Development Cycle

Last week I received a typical run of the mill phishing email littered with the usual bad Engrish making the instructions far from believable but being bored I decided to take a look at the link they were pushing.

They had created a believable enough looking Paypal form asking clueless punters to enter their credit card details in order to avoid having their account being suspended. After playing around with the form for awhile in Firebug I decided to create a quick script to poison their data by submitting a new fake 16 digit VISA number along with random card holder name, CVV number and expiry date every couple of seconds.

After running this script for half an hour I decided that the script while it did the job would be a lot better if the posted data was coming from an anonymous IP address. Here I will run you through the process of setting up TOR & Polipo on a machine to add an element of anonymity to the data being sent and received by your CURL based script using.
Read the rest of this entry »

an·o·nym·i·ty

noun, plural -cies.

1. The state or quality of being anonymous.

The Onion Router Project is a great tool to help people keep their online activites anonymous. In this article i am going to give the reader a quick run down on getting this great piece of software installed on a Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) system.

First open a shell on the machine and issue the command:

sudo pico /etc/apt/sources.list

To edit your apt sources list, add the lines below to the bottom of this file and then save.

deb http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor hardy main
deb-src http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor hardy main

Import the gpg key for the new package repository, with the following commands:

sudo gpg –keyserver subkeys.pgp.net –recv 94C09C7F
sudo gpg –fingerprint 94C09C7F

gpg –export 94C09C7F | sudo apt-key add -

Now the key is imported time to update your packages and install Tor and Privoxy.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tor privoxy

Tor should run okay straight out of the box but privoxy will require some changes for our needs.

sudo pico /etc/privoxy/config

Add the line below to the very top of the file:

forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

To the very top of the file taking special care to keep the fullstop at the end of the line its not a typo. By default privoxy will log all requests that pass through it for better privacy  out line 457 of the file (logfile logfile) by placing a hash (#) character at the very start of the line to comment out the setting. Now save the changes and restart privoxy with:

sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart

Okay know the services are good to go you need to configure something to use them with so open Firefox and install the Tor button plugin then restart the browser.

After you need to configure TOR button to use the TOR service as your web proxy. Click tools –> add-ons and click the ‘preferences’ button.

Make all lines have localhost and port 8118 set except for the entry labelled “Socks Proxy” this should read localhost and port 9050, see image below.

After setting tor button up deactivate the plugin then reactive (or just restart your browser) and you should be good to go, head over to http://whatismyip.com/ first when the tor button is deactivated, and then with it activated the site should now display a completely different IP address.