My Best Nmap experience

My  best experience with Network Mapper.

Its actually based on a real incident that happened during winters, some three and half months ago.
First of all about Nmap: Its one of my favorite open source software. I use open source and free software only because I can't afford to pay for software. n If you think that blah blah non-free software is awesome, I request you to please buy one for me and send it. Then also, I would use it on a test machine (a machine which does not contain anything important to me) because I am not that good with Binary data not created on my machine from source files that I could feel it safe to use on my working machine. You see I don't want Boom! to happen. Enough Good Information. Lets come back to the story of my best experience with Nmap, the Network Mapper.
Nmap, well known as Network Mapper is a tool created initially by the Hacker (A good hacker, obviously Hackers are good) well known as Fyodor (I don't remember real name, I hope Fyodor too doesn't bother about that) in 1997 if I am not wrong. Now its developed across Internet by Fyodor himself and a bunch of  Good people, Hackers. Search Wikipedia or Nmap website for more information. Thats enough History. Lets come back to story.

So by that time, I've been using Nmap for a year or so and became fairly good with its usage, its scripting engine and other good things it comes bundled up with.
That day one of my friends and I argued over something (he still is my friend :) ). The argument was about a silly thing, lets say it was about developing a few pages of text (program code is also text, right!). Lets not go into what that was actually.
So his argument was, 'I can produce those pages of text faster and efficiently than any of our friends including you.' Now that is something I don't like. I mean `Dude, you might be better at doing that. I mean why brag about it and more importantly why are you kinda' insulting me.` I didn't say that but told him that it was no great thing to reproduce an already present efficient version of  that text. I mean 'Life is too short to waste reproducing something that already existed in a remarkable form.' But that A***ole was not ready to come down from that fscking level. So to pull him down, I challenged him that he couldn''t even beat me at this thing, leave our other friends. Its not that I find myself inferior than our friends, Just said that to throw him more down than I could have, if I too bragged about that [Not a good grammatical statement, but I don't care right now].
So I agreed to replicate that few page thing. After saying that, I realized that I would not be able to do that. Its like, You can't win at everything. Some losers are better at something which you don't even care. This was one of those cases.


But as I am really a proud person, Once said, I had to try my best. In this case, I was desperate to beat that dumb-ass. It was a Thursday when that argument happened. The challenge time was fixed. It was during following weekend. I had Thursday and Friday to prepare, if I really wanted. But I was almost sure that whatever I do, he would be able to beat me. He was fscking good at that particular thing. I don't appreciate him for that.


I came back to my place. I was looking into it whether I could do something about this. I knew I could not go for preparing hard for it as it was so worthless that I had not mentioned it clearly here too what it really was. But in a part of my brain, I was really willing to beat him at any cost this one time. Anyways, I started doing some other stuff.

I am responsible for managing a web server with a group of friends. The friend whom I was gonna' beat soon had a webserver of his own to take care about, It is not visible on Internet but its available on the LAN we are connected to. Lets call his webserver "blahblahxyz.com". I started nmap with a few scripts on and started mapping the machine blahblahxyz.com. What flags I used is not much important, but I could find that the guy was not a good network administrator.
Nmap showed a lot of details.
It identified all open ports and stufff. Few open ports were 80, 443, 3306 and few more.

The nmap with NSE located something interesting for me.

It said something like this: There are some interesting locations that you might like. The locations were /images, /mysql, /downloads, /wordpress, /uploads and some others which I don't remember. Who keeps mysql accessible and that too with the name mysql. Dumbass! I read the results and backed it up in a file for perusal. Started doing something else keeping in mind the contents of that file. And then Zen! Why does he has a wordpress web framework installed. There are no links to it on his website. Then, I figured out that he was gonna' integrate the wordpress to support blogging feature on his fscking website.

