The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

Sandboxie, as its name implies, acts as a sandbox or virtual container in which your Windows application can be run without it writing directly to your registry or hard disk, thereby minimizing the risk of virus or malware infection. Developed by Ronen Tzur, Sandboxie is shareware but has no time limitation.

The usual uses of Sandboxie are to surf the .NET or check your email in a sandbox for added security since any malware and trojans encountered will be trapped inside the sandbox. For me, I mainly use it to run trial applications and games that I download from the .NET, not so much for security purposes but more to minimize the chance of improperly written installers cluttering up the computer.

© Ronen Tzur

Without Sandboxie

© Ronen Tzur

With Sandboxie

From the above diagram, you can see that when your application is run under Sandboxie, all files and registry data which is usually written straight to the hard disk are redirected to a temporary storage area (sandbox). The data in the sandbox remains there until you manually clear it. This redirection of data is totally transparent to the end user so it’s really very easy to use.

After installing Sandboxie, it adds a Run Sandboxed item to your context menu. Simply right-click the application you want to run in a sandbox and click Run Sandboxed and you’re done!

Run an application under Sandboxie is as simple as right-clicking and selecting Run Sandboxed.

Child processes created by the application inside the Sandboxie sandbox are also isolated in the sandbox.

The window titles of all applications running inside a sandbox are surrounded by [#] for easy identification.

After using your application, exit it normally and then right-click the diamond-shaped Sandboxie Control icon in your system tray. Go to Contents of Sandbox and from there you can explore the contents of the sandbox, i.e the files which were orginally supposed to be written to the hard disk, or delete the contents of the sandbox to restore the state of your hard disk and registry back to the original state before you ran the application.

I recommend configuring Sandboxie under Configuration > Global Settings > Set File Copy Options and change Don’t Copy files into the sandbox if they are larger than xxx kilobytes to a larger value if you intend to use Sandboxie to run applications or installers that work with large files.

Read the FAQ, tutorial or download Sandboxie at the official site.

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YouTube is a pretty nice site to find and listen to songs that you can’t buy from shops like the excellent Canon Rock arranged by Jerry C and performed by Jeong-Hyun Lim aka funtwo a couple of years back. Being the usual slowcoach, I only discovered it a few weeks ago

It’s all fine when you have internet access to listen to songs like these, but what if you want to listen to them on an MP3 player on the way to work?

Convert them to MP3s of course Here’s how:

1. In YouTube, copy the URL link on the video page.

   

2. Go to www.videodl.org, paste the link we copied in step 1 and click Get It!

   

3. Wait for a while and a Download Link will appear. If the page does not display the Download Link, refresh the page and click on the Get It! link again.

   

4. Right click and choose Save Target As … to save the file somewhere you can remember because this YouTube file contains the MP3 that we want. Remember to rename it as xxx.flv.
5. Download eRightSoft’s Super transcoder (Windows only). Look for a link labelled Download and Use and scroll all the way to the bottom on the next page to download the 25+ MB installer.
6. After installing Super, start it and you should see a screen like the one below.

   

7. The settings should be as follows:
   • Select MP3 from the dropdown list for the Output Container
   • * VERY IMPORTANT * - ensure that DirectShow Encode is NOT checked. Flash video which is the format that YouTube uses to store video, cannot be decoded by DirectShow, that’s why this has to be off.
   • At the blue Audio section, the default settings are set to 44100 Khz, 128 kbps, Stereo ala CD quality audio. You can change these settings but remember that the output quality is dependent on the original audio source in the YouTube video.

8. Right click anywhere in Super to display the menu and click on Output File Saving Management to select the output directory for your brand new MP3.

   

9. To extract the audio in our YouTube video to MP3s, right click again to display the menu, click on Add Multimedia Files and select the YouTube video we saved in step 4.
10. Click on Encode (Active Files) at the bottom and enjoy!

