What not to do...Job Seekers

and offcourse some to do...

Well I have seen a large number of Resumes and also taken interivew of lots of candidates. I wanted to give some thoughts about to do / not to do about the resume, telephonic conversation, interviews. Others are welcome to add / discuss any points.

Resume

1) Keep your point wise

a. Don’t keep paragraphs of information regarding your skills or background.

b. Always keep information point wise.

2) Highlight the key skills for the job for which you are applying. If you looking jobs in multiple fields (Ex. Developer / Tester / Etc.) keep different resume ready for each field. Each field would have some different skills which you need to highlight.

3) Don’t put too much of information in resume. Also what ever tool / skill / project you have put in to your resume you should be able to answers any question regarding to that.

4) In my experience half of the interview questions would come from what you have written in the resume.

Telephonic Conversations

1) Be professional always ask the basic information like job profile , job location in the first place.

2) If the job profile and job location meets your need then only take forward the talks. Other wise you would be wasting your and other party’s time as well.

3) Always make a note of Name of the person with whom you had conversation for future reference

4) When you give time to any person for telephonic conversation, keep you mobile reachable, well charged. Its not good to give these reasons for not attending the call.

Face to Face Interview

1. Do dress decently in official dress.

i. Even if the office is using casual dresses

ii. Interview is not the place to show off with casuals

2. Carry a copy of resume with you and 2 photographs even if not asked by the company. You don’t know when they would come in handy

3. Do ask permission before going in to the interview room

4. Do not seat down before you are asked to do so

5. If interviewer offer shake-hand give a firm shake-hand.

6. Listen carefully to the question asked , if you don’t able to listen to a question politely ask to repeat the question

7. But don’t ask every time to repeat the question , some time its ok not every time.

8. Do answer with truth, if you don’t know any thing admit it that you don’t know it. No one is perfect.

9. Study the basics well before going for interview.

i. Ex. If you going for Developer interview you should know the basics of the programming language.

ii. If you going for Networking / Security profile your networking knowledge should be sound. (Ex TCPIP / ISO Layers etc). For a fresher at-least there is no excuse to Not have knowledge of TCPIP

Hide text in notepad

Hi there,
After some busy weeks, I am back. I had discussion with my regarding hiding text in the txt file using the notepad. So I am giving here the way by using which any text can be hidden in the notepad and you can have your own password for the hidden text also.
If you already dont know this go forwarding reading...

In windows you can hide some text in the txt file using only notepad and no other tool.

The way to do is ...

use following command to create a text file..

go to any specific folder of your choice in cmd prompt,
type command

notepad secret.txt:thisismypassword

Notepad will ask "Do you want to create a new file?"
Click "Yes"

Now the title bar of notepad should read like
secret.txt:thisismypassword.txt - Notepad

Edit and enter any text in this notepad file.

Close this file.

Go to windows explorer and navigate to that specific folder you will see only one file
secret.txt.

If you open this file you will see blank. You can enter any garbage in this secret.txt also and save it. It will not change your secrte data which was entered earlier.

To reopen the secrete data type same command again

notepad secret.txt:thisismypassword

You will see your data again. When opening file like this you can edit it and change your secrete data.



P.S. Regards to Cybercrawler for his posts

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See you there at NullCon !!!

Using Multiple Monitors - like seen in movies

I had already discussed use of multiple monitors with Microsoft PowerPoint to make your presentations easier. When ever I am in my workplace I use extra monitor with my laptop. I just love using that.
First important thing linux inbuilt support multiple monitor with lots of features so I am not talking about linux os in this section, I am talking aobut Microsoft Windows.

Remember the computer setup in movie Swordfish ?



Dont you like that kinda of setup ??
Well I was also fascinated by that kinda of setup. I will discuss multiple techniques you can use to get that kind of setup. But money does matters so first I will describe about hardware options to get this kinda setup then I will describe software options.


1) If you have lots of money to invest on this setup then you can go for laptop docking station. Something as seen at http://www.digitaltigers.com/sidecar.asp


This kinda of hardware setup can provide you lots of flexibility in terms of how you can use your multiple monitor setup.

2) If you dont have that kinda money (which is always the case with lots of us) then you can go for some other options like using laptops vga out to connect secondary monitor. In this case you can drag drop your applications on the secondary monitor and distribute space taken by your applications.

