Intro

Denial of Service attacks are nothing new to people in the IT and computer security world. DoS attacks are a very simplistic form of attack which aim to flood the target (whether it be a computer, mobile device, or phone line) with traffic so that it cannot process legitimate traffic. While being simple simple to perform, DoS attacks are often difficult to defend against without significant downtime.

Today I'm going to show you how to perform a DoS attack on a phone line. This process is simple, quick to perform, and very illegal. Before we get started, I'd just like to remind you that this article is for educational purposes only! All the code I'm putting into this article is python, and should work on any system with python 2.4+.

Synergy is a popular application for sharing a keyboard and mouse between multiple computers on multiple operating systems using your network. One of it's biggest flaws is that the underlying protocol is unencrypted. This means that people could potentially read what you type remotely. This article describes a method for setting up an encryption layer for Unix-like and Windows machines as well as automatically starting Synergy on system boot-up without user-prompts.

While I have no doubt there are several articles on this subject elsewhere, I'm going to give you a walk through from my point of view about how you can set up synergy across multiple Windows and Unix-like systems securely.

This walk through will be divided into two parts. First will be Unix-like setup and the second part will be Windows setup.

Prefixed Portage

Most Linux distributions have great package managers like apt or portage. But installing programs when you don't have root access can be a pain. You need to find, download and install all the dependencies and their dependencies, setup a prefix somewhere in your home folder and hope that everything works.

Prefixed portage is perfect for those kinds of situations. It's a modified version of portage, the package manager of the Gentoo distribution. I am using it on a computer running Linux, but you can also use it on OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris to install applications and libraries from the portage repository.