Tricks, Hacks and Fixes for Everyday Problems.

In the past few years people have become more aware of the danger of having their passwords stolen. Email, facebook, and twitter passwords are especially easy to acquire without any “crazy hacks” and by simply using some good old fashioned detective work and a little social engineering.  I’m going to outline some things that most people overlook.

THEN, I’m going to show you how to protect yourself from these types of attacks. A slight disclaimer, however, is that if someone really knows what they are doing and is determined enough, they can get just about anything they want from you – regardless of how aware you are of these attacks. Let’s hope no one hates you that much!

A lot of people might disagree with me showing people how to break into these accounts. I, however, feel if you don’t know how people get in, how can you properly protect yourself?

If you have a strong technical background or tinker with computers you already know everything in this article; I am not going to show you any complicated hacks this time around. This article is geared towards the everyday computer user to hopefully make them more aware of the silly things we often overlook when we set up our accounts.
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Data security is something most people take for granted even though our computers and the Internet are inherently insecure. This insecurity is heightened even further if other people have physical access to our computers. With enough time, anyone can break into our windows/linux/Mac accounts, copy our internet history, our saved passwords and much  more. I am going to show you two ways to securely hide your data through trickery, obscurity and encryption.

First, I am going to show you how to hide your data  on a simple USB flash key. Doesn’t sound secure? Well we are going to pull a switch-a-roo: We are going to take a 1gb USB key and put the insides of it into a 256mb USB key’s casing, then edit the partitions so when people plug it into their computer it will appear to be 256mb.  The remaining portion of the drive will be hidden so no one will be aware you actually have another 700+ mb’s of hidden data.  As a backup the hidden portion will be secured with Government Top-Secret Level AES encryption and hidden behind another dummy hidden portion. So, even if it is discovered that there is a secret area on your USB key it will be almost impossible to break. Welcome to the Obscura USB swap.

Second, I’m going to explain how you can place a USB key into a spare phone jack in your wall. Not only will no one think to look there, but a special cable (that I’ll tell you how to construct out of an old USB cord and an old phone cord) are required to access the data. Afterward, you can encrypt it with the same level of encryption as your other drive making it obscure and secure.

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This tutorial is a quick break down on how to install a bootable version of Backtrack 4 Pre-Final (BT4) to a USB key or DVD. It’s part of the Tutorial Series for Myfriendjosh.com. I plan on using Backtrack 4 for quite a few articles in the future. Instead of writing the installation procedures into every article, I will instead refer to the Tutorial Series in the future to cut down on redundancy. This article is in fact a re-hash of the previous article “Quick Tutorial: Installing Backtrack 4 Beta (BT4) to a Dvd or USB key”

What is Backtrack 4?

From Remote-Exploit.org, “BackTrack is the most top rated Linux live distribution focused on penetration testing. With no installation whatsoever, the analysis platform is started directly from the CD-ROM and is fully accessible within minutes.” Don’t let the name Linux scare you off though, it’s incredibly easy to use and very intuitive.

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Here are a couple random interesting facts about MyFriendJosh.com I thought I would put together for anyone interested.

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