Happy 4th of July!

Hping3 is a magnificent tool. It crafts custom TCP/IP packets for various functions including a DOS attack. Companies without constant alert programs could find that their programs designed for sniffing traffic quickly run out of memory, or, if given more time, their hard drive is filled up, and can log no further intrusions. I also learned about session hijacking programs, and was reminded of the importance of the https protocol. Any simple http request is sent in plain-text with no verification of authenticity. I changed a Google search request on a client computer with a man-in-the-middle attack. Now, with the encrypted version of that search, I can either not know what is going on, due to encryption, or decrypt and change it. However, I cannot re-encrypt it and pretend to be Google, so the client knew that the page was not actually from Google, and detected my hijack. At my school, the proxy server they use to censor the Internet for students does have ssl certificates for the computers to use, but my school  doesn't implement them, which has taught their students to ignore these critical ssl warnings! --Though, on some level I do appreciate that they did that, for my own purposes ;)