BTW, correct me if I’m wrong but ripping copyrighted songs from YouTube is considered illegal in most places. Use the above info at your own discretion

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I usually download Flash games with the help of my trusty Opera Browser via Tools > Advanced > Cache and search for either .swf or the domain name of the server hosting the Flash game. It’s easy to get the Flash game this way if all the content has been packaged into a single .swf file. For games which are contained in multiple swfs, you have to download all associated .swfs and replicate the directory structure. Anyway, this post is not about downloading multi-swf games so I will leave it to another time.

Once I downloaded a Flash game, I used to drag and drop it into any browser (usually opera) with the Flash plugin installed and play the game offline. Most games work perfectly fine for me this way except that the Flash plugin for my Opera browser doesn’t work too well and guzzles up a lot of memory after a while.

I chanced upon this page on Adobe Flash Player Support Center where Adobe offers free downloads of “Projector Content Debuggers / Debug Players” which are essentially the same as those self-executable SWF projectors but without any SWF content. This means that these “Debug Players” double as standalone players for any .swf file you have on hand

A screenshot of the Ninja Rinseout game reviewed previously, running on a Flash 9 debug player.

Download Windows, Linux and Macintosh versions of the Flash 9 debug players from Adobe Flash Player Support Center (Select the Projector Content Debuggers not Plugin Content Debuggers - those will install a debug version of the Flash player into a specific browser which is A Very Bad Thing™).

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After last week’s F-Secure Reversing Challenge 2007, I suddenly felt like writing about one of my favourite reverse engineering sites

Fravia’s original site @ www.fravia.org was one of my most frequently visited sites when I first discovered the Internet some ten years back. It was a treasure trove of hard-to-find reverse-engineering information at a time when reverse-engineering was generally misunderstood as a black art mainly associated with software cracking.

Although the site design might not have kept up with the times i.e no dynamically generated pages, AJAX scripting etc, the design was unusually clean and easy to navigate compared to other sites during the Geocities era where blinking text and banners were commonplace.

Anyway, the real value of Fravia’s site laid in the fact that it was one of the first communities for knowlege sharing between reverse engineers throughout the world. Rare information (originally focussing on cracking protection schemes) contributed by enthusiasts created a database of useful knowledge for newbies and skilled reverse engineers alike. The focus later shifted to pure reverse-engineering to improve on software without needing the original source and finally in 2000, Fravia abandoned the entire reverse engineering content - but not his well-known anti-commercial attitude - to concentrate on the art of web searching @ www.fravia.com (originally www.searchlores.org (currently down) ).

Some recommended pages at the new fravia.com are webbits, tools and books & books & dark riders - learn to fully utilize your search engine to find the stuff that you seek.

The writings and techniques presented at original fravia.org influenced me a lot - I developed a love for 32 bit Windows assembly programming from reversing and injecting code in other applications to add extra functionality as well as the love for searching and learning stuff online (so much that I haven’t been studying for any certifications other than my diploma - something that I’m sure will screw me up in the future in paper-obsessed SG)

The original reverse-engineering pages are still available at Fravia’s archive pages of reverse engineering over at RCE Messagboard for those interested in this particular field of computing. More white hat reverse-engineering stuff are also available at www.openrce.org.

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Fancy utilizing your analytical and deductive skills to solve a trio of challenges and learn some extra knowlegde in the process? Actually, there were iPods up for grabs for the three fastest entries but they have already been won. You can still win a visit to F-Secure’s anti-virus lab in Helsinki (excluding travel expenses)

Try F-Secure Reverse Engineering Challenge 2007 (started yesterday at 3:00 PM (SG time) and ends on Sunday 4:59 PM) which I read about over @ Didier Steven’s blog. For more rules and details of the competition, head over to this page @ the ASSEMBLY Summer ‘07 site.

Some of my favourite freeware tools of the trade that you may find useful:

• IDA Pro Freeware 4.3 (or Google Search for freeida43.exe) - A freeware version of a most powerful disassembler
• OllyDbg - Disassembler and assembler-level debugger
• HxD - My favourite hex editor

© F-Secure Corp.

The first challenge should be simple enough for even basic reverse engineers - as long as you’re comfortable with basic programming and debugging, it shouldn’t even take you more than 20 minutes. Download it from the offfical site at www.khallenge.com.

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