Tools of the Trade - More Useful Than Isinglass

Isinglass is a substance obtained from the swimbladders of fish (especially Beluga sturgeon), used mainly for the clarification of wine and beer. It is a form of collagen. Prior to inexpensive gelatin production and other competitive products, isinglass was used in confectionery and desserts such as Fruit Jelly and blancmange. Isinglass was originally made exclusively from sturgeon until the 1795 invention of a cheap substitute using cod by William Murdoch. This was extensively used in Britain in place of Russian isinglass.

Although very little isinglass remains in the beer which is drunk, many vegetarians consider beers which are processed with these finings to be unsuitable for vegetarian diets.
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On to the tools....

1) On April 13th, Cain & Abel v4.9 was released. Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, recovering wireless network keys, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing protocols.

New features include the following:

• WPA-PSK (Dictionary and Brute-Force Attacks).
• WPA-PSK Auth (Dictionary and Brute-Force Attacks).
• WPA-PSK Authentications sniffer.
• WPA-PSK Hashes Cryptanalysis via Sorted Rainbow Tables.
• WPA-PSK RainbowTables have been added to Winrtgen v2.5.
• Added IE7 passwords support in Credential Manager Password Decoder.
• OpenSSL library upgrade to version 0.9.8e.

2) On April 12th, Opera 9.20 was released.

From the security perspective, these are the fixes in the new release:

• Fix for character encoding inheritance issue with frames, which could enable cross-site scripting. See the advisory.
• Fixed an issue regarding handling of FTP PASV response, as reported by Mark at bindshell.net
• XMLHttpRequest now treats separate ports on the same server as a different server. Issue reported by Egmont Koblinger.
• Fixed an issue where scripts could continue to run after leaving the page, as reported by Herrmann Manuel.
• Skandiabanken.no's message about successful certificate installation is now shown.

3) On April 12th, Flash Player v9.0.45.0 was released by Adobe.

4) On April 12th, ClamWin v0.90.1.1 was released. ClamWin is an Antivirus tool that comes with an easy installer and is open source code at no cost. Please note that ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner, that is, you need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus. See the main site for changes in this version.

5) On April 10th, Scapy v1.1.1 was released. Scapy is a powerful Python-based interactive packet manipulation tool, packet generator, network scanner, network discovery tool, and packet sniffer. This version contains various bug fixes and enhancements.

6) On April 10th, Microsoft released DirectX v9.18.944.

7) On April 10th, Bastian Ballmann released Bluediving v0.7. Bluediving is a Bluetooth penetration testing suite. It implements attacks like Bluebug, BlueSnarf, BlueSnarf++, BlueSmack, and has features such as Bluetooth address spoofing. This version includes better log output and sdp scanning, updated vendor detection, various bug fixes, new menus, new tools, and new exploits.

8) On April 9th, WinSCP 4.0 Beta was released. See the changelog for all the details.

9) Java.com recently replaced Java 5 Update 11 with Java 6 Update 1 in the main release system.