7 Things I Already Knew But Probably Wasn’t Supposed To…
January 11, 2008
So I was reading Kent’s blog (my boss at OWGM) and he had a neat post about an article on PCWorld.com titled 7 Things Your Company’s IT Department Doesn’t Want You to Know. I thought to myself, “I wonder if I can learn anything from this seeing as this is the sort of thing I’m supposed to be watching for.” After reading the article I felt a bit cheated. “Wait a second,” I thought, “these are all the ways that I used to cheat the system!” It’s actually not a bad little compendium of subversive tricks for getting around tight computer-use policies. Check it out if you’re feeling locked down at work.
A few things they didn’t mention in the article…
These are all things that allow you to either encrypt your traffic and hide it, or use a remote computer. Tor stands for “The Onion Router” and is a protocol that was created to make the Internet more anonymous. Using Tor and a local proxy, you can pipe connections through the proxy out into the Tor universe (which is comprised of a bunch of random servers around the world). Every time your connection is passed off to a new server, the information given is only enough so that the server knows to say “Is the destination nearby? If so, connect to it. If not, pass it along the chain further.” This is a layman’s analogy, but it works. Your “connection” is bundled and unbundled at each exit node until it reaches the web site or server you’re trying to connect to. That server only sees the IP address and information of the exit node. A fun way to test this is to install the Tor package for windows from the above listed website, turn on Tor and visit whatismyip.com. Every time you refresh it should be a different IP address. You can also host your own Tor exit node if you happen to have a lot of bandwidth or a dedicated server. (Note: I’ve done this on one of my dedicated servers and my bandwidth usage shot sky-high. User Beware.)
VNC, RDP, and SSH are all protocols for connecting to computers remotely. There are many free remote-control programs that make use of VNC. RDP is the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol. It’s what you use to connect to Terminal Server sessions, but Windows XP and Vista (Business and Ultimate) also have it built in. I use RDP to connect to my computer at home, and it’s as though I’m typing at the keyboard. Finally, SSH is a protocol for encrypting shell connections. It’s most commonly used with *nix servers, but you can install a windows version if you want to host your own SSH server. I use it when connecting to my dedicated Linux box. Putty is a good tool for connecting to SSH from Windows.
In closing, all the above methods will work for circumventing many strict policy rules, because you’re either a) hiding your connection, or b) connecting to a different computer entirely.
