Week 7 Takeaways

Reading Summary: NetCat

NetCat is a tool built by Hobbit and made available in a Windows platform by Weld Pond.  It is recommended to test the firewall and router configurations in a test environment and not in a production network.  This utility allows security professionals to test the operating system lockdown procedures by allowing them to write and read data across TCP and UDP network connections. In addition, some other features include the ability to use any local source port, built-in loose source-routing, full DNS forward/reverse checking, etc. Lastly, security professionals use NetCat in their environment for file transfers, firewall testing, proxy gatewaying, script backends, spoofing tests, protecting X servers, etc.
Question for the class:

Have you previously used NetCat and if so, how did you  utilize this tool to its full potential?
In the News:  Trump hotels hacked, credit card data at risk

Trump hotels across the US and Canada were impacted by a computer virus where hackers had access to customer credit card data for an entire year.  Anyone who visited a Trump hotel in New York, Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Toronto, and Miami between May 19, 2014 and June 3, 2015 were impacted by the malicious software placed on the hotel’s payment systems which allowed any sensitive information to be exposed, such as credit card numbers, expiration dates, and security codes on the back of the cards. As a result of this hack, the hotel is offering one year of free identity fraud protection to any affected customer.

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