TIme Pass...!!!

Top Ten Security Reasons to Upgrade to Windows 7


After a devastating wrong turn with Vista, Microsoft is back on its game with Windows 7. Sure, Windows 7 has annoyances – such as touting attractive features, but making most of them available only to those who pay extra for Enterprise (or Ultimate). But Windows 7 Enterprise delivers a plethora of improvements to justify the cost and pain of migration. The security benefits you could reap by upgrading to Windows 7 Enterprise include the following:

1.Improved platform security.

Windows 7 picks up where XP SP2 and Vista left off, extending Data Execution Protection and Address Space Layout Randomization to deter malware, even when browsing. Kernel Patch Protection stops malware from hooking 64-bit kernel events, and Windows Service Hardening can enforce resource access profiles for included Microsoft services. Alas, not all applications use DEP and ASLR and only services can use WSH, but Windows 7 starts with a more solid foundation from which to fend off attackers.

2.Safer browsing.

Internet Explorer 8, supplied with all versions of Windows 7, incorporates a wealth of security enhancements, including SmartScreen filtering, trusted domain highlighting, type 1 cross-site script attack filters, and InPrivate browsing. IE8 takes advantage of ASLR and DEP and can apply more granular ActiveX settings—for example, letting admins authorize riskier ActiveX controls, but only by trusted sites or users. IE8 can also be installed on XP SP3 and Vista, but upgrading to Windows 7 makes the most of some IE8 features and provides further incentive to retire older, less secure browsers.

3.Secure protocol support.

Network protocols may not "wow" end users or sys admins, but they're a vital part of building a more secure foundation. Windows 7 includes native support for IPv6 (including IPv6 IPsec) and DNSSEC. These more secure protocols make it harder for attackers to spoof IP packets and addresses by providing cryptographic authentication and integrity checks. Enterprise networks must master other hurdles to actually use these protocols, but embedding protocol support in all of your endpoints satisfies one big pre-requisite.

4.Location-aware connection security.

Windows 7 includes policy-based network segmentation, letting admins apply different Windows Firewall rules to each adapter based on location (e.g., Wi-Fi at the office, Wi-Fi at home, Wi-Fi at a public hotspot). The Windows 7 Firewall itself has grown from outbound-only packet filtering into a full bi-directional TCP/IP firewall, enforcing rules that can now be centrally-configured with ActiveDirectory GPOs. Windows 7 still doesn't have the best personal firewall around, but this is a noteworthy improvement.

5.Quick-and-easy file recovery.

Windows XP creates System Restore points to roll a damaged PC back to a know-good earlier state. Windows 7 and Vista beef this up with Volume Shadow Copy (VSC) – a service that backs up entire volumes, including Windows system files, program files, settings, and user files. By default, shadow copies are created weekly on a Windows 7 PC with idle time. On-the-go workers can use VSC to recover a single lost document or a corrupted DLL in minutes, without connectivity or help. However, because shadow copies are stored on the same disk, they are not a replacement for routine data backup to archive.

6.Always-on secure remote access.

For those tired of intrusive VPNs, Windows 7 Enterprise offers DirectAccess. DA uses auto-initiated, authenticated, encrypted IPv6/IPsec tunnels to securely connect remote Windows 7 users to private network resources. DA tunnels can terminate at a Windows Server 2008 DA gateway or at any IPv6 Windows Server 2008 behind that gateway. Alas, in order to achieve user-transparent always-on secure remote access with DA, the enterprise must deploy Windows Server 2008 and IPv6. Fortunately, DA can wrap IPv6 inside IPv4 or HTTPS to traverse home and public networks that usually lack IPv6 today.

7.Usable user access control.

The tighter User Access Controls first introduced by Vista are back in Windows 7 – after a rigorous reality-check back at Redmond. UAC deters apps and users from making unauthorized changes by defaulting to Standard User and requiring explicit permission to elevate privileges when needed. Windows 7 now silently elevates many activities routinely needed by end-users (e.g., adding printers, changing time/date) to reduce prompting. Many Microsoft apps have also been refactored to segregate activities that do and do not require elevation, and admins can now configure prompts without disabling UAC altogether.

8.Better desktop auditing.

Vista added XML-based audit events at a finer level of granularity. Windows 7 took this further by including more helpful information in audit events—for example, indicating not just that a given activity was permitted or denied, but why that decision was made. These enhancements improve forensic analysis and troubleshooting capabilities and make it possible to easily find all changes made by an individual user or group.

9.Application whitelisting.

