Things I’ve taken note of over the past months:

1.) Finding ‘too much information’ (even when it’s public information) on a company can scare HR people, go figure.

2.) Linksys routers that are compatible with DD-WRT or the like, are great for being used as pivot points in networks. For example, if you’re able to to gain access to a router that is DD-WRT compatible and you can get SSH up and running on it, you’ve opened up a lot of opportunities.

One opportunity would include scanning the internet network using proxychains and nmap over an SSH tunnel. You could also use proxychains and nikto to scan web servers that are in the associated network with the DD-WRT compatible router.

You can also setup a private second WLAN network on the DD-WRT compatible router to have a sense of secure access to the network you’re penetrating. Using DD-WRT as a penetration tester, really opens up your possibilities.

3.) http://ipq.co rocks, ‘nough said. 🙂

4.) Being able to boot up a live Linux distro on a victim machine, use bhive, samdump2 (like this tutorial http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/localsamcrack2), to extract password hashes and then do ‘Pass the hash attacks’ via metasploit (like shown here: http://securitytube.net/Metasploit-Megaprimer-Part-16-(Pass-the-Hash-Attack)-video.aspx) is incredibly cool.

5.) The Nmap scripting engine rocks: http://securitytube.net/Mastering-the-Nmap-Scripting-Engine-(Blackhat-2010)-video.aspx

6.) Did you know you could install Nmap silently on a Windows machine? (Yes, it will also install winpcap.)
nmap-5.35DC1-setup.exe /S

7.) Other cool apps to install ‘silently’ using msiexec on Windows machines:  (msiexec /i appname.msi /q)
http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.5/
http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads

8.) The concepts of SSH reverse connections and port forwarding make me elated: http://www.securitytube.net/Hacking-through-the-Windows-Firewall-using-Metasploit-video.aspx

More to come as usual…