A million Dollar idea striked me! You need a few pages of text to produce, right!! Why reproduce it when you could use already existing one!
The idea was very simple:
What is Wordpress good for?- Blogging, right! What is a blog? - a webpage with text. How do you access a blog? - using http i.e. our favorite port 80. Where does wordpress store blogs? Is it files uploaded in some upload directory?- Nah, Its not.. Its in a cell of a table of some database. Right! There you got it. Its simple.

Access the web based mysql (phpmyadmin), store the text to be replicated on The challenge day in cell of some already existing blog entry. (Don't create your own entry for obvious reasons).
Simple enough, Right? Nah, Comeon, you are such a loser. How would You access the phpmyadmin. You have to authenticate yourself. You don't have passwords and stuff right? Yeah you are right.... I didn't have, Yet!!
Another hurdle, How to cross it!! Is it worth the effort... Am I going on right path (Not morally right path, It was not about morals, it was about winning). By right, I meant Feasible.
I was not gonna' use Hydra or Nmap itself or any other not suitable tools for this. That'd be illegal, perhaps. So I neither used Hydra nor Nmap nor anything else for doing anything of cracking and stuff.
The day ended. Next Day, the Friday, I went to that Guy with another common friend of ours, just like that. He was doing some php coding n stuff for some part of his website. I am sure, I was not dreaming. He was doing that only and we really visited him. And believe it or not, after some time he closed his scite session and started talking with us. It was friendly. He and the third guy went to the balcony of the floor leaving me just like that or for some reason, may be enquiring the third guy why he brought me along with him or something. He had left the Nautilus opened with the codebase directory, just like that. In a moment, as I knew he was a dumbass administrator, I looked for some file named config or some similar one, n there you go, I found one... What was there, both the username and password of database in a php file in plain text. I mean what the Fsck! Do you really own this server, still, dude? ( I hope this was not illegal or we could have some other description also, if it was)
In a moment I closed the file echoing the name and password in my mind!!! Bam! Done..
I went outside to them and that's it...... My evil job done!
I came back after some time. By evening I was sure about what I would do!!!
I started my machine, got connected to wireless spot. Started browsing website. N there I was, opening blahblahxyz.com/mysql with the name and password which I still felt in cache of my brain. JackPot, If you would say so! Right! The helloworld blog was accessible at blahblahxyz.com/wordpress/hello.html?page=1 (I am not sure about it, but lets say it was)
Opened the file which I was gonna' produce during the challenge. Wordpress stores the blogs in tables, as I mentioned. Wordpress provides a helloworld blog too when you setup the framework, it seems. One more blog with some content was there. Copied the contents, and stored in the first blog as html comment in it because it contained only helloworld text and nothing more.
The Day:
The Saturday morning, we happened to be at computer lab with friends. It was the time. Lets do it now. Although I type quite fast, but I knew I won't be able to beat the Dumbass at his thing. Chose the machines. Machines were already connected to Lan. We opened Editors in our machines. Here is what I did. Started Vim. In insert mode, started typing damn fast, some arbitrary text... with meaningful words unrelated to the text like dumb-ass too. In the meantime after sometime, when nobody was taking care about me, I typed this: <Esc> :!wget blahblahxyz.com/wordpress/hello.html.?page=1 and opened the html file and Bam, Html page returned with the comment ( the huge comment) I inserted. Removed the text outside the comments I injected. A few keys on Vim, Right!! Saved it and Done! The challenge was complete. I took care of time. It should be feasible by an average human.. Done!!


Moral: Don't Be Dumb-ass.. and Don't believe everything I write!
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any gains or losses incurred to people using this description. Don't use it, its not what you think it is...

How to reach me through Ubuntuforums.