In Windows 7 Enterprise, XP/Vista Software Restriction Policy blacklists are replaced by AppLocker whitelists. SRPs were too hard to maintain and too easy to bypass. Windows 7 AppLocker strikes a better balance by permitting or denying program launch based on Publisher Rules (recommended), Hash Rules (for programs without signatures), and Path Rules (as a last resort). Publisher Rules check signatures on executables, installers, scripts, and libraries. A new wizard can even search an entire reference PC to find all programs and propose AppLocker Publisher Rules, falling back to Hash Rules only for programs without signatures. AppLocker still isn't for everyone, but it can deliver a more effective defense against malware while enforcing potentially-unwanted-program policies.

10.On-the-go data protection.

BitLocker, introduced in Vista, is back in Windows 7 Enterprise with major improvements. BitLocker full-disk encryption can now be controlled by GPOs, use a wider PIN or two-factor authentication to unlock drives, and interface with a central recovery key store. Windows 7 also plugs the "USB hole" with BitLocker To Go—portable data encryption for USB drives. BitLocker To Go stores an encrypted volume on a USB drive, along with a reader that can be used to decrypt those files on Vista or XP PCs. GPOs can be used to control whether unencrypted data can be written to USB, thereby enforcing encryption whenever files are permitted to leave an otherwise locked-down PC.

Take a hard look at these and other Windows 7 security features to determine how you can get the biggest bang for your buck during your OS migration. Some of these features require additional infrastructure – most notably DirectAccess. Several are only available when upgrading to Windows 7 Enterprise (or Ultimate). Most require careful planning and testing prior to broad rollout (e.g., UAC, AppLocker). However, if used wisely, Windows 7 can help many organizations strengthen their security postures.

A really quick and easy tip for a really nice rainbow like background. And by quick, I mean REALLY quick!
So, let's get started!

Open a new file with about 800x500 and a transparent background.

Go to the infamous Filter/Render/Clouds and then go to Filter/Pixelate/Mezzotint with Long Lines as type.

It looks awfully ugly now, I know.

Go to Filter/Blur/Motion Blur set it to 90 degrees and 999 Distance.
This looks alot better now...

Make a new layer with a gradient from the left to the right, I used Spectrum, but anyting else colourfull looks great.

Set it to overlay and maybe tweak the opacity abit if it doesn't look that good.

For step 2, type, in a nice green (#4a9c1d), some text. The bolder the font, the better. I used Harabara (Download) and typed "Jelly" (I know, very original ).
Center it and go to Window/Character. Set your options to the same as mine.

Step 3
Now add some blending styles to make it look more like jelly. You can always play around with the controls if you think mine don't look good enough

Step 4
And now, the gloss.
Click on the icon of the text layer while holding Ctrl (Or Command for Mac users) to load the selection.
Go to Select/Modify/Contract and contract the selection by about 4 pixels.

Step 5
Make a linear gradient wich goes from white to transparent. Make a new layer and click and drag from the top of the selection to the bottom. Now de-select.

Make elliptical selection at the bottom of the text and hit delete. You can use a ruler to center the selection.

And there you go! A nice jelly type! Hope you learned something.
I'm going to make some more tutorials in the near future, but first I'm going to wait for some reactions on this one.

Well this image was posted a few weeks earlier and it went throughout the internet with comments and articles of people stating it as "GOOGLE MAPs GOT GOD?? "

well later as many other people confirmed that they have seen such mist on some other 3-D view images of GOOGLe maps..it was declared that this is just an error in the images taken by google ..

what else to say..

JUst POSTED HERE FOR TIME PASS....

EnJoy..!

(I am not taking any credit for this .)

Guide to simple C++ Viruses

Ok first off I’d like to say 2 things:

1. This guide is only intended for people who want to learn
2. I don’t condone releasing viruses in any way

Taking the above into consideration I’d like to say welcome to the world of virus programming I’m hoping upon reading this you well become as fascinated by viruses as I am and continue to study and write new unique viruses.

Most of the virus writing guides I’ve seen are lengthy, boring and out of date, this guide will try to be the opposite short, fun and to the point. Now this is what you will need to start programming:

Win32 API Reference <- Not Required but very helpful
A C++ Compiler – I Recommend DEV for people who do not wish to buy and Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 for people with money and serious programmers, however DEV works fine.

Even if you have never programmed before you should be able to carry along with this one, but it helps if you know a little bit of C++.

