Tools of the Trade - Brought to You by the Letter V

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.

Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

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On to the tools....

1) On May 16th, CCleaner v1.40.520 was released. CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space.

2) On May 16th, Nullsoft released Winamp 5.35. This update fixes the very serious MP4 buffer overflow vulnerability. See the changelog for all the details.

3) On May 15th, MySQL 5.0.41 was released. MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS) which has, according to MySQL AB, more than 10 million installations.

4) On May 15th, Microsoft released MBSA 2.1 Beta 2. Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is an easy-to-use tool designed for the IT professional that helps small- and medium-sized businesses determine their security state in accordance with Microsoft security recommendations and offers specific remediation guidance. This beta adds Windows Vista compatibility.

5) On May 14th, Thierry Zoller released BTCrack v1.1 Heisec Release. BTCrack is a Bluetooth Pass phrase (PIN) Brute force Proof of Concept tool, BTCrack is aimed at reconstructing the Passkey and the Link key from captured Pairing exchanges. To capture the paring data it is necessary to have a Professional Bluetooth Analyzer : FTE (BPA 100, BPA 105, others), Merlin and others.

6) On May 13th, Aircrack-ng v0.9 was released. Aircrack is an 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program that can recover keys once enough data packets have been captured. It implements the standard FMS attack along with some optimizations like KoreK attacks, thus making the attack much faster compared to other WEP cracking tools. Check out the changelog for all the details.

7) On May 9th, GnuPG v2.0.4 was released. This is maintenance release with a few minor enhancements. GnuPG comes in two flavours: 1.4.7 is the well known and portable standalone version, whereas 2.0.4 is the enhanced and somewhat harder to build version.

8) On May 8th, TightVNC 1.3.9 was released. Since version 1.2.9, there were too many changes to list, especially in the Windows version:

• file transfers,
• improved server performance with mirror video driver,
• improved user interface,
• support for the latest version of the protocol,
• and much more.
  

9) On May 8th, Paint.NET 3.07 was released. Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

10) On April 29th, Putty 0.60 was released. PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. This version is mainly a bug fix release.

11) On April 26th, VMware released VMware Server 1.0.3. This version is a maintenance bug fix release to address security issues.

12) On April 25th, Tor 0.1.2.13 was released. Tor 0.1.2.13 features some major anonymity fixes, such as safer path selection; better client performance; faster bootstrapping, better address detection, and better DNS support for servers; write limiting as well as read limiting to make servers easier to run; and a huge pile of other features and bug fixes. The bundles also ship with Vidalia 0.0.11.

13) On April 21st, Gadwin Systems released PrintScreen 4.0. Gadwin PrintScreen captures the contents of the screen with a single keystroke. The captured screen can then be sent to the printer, or saved to disk as a file in 6 different graphics file formats.