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Using Security Tools Tutorials

Building a Security Toolbox / Creating Your Own Live Security CD pt. 2




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The other issue about using a Live Security CD is if you want to update the tools or you want to apply patches to the OS you have to remaster a new Live Cd and that might involve resolving dependencies and fixing glitches and so forth. So as you can see this is a continually process. I have to tell you that in my personal opinion I think the Security Field in general is probably getting away from Live CDs more in favor toward live USB distributions, simply because of the issues with having a remaster over and over. Now don't get more wrong, Live CDs are still extremely useful. I use them everyday in my work and a lot of security professionals do. But I think eventually you're going to see a movement more toward Live USB Devices, Live USB Hard Drives or Memory Sticks and so forth and that's how we're going to do our Live Security Toolsets. Now let's talk a little bit about creating a Windows Live CD. Now, from a technical prospective creating a Windows Live CD is actually very easy. From another perspective namely copyright restrictions, its kind of problematic and the reason is, is with a Live Linux CD you can create one and give it away. OK? With a Live Windows CD since it actually has a version of Windows on it, you have to sell that and they're very few people who actually sell one of those. In fact the only folks I really know of produced a CD not to many years ago are no longer in business. The other way of creating one yourself, normally involves downloading a program such as BART PE for example to create a Windows CD. But you have to use a CD, a legally licensed copy of Windows OK? So you get into some legal restrictions when you start creating Live Windows CD's because technically once you create that Live CD you should not have also installed that particular Licensed copy of Windows on another machine unless you have a volume license. So, if you have only a single license, you'd have to pull that version of Windows off of another computer. The other thing is once you create that Live CD you've got to control it very carefully, you can't make copies for your buddies because that's illegally producing copies of Windows. That's called Piracy, so there's some legal ramifications to creating Live Windows CD's. Like I said from a technical perspective it's not very difficult. So I'm not going to tell you one way or another whether creating your own bootable Windows CD is perfectly legal. In some instances it may be but you should probably consult your legal folks and you should probably work with Microsoft on the legality of it, you may be able to get licenses to do that under very specific circumstances. From a technical perspective its actually not difficult though. Program such as BART PE, that's a very popular one, you can create a Windows Live CD with your choice of Security Tools, essentially you create the set-up, the image and then you use your legally licensed copy of Windows to add the files on there to make it a Windows CD and then basically you go through a little wizard process that creates it and you burn the image to a CD and wahlah you've got a bootable Windows Distribution. As I said another version of that, that was professionally produced and sold was called ERD Commander and that company is no longer producing that as far as I am aware but it was a professionally licensed and sold, it was sold as a copy of Windows, a legal copy of Windows. It had a lot of good tools there but BART PE can do the same thing for you and you can put your own security tools on there, stand alone tools of course is always preferred, but you may be able to create some tools by resolving dependencies and so forth and put them on the disk. Now what can you use a Windows Live Cd for? Well that's easy from just a pure maintenance perspective you can use it for repairing the file system if the file system crashes. You can restore boot files and so forth. From a security perspective you can use it to get rid of malware because you're not booting off the computer. You can use it to eradicate viruses; you can also use it during Computer Forensics response work. You can use it to wipe a drive completely, wipe a drive if you like. You can use it to recover passwords you can even undelete and recover files that may be some user deleted. Now there are the same advantages and disadvantages, other then the copyright restrictions of course apply to the Windows Live CD as they would a Linux Live CD. If you're going to update the tools or the operating system, you're going to have to reburn, remaster the disk. So as I said before, I think the community is probably moving more toward a USB Live toolset then a Live CD Toolset for that reason, for the remastering difficulties. So we basically just touched the surface of covering your own Live Linux CD's, unfortunately as I said we couldn't do a demo because it's just extremely time consuming and tedious, you'll find when you do it the first time it can several hours and even after you do updates and update your operating system and tools it can take a long time to do as well. But the information now is out there, it's very easy to do with the right tools.

Tutorial Information

Course: Using Security Tools
Author: Bobby Rogers
SKU: 34068
ISBN: 1-935320-88-2
Release Date: 2009-12-04
Duration: 9 hrs / 91 lessons
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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