Ok lets begin fire up DEV or MSVC and select new Win32 GUI for DEV users and Win32 for MSVC. Now with DEV it makes some generated code for GUI apps, delete it all leaving something like this:


Now compile and run the code nothing should happen (if a black window pops up it means you didn’t goto win32) The reason nothing happened is because or program doesn’t do anything. It runs and exits we need to make it do something first of all add this code to the project in between the { } and before return 0;.

MessageBox(NULL,”Hello”,”Messagebox Example”,MB_OK);

Now compile and run the program again A message box should pop up, cool ay? But its not much of a virus lets make it do some cool stuff. Add the following code to your project:

Once again make sure the code is before return 0; and the { }.Ok compile and run the code, now open up the system32 directory in you windows folder (for those who don’t know goto run in the startbar and type: %windir%\system32
Ok look for a file called virus.exe in the system32 folder. Don’t believe me that its our virus? Run the file it should come up with a message box saying “Hello”.

Cool is it not? Ok time to explain how this works:

char sytem[MAX_PATH]; This is the buffer to hold the system32 directory.
char pathtofile[MAX_PATH]; This is the buffer to hold the path to our virus.

HMODULE GetModH = GetModuleHandle(NULL); This one my be hard to grasp for some but bare with me. GetModH holds the handle to our virus GetModuleHandle() gets the handle and stores it there.

GetModuleFileName(GetModH,pathtofile,sizeof(pathto file)); This gets the FileName of our virus using the handle we got before and storing the path to it in pathtofile.

GetSystemDirectory(system,sizeof(system)); Basically this finds out what your system directory is. Remember not everyone’s window’s directory is c:\windows\system32. Mine is d:\winnt\system32 on this box, the reason for this is we want to copy to an existent system32 directory.

strcat(system,”\\virus.exe”); Ok we have the system32 directory c:\windows\system32 or whatever now we need a place to copy to. This function binds to strings together to form one. So our system buffer now says:
c:\windows\system32\virus.exe or whatever the case maybe. Note \\ is not a typo \\ is how c++ interprets \. A single \ is seen by c++ as an escape character and if you have one your virus will not work!

CopyFile(pathtofile,system,false); Pretty self explanatory copy from were our virus is to were we want it to be. What false means if virus.exe already exists it will copy over it, to stop this change false to true (leave it as false for this tutorial).

Ok that’s it next we are going add code so it will startup when the computer boots. We are going to use an 3 API calls to accomplish this
RegOpenKeyEx(); This opens the key we want to write to
RegSetValueEx(); This sets our value
RegCloseKey(); This closes the key

Time to add code to our fledgling virus

Ok obviously this is going to need an more of an explanation than before. HKEY hKey is the buffer that holds the data for calls to the registry nothing else about this except you need it. RegOpenKeyEx Opens the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run this is the key for starting up for all users which is what we want. 0 is reserved and needs to stay 0. We want to open up the key with set permissions that’s why we use KEY_SET_VALUE. And then we add the buffer.

The next call: hKey is the buffer “Writing to the registry example” is the message to appear in the key you can change this to something less obviously like “Windows Update” or “Norton Security Shield” anyway be creative. The next zero is the same as above reserved needs to stay 0. REG_SZ is the type of key we want. There are other types like REG_BINARY and REG_DWORD but we are using REG_SZ which is for text. (const unsigned char*) formats our string to a const unsigned char * because it doesn’t accept normal chars. system is the buffer that holds the path to our virus and the final part is the size of the string, this is calculated automatically by using sizeof.

The next call closes the registry key.

Ok add this to you code so it looks something like:
Now run you code and open up regedit and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run there should be a new key in the area to the right our key!

Now comes the fun part of writing a virus the payload! This could be anywhere from a DdoS to making the cursor jump around the screen. Note destructive payloads are lame and frowned upon by the virus community, so do you self a favour and get the idea of destroying computers out of your mind. Besides writing a non destructive payload is more fun. Lets go with a payload I’ve written and christened The Flasher.

Your code should now look like this with the payload attached:

Although small don’t underestimate this payload it is very annoying try it. To fix your startbar ctrl-alt-delete find virus.exe end the process. Then find explorer.exe end it. Finally while still in task manager goto file run and type “explorer.exe” without the quotes. If that doesn’t work change EnableWindow and ShowWindow to true instead of false, remember to change it back later though.

That’s it for now I’ll go in depth about Finding Windows and such next time. I’ll also teach you how to kill taskmanager. Keep experimenting there are hundreds of API calls you can use try them out. If you run into an error try and figure out what went wrong 95% of all errors are spelling mistakes.

Keep Programming,




By: SaMaN "The EthiCal H4x0R"