A Geeky story:

When I started exploring *nix world, I created a profile on ubuntuforums with username: ~!geek!~
It too has a story of its own like my online identity drake01.
It was before I created my identity as drake01. I started my life in this fascinating world of un*x by an accident, which is not so important and just stuck with it. The other morning I started liking this new world. It was really good since day 2 of this new life. Before I tell you the story, I want to share a trivia with You, When I was learning calculus, I learnt about a great equation : e^(i*π)+1=0. This is a remarkable equation. It unifies five important constants in single equation. In one of the great text books on calculus, it's been mentioned that if World ends sometime, and mathematicians have to leave the world (obviously with all other people) with only a single fact left for new life which will start after they are gone, they should leave this equation. It is an equation which unifies so called five most important constants and only them with operators. It conveys that there exists five important constants while describing nature in the language of mathematics related by a single equation. Sooner or later, new world should be able to come to find 5 constants satisfying this equation. Thus making their job easier. Ok Enough Trivia...
About my name on ubuntu forums: ~!geek!~
It too sort of is inspired by the above trivia. I see it this way.
1) For Someone who is new to the world of this remarkable machine with newly installed *nix, the name says: the person you are interacting with is a geek and the symbols at the beginning and end of the name are just there for decoration purpose, or if she believe in symmetry the symbols are just for making word geek look packed with symbols on both sides symmetrically. As she assume me to be geek, she finds me helpful. Because geeks and nerds are helpful. :)
2) For peers and people surrounding me, people who are studying with me, or are of my age probably knows C and C++, would see it as not of Geek (you see, !geek and the the last ~ as implying command prompt on *nix. How smart they are!) They may interpret remaining symbols to be there for making name look symmetric. You see, I almost have same level of understanding about *nix world (I thought, those days). Even today I explain, my name this way to my peers. They do not need help from me, since I won't be of much help for them. Nor Do I since they would be knowing almost same about *nix as me. So no reason for wasting my time with them.
3) The third category of people are those who would interpret this name as I want them to, The name shows philosophy of  unifying the world of programming languages (atleast I want, crazy idea :) who cares!). The first ! and ~ are from C ( or C++) and prolog respectively for negation, both negating each other. The second ! is for exclamation about using both symbols in a single statement and the last ~ symbol implies the command prompt of *nix.  Thus implying the person behind it, that's me,  intends to be a geek or is a geek, whatever... This third category of people are great resources and worth befriending. Sharing knowledge with them is like multiplying your understanding with positive natural numbers. You won't feel your time wasted. Instead you would learn great things from them.

Again, I don't like to be indexed in search results without me knowing it. It seems the SearchEngines don't work well with the symbols like ~ and !. They ignore them or something, which means they see the name as geek and nothing more, which I like.
and searching the word geek, an english word with a meaning in dictionary, using a search engine has so much room for other words to come up before the one related to me, which is great.

I know the description sounds crazy, But this is what I am.


Good Bye Lurker. Have a nice Day :)

Story of my Pseudonym

About my online name..

I usually go with drake01 as my name on the Internet. Be it forums, irc, if I am there, I would be using drake01 as my handle. Its not my real name, not even close to my real name. It all started while  I was participating in the discussions on open lists of opensource projects. The discussions are generally open and SearchEngines index them too. The moment I realized it, I made a search with email-address I was using earlier in qoutes, and boom! All discussions I was involved in were listed in order. Boom! Now that's what I hate, "People able to trace me". Then I thought what's wrong with it. People should know what great things you are involved in. But the thing is, I don't want my friends and other people who care about me to have these discussions listed when they are searching for me. Or lets say "I don't want anyone to know about me more than what I want them to know."  Anyways, So I created this pseudo-name.

People say Its really easy to trace you if they intend to. I know, it is. But again I only want to avoid those people who would just incidentally hit my email on SearchEngine's search box and learn about all of my activities which they didn't intend to know about at all (that Sucks).
The other category of people who would be able to trace me after doing sort of an intensive search and who won't stumble upon these details accidentally, are of no problem to me. I prefer to call those Lurkers, My Fans.

By the way, About my name:
Why did I choose drake01 as my online identity?
Ans-> Its based on two characters of TV industry. The one is Dr. Drake Remorey played by Joey (played by Mr. Matt Le Blanc in sitcom Friends).Mr. Blanc is the person, I am really happy to watch doing the role of Joey. The other guy is Drake from sitcom Drake&Josh (played by Drake Bell). Drake Bell was one of the guys, I wanted to look like in my adolescent age.

