Install Backtrack 4 to a USB stick

Many reasons that you need to install Backtrack 4 to a USB Stick. For me, I just want to keep the tools up to date. It was a little bit tricky because I was able to install it to a USB Stick, but it still acted like “Live CD”, meaning every change is gone after I reboot it.

But now it becomes very easy because I found this great video:
http://www.offensive-security.com/videos/backtrack-usb-install-video/backtrack-usb-install.html

Just make sure you have a 8G USB stick, because a 4G USB stick will only have 300M free space after the installation.

Uncontrollable Zooming in Microsoft Word and IE

The Dell Latitude D630 laptop I was using has a very strange behaviour, when I connect it to a projector, and press Fn+F8 to show the screen on both devices, word zooms to 500% and stay there, whatever I change zooming setting, it goes back to 500%. Same as IE. I have to reboot the laptop to solve this problem, but when I press Fn+F8, it happens again. The strange thing is, if I don’t connect it to a projector, everything is fine, even I press Fn+F8. And I couldn’t reproduce the problem in another Dell laptop.

It really annoys me because I cannot use it for presentation. I decided to find out the reason. I believe there is a process causing this problem, I killed the suspect processes with Process Explorer 11.33 (www.sysinternals.com) and finally found out it is iType.exe that causes the problem.

Here is detail of iType.exe:

Once I kill the process, everything back to normal.

Running Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) command line

You may already familiar with Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) GUI, but how about the MBSA command line?

You get at least 2 benefits from the MBSA command line

1. If you want to scan the remote computers that are not part of your domain, MBSA GUI won’t help you, at least I couldn’t find any option to do it. In this situation, MBSA command line comes in place.

2. You can easily schedule MBSA Command line running at midnight to scan a range of computers, and view the reports with a cup of coffee next morning.

The format of MBSA command line is:

MBSACLI [/target /r /d domain] [/n option] [/o file] [/qp] [/qe] [/qr] [/qt] [/listfile file] [/xmlout] [/wa
/wi] [/catalog file] [/nvc] [/ia] [/mu] [/nd] [/rd directory] [/?][/u username /p password]

For example, if you want to scan an IP 192.168.1.1: mbsacli /target 192.168.1.1 /u administrator /p password

Enter “mbsacli /?” for more details.

Something you have to be aware:

1. MBSA Command line need an offline security update signature to perform a scan, the file name is wsusscn2.cab. MBSA GUI can automatically download it and save it in “C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\MBSA\2.1.1\Cache\” (depends on your MBSA installation) , but if you haven’t run the GUI for a long time, you can download the latest signature from here http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=76054. I normally save it in a temporary folder, then use /category parameter to specify the file location: mbsacli /target 192.168.1.1 /catalog c:\temp\wsusscn2.cab /u administrator /p password

2. The cons of this command line is the username and password is in the plain text, you have to change your password after you finish a scan.

3. The output of MBSA command line is ugly, however, you can view the report from MBSA GUI, it is user friendly and pretty beautiful.

4. The version of MBSA we are talking here is 2.1.1, released on Nov 4, 2009. You can download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b1e76bbe-71df-41e8-8b52-c871d012ba78&displaylang=en