Tools of the Trade - Now Bigger Than General Sherman!

General Sherman is the name of a Giant Sequoia. It is the largest tree in the world, and generally considered the largest organism, as measured by the volume of its trunk (1487 cubic metres as of 2002). The tree is located in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in the United States, east of Visalia, California. The tree is believed to be approximately 2200 years old.

Check out this pic of General Sherman.

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On to the tools...

On Dec 14th, QuickTime Alternative 2.2.0 was released. QuickTime Alternative is a trimmed down version of QuickTime that contains only the essential components needed for playing QuickTime content that is embedded in webpages. Apple patched several serious security issues this weeks. This version includes these new QuickTime 7.3.1.70 components.

On Dec 14th, Wine 0.9.51 was released. Major changes include the following:

• A bunch of WinHelp improvements.
• Better Japanese font support.
• A ton of rpcrt4 fixes.
• Several Alsa capture fixes.
• Improved support for screen resolution changes.
• Lots of bug fixes.

On Dec 13th, Insecure.org released Nmap 4.50. This is no beta folks, this is the first stable since 4.20. Check out the release announcement for all the details.

On Dec 12th, Paint.NET v3.20 was released. Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Check the roadmap for the details.

On Dec 11th, Oxid.it released Cain & Abel 4.9.10. This release includes several fixes and updates. 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.

On Dec 7th, Pidgin 2.3.1 was released. Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. This version can now handle MySpaceIM as well. Check the changelog for all the details.

As a bonus, be sure to check out SecurityCompass' Exploit-Me package. Exploit-Me is a suite of Firefox web application security testing tools designed to be lightweight and easy to use. The Exploit-Me series was originally introduced at the SecTor conference in Toronto. The slides for the presentation are available for download. Along with this SecTor is making the audio of the talk available.