Tuesday 28 June 2011

Read/Receive and Send emails on the linux command line - Alpine/pine

I like to use my command line to do most of the work rather than using GUIs. So I wanted to be able read and send emails using the linux command line. After done much research I have found this free application called "Alpine" developed at the University Of Washington, which the earlier versions of it was called "Pine".

To download you can go to the official website by clicking the the URL below
http://www.washington.edu/alpine/

or if you are a Debian/Ubuntu user you can simply type in the command below

sudo apt-get install alpine

Currently I am using Alpine with my gmail account. I may be do a post about how to configure gmail on Alpine

Enjoy

Monday 27 June 2011

Secure your Gmail/Google Account

      Are you confidant that your email account is secure anymore? You can never make anything 100% secure but, there are things you can do to make it more secure than it is.

     Gmail has introduced 2-step verification which protects your gmail account little bit more. I recommend that everyone who read this blog, should enable the feature.

To enable: Go to your Google account page and then click on the
                  "Using 2-step verification" And then follow the instructions

Make sure you read the instructions carefully and print out or keep the verification codes safely, which you will need to log in to your account when you haven't got your phone to get a verification code. Never loose them.

The other thing you could do to protect your Gmail account is that to always use HTTPS. To enable this feature.

Log in to your gmail account
Click on the Options symbol
Click on the General tab
Then click on the radio button which says "always use https", under "Browser Connection"
Save Changes

Surf Save!

Thursday 23 June 2011

Start Dradis in BackTrack 5

Back Track 5 comes with Dradis pre loaded already
But you might not be familiar with the way you start Dradis in BackTrack 5
To start Dradis:

Go to the dradis/server directory 

root@bt:~# cd /pentest/misc/dradis/server

Then run start.sh script in the dradis directory 

root@bt:/pentest/misc/dradis/server# /pentest/misc/dradis/start.sh

No Active Driver when you type in db_driver or db_connect?

Do you get the following error message when you type in db_driver on Metasploit console on BlackTrack5?

[*] No Active Driver
[*]        Available:

[*]     DB Support: Enable the mysql driver with the following command:
[*]                 $ gem install mysql
[*]     This gem requires mysqlclient headers, which can be installed on Ubuntu with:
[*]                 $ sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

[*]     DB Support: Enable the postgresql driver with the following command:
[*]                   * This requires libpq-dev and a build environment
[*]                 $ gem install postgres
[*]                 $ gem install pg # is an alternative that may work

msf >

And you have tried installing mysql driver but didn't solve the problem ?

This happens because when you start msfconsole by /pentest/exploits/framework3/msfconsole, it does not set the environment variables properly

So all you have to do is, start msfconsole using BT5 menu or by using /usr/local/bin/msfconsole