In the Internet, each IP Address belongs to an autonomous system (AS). In this blog article, it is demonstrated how any IP address can be mapped to an AS number. The necessary information and sources to map each IP Address to an Autnomous System is provided as well, since they were not easy to find.

In this blog post, I will introduce a JavaScript library that allows to track various user interactions of website visitors. Several key problems that arise when creating a JavaScript analytics application will be discussed and solved in this blog post.

I recently forked twisted-socks to add SOCKS 5 support for my GoogleScraper in order to scraper Google pages asynchronously. Obviously I needed SOCKS5 support to anonymize the parallel requests such that I can scrape more pages simultaneously.

I tested the code for SOCKS4 and SOCKS4a with a local TOR proxy and twistd -n socks and the SOCKS5 protocol with the dante socks proxy server on my VPS. So I guess the basic functionality should be working by now. GSSAPI (Kerberos) support is planned.

Here is the socksclient code, which is also available on my github repository:

# Copyright (c) 2011-2013, The Tor Project
# See LICENSE for the license.

# Updated on 25.01.14-28.01.14 to add SOCKS 5 support.
# Cleaned some parts of the code and abstracted quite a bit to handle the most important SOCKS5
# functionality like
# - username/password authentication
# - gssapi authentication (planned)
# - CONNECT command (the normal case, there are others: UDP ASSOCIATE and BIND, but they aren't as important. Maybe I will add them
#   in the future. If anyone wants to implement them, the basic structure is already here and the SOCKSv5ClientProtocol should be
#   rather easy extensible (how the actual connection, listening for incoming connections (BIND) and …

Hey everybody!

In this short article I will explain how I designed my wordpress theme's comment section with bootstrap 3.0.2. For the most recent changes, you find my theme on github. If you want to see a live demo, just inspect the comment form on this site. It uses exactly this bootstrap styled form I am discussing here.

In order to follow the content's of this blog post, you should have basic experience with PHP and HTML/CSS.

The Problem

The tricky question here is, whether we can use a action or filter hook to manipulate the comment form to our liking, or if we have to use and modify the original comment_form() function directly. Our goal is to decorate the form with some bootstrap widget classes and use the bootstrap grid layout. We want to obtain a horizontal form, such as demonstrated here. After a quick search, I found the function comment_form( $args, $post_id); in the wordpress codex. While it looks promising on the first glimpse, some hindrances become clear after further thinking through. The function's description says:

Most strings and form fields may be controlled through the $args array passed into the function, while you may …

Last Edit (Effective: 7th November 2013)

It seems like the plugin authors updated the security of the plugin. All the bottom blog entry deals with version 3.8.7. In this new paragraph, I will look whether these recent updates to version 3.8.8 added the necessary security to prevent conducting an...

• Attack vector one: Parsing the captcha logic.
• Attack vector two: Reversing the decode() function and just reading the solution from the hidden fields.

Let's get started:

At line 942 of the plugin code (The start of the function that generates the captcha) we see that the password isn't longer a static clear text password, it is built dynamically every 24 hours with the function cptch_generate_key(), that I will show here for your convenience:

// Functionality of the captcha logic work for custom form
if ( ! function_exists( 'cptch_display_captcha_custom' ) ) {
    function cptch_display_captcha_custom() {
        global $cptch_options, $cptch_time;

        if ( ! isset( $cptch_options['cptch_str_key'] ) )
            $cptch_options = get_option( 'cptch_options' );
        if ( $cptch_options['cptch_str_key']['key'] == '' || $cptch_options['cptch_str_key']['time'] < time() - ( 24 * 60 * 60 ) )
            cptch_generate_key();
        $str_key = $cptch_options['cptch_str_key']['key'];

Let's see if the new function cptch_generate_key() is sufficiently random enough. Here is the function code:

/* generate key */
if ( ! function_exists( 'cptch_generate_key' ) ) {
    function cptch_generate_key( $lenght = 15 ) {
        global $cptch_options;
        /* Under the string $simbols you write all …

PLUGIN: http://wordpress.org/plugins/flash-album-gallery/
AFFECTED VERSION: 3.01
DOWNLOADS: 840,714
RISK: MEDIUM/HIGH

The following blog post addresses a critical (chain) of security issues in the version 3.01 of flash-album-gallery
which eventually leads to remote code execution. The exploit is not completely automatically and needs a minimal amount
of social engineering. Nevertheless I rate the danger at a medium/high level {Probably even worse than a fully automatable SQL injection).

First of all, I need to say that the plugin code lacks a fair amount of secure programming techniques and has inherent design flaws as far
as I can say this [I am not a software engineer, I do security as a hobby]. Assumingly, this is a direct result of heterogenous and
evolutionary growth of the software.
I researched flash-album-gallery mainly in June 2013 and after some weeks I found a CSRF vulnerability in combination with
a stored XSS. But on the same time I was preparing to contact the author and reveal my findings, I noticed a new version and
the bug seemed to be found by an independent researcher. See below the lines Fix: vulnerability with albums and Fix: XSS bugs reported by Ken …