If you haven't used multiple monitors read the article from Microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307873

When I started using multiple desktops this way then first thing I noticed was there was no taskbar on the second desktop. After you drag drop applications on second monitor then also the taskbar icons stay on first monitor only. So my taskbar was becoming crowded. So I was looking for a solution which will give me second monitor with taskbar also. I found some solutions like http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/
which give can give multiple desktops with taskbar also. If you dont want to go for paid solution then there is Multimon http://www.mediachance.com/free/multimon.htm which is freeware and only place a taskbar on the second desktop. Which application you drop on second monitor it will take taskbar icon to the its taskbar on second monitor. freemon taskbar dont have lots of fancy options but it does the work.
You can directly download mmtaskbar from this location http://www.mediachance.com/free/mmtaskbar21.exe

3) But you might have noticed that I was only talking about the second monitor and not multiple monitors, but laptops only have one VGA output. So only one monitor can be attached to it. So what about multiple monitor setup ???
Well multiple monitor you will need monitors. Even if you have monitors how will you connect them without hardware. So you cant do anything without getting some costly hardware ??
Well low cost solution is there If you have some spare computer or laptops. There is software solution by using which you can extend your monitor on any machine in the network. Maxivista is the name of one of such products found at http://www.maxivista.com/.



I have tried maxivista with total 4 monitors at a time, and it was working fine. So here you go... Now you can have your own setup like movies.

version 2 of script to check cisco router with Default password

With request from my one fren to make the script more user frendly
I have created version 2 of the script which can be downloaded from http://neo1981.googlepages.com/ciscoPassChkv2.py

Well Here is some Spoon Feeding and brief documentation as Requested by my fren.

This script is checked on windows xp with python version 2.5. Though it should run with python 2.3 and 2.4 also.

You can download python for windows or linux machine from this page http://python.org/download/

On Linux system you can execute the script by using commnd
# python ciscoPassChkv2.py

On windows you can execute script by using command

C:\>c:\Python25\python.exe ciscoPassChkv2.py

Where C:\Python25\ is the directory where you have installed python 2.5

By default the script will ask you IP address of the router to be checked for default login.
If you want multiple routers checked at one go, put the IP addresses of the routers one IP in single line in a file and save
it as iplist.txt
Keep iplist.txt in the same folder as the python script and run python script. The script will read IP addresses from the file and check
those routers for default passwords.

python script to find cisco routers with default password

While I was doing my work (No options...have to do some to earn) in recent days
I was busy auding lots of cisco routers. As hacker mind I just went ahead hacking my way in to nearly all routers getting full access. But when I had completed my work I suddenly remember that some of the routers used default passwords and others I had extracted password from config of already accessed routers. But I just didnt remember for which routers I found using default password. As usual the programmer in me wake up (My colleague said he would check out manualy in 1 hour) I said I would better use half hour to write a script to find out those. This script will be use full in finding out routers with default password in future also.
So I did write a python script (you must be knowing by now python is my fav language) to check out routers with default passwords.
This script is still in its early stages. So looking forward for some good or bad feedbacks.

You can find script at
http://neo1981.googlepages.com/ciscoPassChk.py

Decrypting...No..Deobfuscating Cisco IOS Passwords

Why I said not decrypt but Deobfuscating ???

The level 7 password is not actually encrypted . The Vigenere algorithm is used to obfuscate the passwords (there is not key used in this algo)

Cisco IOS uses this level-7 encryption when the "service password-encryption" command is used. 

I found some interesting info while I was getting tools to decrypt cisco level 7 password. Yes you might know that there are Lots of softwares available on net whcih decrypt cisco 7 secrete. But this method got my attention since it uses cisco commands to obtain cleartext password from the secret.

Here it goes...
The show key-chain command executed on Cisco IOS displays the password configured in a key chain in cleartext even when the same password is stored as type-7 obfuscated password in the router configuration. 

For example, if you want to get the cleartext password corresponding to string 04480E051A33490E, enter the following lines into the router configuration (any routers configuration it can be your router not necessary victims router :D) :- 

R1(config)#key chain test
R1(config-keychain)#key 1
R1(config-keychain-key)#key-string 7 04480E051A33490E

When you execute show key chain test command, the cleartext value of the password is displayed: 

R1#show key chain test
Key-chain decrypt:
key 1 -- text "secure"
accept lifetime (always valid) - (always valid) [valid now]
send lifetime (always valid) - (always valid) [valid now]

Walla Cleartext without using any tools

I also have found perl code by Bostjan Sustar to do the same task.
The perl code is uploaded at http://neo1981.googlepages.com/decrypt_cisco.pl