textfiles.com: /web/web/hacking/wsec08.txt
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Section 08



For The Lamer...



These questions (reworded and spell checked) are lame, but give you admins

out there a bit of a flavor of the mentality of "intruders" that write to

me. Four people asked all three of these questions in the same email....



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08-1. How can I falsely increase the hits on my counter?



This one is a sore spot with me, as I have no understanding as to the

importance of a web counter. If you are a site trying to gain advertisers,

well, you would obviously forge this number (make it very high) and even 

forge your logs to show thousands and thousands of entries to a perspective

sucker^h^h^h^h^h^h client.



There. I feel better.



Now, how do you increase the hits on your counter without hitting reload a

zillion times like some type of lamer? You simply reference the counter on

someone else's site that is a high traffic site. For example, if the high 

traffic counter is at http://www.thegnome.com/cgi-bin/count.cgi, then 

simply add that link to your page. Lame, but simple. Anyone looking at your

source code can see you are pathetic.



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08-2. My ISP limits web space and I want tons of graphics. What do I do?



Very common lamer question. First off, consider a competing ISP that offers

more space, or if it is worth it, ask if there is an extra fee to get your

allocated space increased. Also note, GIFs are smaller than JPGs if you 

save them correctly, so convert existing JPGs to GIFs. 256 color palettes

in a GIF are usually fine, even for scanned photos. Don't ask me how to do

this, however -- simply read your graphics package's documentation or try 

a graphics newsgroup. If that doesn't work or is not to your liking, you 

can resort to "image piracy".



Lamers can simply point a URL for a graphic to another web site. A common 

thing is to point a link at a click art repository, instead of actually 

copying over the link and placing it locally on your server. But beware --

a site you've linked your graphics to could go down, or even worse, change

the picture on purpose to make you look like the lamer you are. For 

example, Museum Mercantile (http://museummercantile.com) had a problem with

lamers linking to an animated email GIF located at 

http://museummercantile.com/images/email.gif. They noticed this because of

excessive hits in their logs to that image. So they renamed the image to 

emaiL.gif, updated their pages, and then copied out a 200k+ file called 

email.gif.



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08-3. How can I get pictures without paying for them at adult web sites?



You know, I almost didn't put this in but several people have asked. For

those of you reading this who are not into porn, just pretend that there

are web sites with REAL useful data in a protected directory that you wish

to access. For those of you I told to actually pay the whopping $5 the

adult site is asking for, that IS the best solution. The second solution 

is USENET and one of the porn newsgroups, as lamers that DO retrieve these

files often post them there, along with the porn sites themselves to get 

you to check them out.



Often a site will limit a part of the web tree, let's say the main page to

the subscriber area. Since this page is the only spot with links to the

good stuff, a site will limit access to that single page. Your job is to

guess the links under the main page. Look at the public areas. Note the 

names of directories and files, note the layout. It is possible that you

can guess these URLs, and quite possible these are unrestricted. For

images, they may have them all in a single image directory, so try and

guess that one first.



Another option that I have used for non-porn sites with great success is

to use search engines. There are many search sites that allow you to

submit a URL for indexing -- try submitting the URL of the protected page

and let the spider try and index everything underneath it. Depending on 

the search site, you could have the entire protected area indexed in a few

days. For example, I found a site that allowed online credit checks, skip

tracing, NCIC searches, and all kinds of info. Indexing that site allowed

me to view every single submission form. Of course I still needed an 

account name and password to actually submit the form, but it was still

fun to plow through and look at WHAT I could have submitted. By the way

site in question is no longer on the web, but I'm sure their CGI scripts

had potential holes that could have allowed for submissions to be made...



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-1. How can I falsely increase the hits on my counter? 2. My ISP limits web space and I want tons of graphics. What do I do? 3. How can I get pictures without paying for them at guide: For The Lamer... - includes a guide of "How can I get pictures without paying for them at adult web sites?" a tutorial about a few basic computer concepts including web site design and hacking techniques for images such as "image piracy"  - also covers search engines and some other topics unrelated to the topic of the book itself, which is an introduction 1 How can i falsely increase hits my counter? this one is a sore spot with me as i haev no understanding of importance of a web couter if you are site trying gain advertisers well u would obviously forge this number and