Also I find Drake to be sorta' related to Dragon in Chinese stories. I like dragons. :)

And the last reason is: In my experience, I find Drake to be common name (I don't have anything to support this. As I said, in my experience. I heard it at so many places, that I assume it to be one of the most common names.) The other Lurker might question, lets assume for a moment that indeed Drake is one of the most common names. So what? I prefer to answer it as: You moron, More common is the word, more would it be difficult to find it as first few results of any search.. (Sometimes its great to learn that some desired query is not among the top few results of any search engine). No bold fonts or other idiosyncrasies have been used in this post, just to convey that I just don't want to make it easy for your brain and great eyes to go through the so called important text, leave out all the rest ( Woh, that sounds some song by great band :) )

By the way, that 01 in drake01 also has a small story. When I tell people, that I am known as drake01, I try to hint them that, `its not at all my real name`. (atleast I try to make them suspect that it can't be a real name). Adding number in your name can't be a sane idea, atleast for me! That too a trivial number. Some people find it cool and sane to add some fancy number which they can associate with their names, I am not the one. Its merely to make you suspect, Dear Lurker. Also as I said, according to me, drake is a common name. If you believe in this premise, its not hard to realize that it would be unavailable almost all the time. Its annoying to not have the name you want on the Internet. To the question Why 01 and not 02 or anything else. Some would see it to be obviously because 01 is the first number, but 01 comes from Animatrix (animation series based on The Matrix movie). In second episode they showed the place used by machines to stay after being abandoned by the humans to be called Zero-One. Initially zero-one sounded cool. But then using the name drake-zero-one didn't sound right. So I started calling it, drake-o-one or drakeoone..
A combination of these reasons resulted in the name drake01 or drakeoone being my choice for the Fsckinly insecure Internet world. (Call be paranoid for using word insecure but its a hard Truth. By the way, `Ignorance is Bliss`, so you may keep your stand with you and feel comfortable and secure).

All these things resulted in choosing this identity. I find the second last reason more revelant of all the above reasons, yes I am using wrong spelling for revelant, because I don't want some random guy to just read that `the last one is the one to read` and leave the rest. (sorta' pathetic attempt to deceive the Search Engines because they are getting smart day-by-day). You might be reading only this paragraph, and feeling proud of not reading all the text, and failing me in my attempt, but you see, I don't care. I mention again, I care about the majority who will accidently stumble upon my activities. You don't need a super secure system to work because No such thing exist. You have to settle with the level of security which just works for you. Again, whatever you do, that will not be the most secure system. Only  machine kept locked in a safe, with no internet connection, preferably not having any power supply too,  is close to being a secure one.

If you followed whole page and if you happen to be a keen observer too, you might have noticed that I have used word drake more than needed actually, what do you think? Is it intentional, if yes, what is the logic. I won't go describing crazy rationale behind it...
Good Luck Lurker. Have a Nice day. :)

Gsoc2012 Initial shortlist of projects

A list of project links out of 180 from google-melange website. Kinda' First shortlist. Not in any order..

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2012

https://github.com/peff/git/wiki/SoC-2012-Ideas

http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2012

http://wiki.phpmyadmin.net/pma/GSoC_2012_Ideas_List

http://nmap.org/soc/
http://nmap.org/svn/
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3168.txt

https://www.torproject.org/about/gsoc.html
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-design.html

http://code.google.com/p/soc/wiki/GSoC2012Ideas

https://github.com/twitter/twitter.github.com/wiki/Google-Summer-of-Code-2012

https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SummerOfCode2012

http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas-2012.html


http://www.abisource.com/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2012#Project_Ideas

http://moinmo.in/GoogleSoc2012/InitialProjectIdeas
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/gsoc-2012-ideas
http://www.scala-lang.org/gsoc2012

http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2012/Ideas