Tools of the Trade - Tentacled Snake Uses Fish's C-Start in Predictive Attack

Forget the old folk tales about snakes hypnotizing their prey. The tentacled snake from South East Asia has developed a more effective technique. The small water snake has found a way to startle its prey so that the fish turn toward the snake's head to flee instead of turning away. In addition, the fish's reaction is so predictable that the snake actually aims its strike at the position where the fish's head will be instead of tracking its actual movement.

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On to the tools....

On June 20th, Foxit Reader 3.0.1817 was released. Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer, with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set.

On June 17th, Rsnake released the Slowloris HTTP DoS tool. Slowloris helps identify the timeout windows of a HTTP server or Proxy server, can bypass httpready protection and ultimately performs a fairly low bandwidth denial of service. SANS Internet Center has a blog entry describing possible mitigation techniques.

On June 16th, Irfan Skiljan released IrfanView 4.25. IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative Freeware (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows. I have been using this viewer on my personal Windows boxes for many years. This release fixes a serious integer overflow vulnerability in the 1BPP Image resampling, so this is a recommended update for all users. Check out the version history for all the other details.

On June 15th, Wireshark 1.2.0 was released. This version has many fixes and improvements, including a Windows 64-bit installer and improved support for OS X. Check out the release notes.

On June 15th, TrueCrypt 6.2a was released. TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted drive. Check the version history for change details.

On June 12th, Nmap 4.8.5 BETA 10 was released. This tool needs no introduction and this beta, like most Nmap betas, is pretty stable. Check out the changelog for all the details.

On June 6th, KeePass 1.16 was released. KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). Check the news release for details on the new version.

On May 31th, OfficeMalScanner was released by Frank Boldewin on OffensivieComputing.com. OfficeMalScanner is a Microsoft office forensic tool to scan for malicious traces, like shellcode heuristics, PE-files or embedded OLE streams. It supports disassembly and hexview as well as an easy brute force mode to detect encrypted files.

On May 29th, Java JRE 6 Update 14 was released. Check out the release notes for all the details.

On May 29th, Kismet-2009-05-RC2 was released. Kismet-2009-05-RC2 fixes a 1-character bug which led to corrupted logfile names and bad kismet_server launching.

On May 29th, VirtualBox v2.2.4 was released. VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Check the changelog for all the details.

On May 28th, Technitium MAC Address Changer v5 R3 has been released. Technitium MAC Address Changer allows you to change Media Access Control (MAC) Address of your Network Interface Card (NIC) irrespective to your NIC manufacturer or its driver. Release 3 adds support for Microsoft Windows Vista/Server 2008 Service Pack 2.

On May 28th, CCleaner v2.20.920 was released. CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. Check out the version history for all the details.

On May 27th, Cain & Abel v4.9.31 was released. This version includes:

• SIPS Man-in-the-Middle Sniffer (TCP port 5061; successfully tested with Microsoft Office Communicator with chained certificates).
• Added support for RTP G726-64WB codec (Wengo speex replacement ) in VoIP sniffer.
• X509 certificate's extensions are now preserved in chained fake certificates generated by Certificate Collector.
• Extended ASCII characters support for SSID in Passive Wireless Scanner.
• Some bugs in Cain's Traceroute fixed.