General Org Gripe

I'm not sure why I cannot seem to find a good tool to help keep all the daily life organized. I have become more and more reliant on calendars, online file storage, and email clients as time has progressed in this academic venture. Dropbox, EndNote, Evernote, and Gmail are now more intertwined with my life than ever before.

I still cannot seem to find one tool to rule them all and stay on a desktop. I need EndNote (Mac or PC), Evernote is web-based (and I love it). Gmail is on my phone and Dropbox is useful for all sorts of issues. I still have this nagging problem of use-ability across all these products. Dropbox beats Google Docs for ease of use, but Docs kicks tail for organizational capability and storage space. Outlook on Mac kills when dealing with multiple EWS clients, but cannot seem to have the same functionality on the Windows side. The iPad rocks as long as I don't need to print or have multiple screens. Add to the need to have all of this mobile and I'm in a small rut. I think mail and calendars are my biggest gripe. I love being able to get multiple exchange accounts on one client without having to rely on VPN connectivity for each of them. I live by my Google Calendar, but integration between outlook and Google Calendar is for PC only, where I lose the EWS functionality in outlook. I would just rely on the iPad for calendar functions, but then what to I rely on when I'm on a desktop or laptop (lets face it, tablets and pads are no real substitute yet for the major applications like SPSS and SAS).

It would also be nice if Google had a utility to mimic Dropbox cross platform.

I need to get this crap squared away before comps and proposal time.

Paros Web Proxy

As this semester wraps up at both universities I found myself rapidly trying to grade papers as well as complete my own projects. One of the projects I needed to complete was a network and web security course at DSU. I used nikto in a previous post to discuss the use of the software in vulnerability assessment.

I have used proxy software in the past, but never in the capacity of vulnerability assessment. Now the project was to break a PHP script and gain remote access. This actually turned out to be more simplistic than I anticipated, but what was surprising was how useful the paros proxy software was in accomplishing that particular goal.

The software is designed to allow you to see all the GET and POST messages, content, delivery of regular web traffic between your host and the remote server. It has two nifty features though; cookie storage and spider crawl. I used the spider functionality to grab the listing of html the did a directory grep for *.php to find my script call. This saved hours of time looking though the site and really let me get to the heart of the assignment.

Paros should be added to any suite of network vulnerability tools for use in pen testing. I highly recommend it.