Whatever you do with the following information is solely your responsibility.
#telnet ip:25 That title looks like random letters and symbols, but it is actually
the command used to connect to an SMTP server via telnet. The # represents the shell,
"telnet" is the program used to start a connection via telnet, "ip" is the ip address
of the mail/smtp server (an SMTP server comes with XP PRO and is easy to set up),
and 25 is the port SMTP daemons run on. First of all, the newer Windows command
shells are not truly DOS, and the telnet command is a little different. Namely,
you will replace the colon between the ip and the port with a space. I don't know
why this was changed but there is nothing to be done about it so you just have to
live with it. The colon is used, however, in almost all other operating systems,
such as BSD, Linux, and probably Mac (I don't own a Mac). When you connect, you
will know right away what daemon the server is running. A daemon is a program that
deals with all incoming connections and data on a specific port. The most common
SMTP daemon is Sendmail (for Linux and maybe cygwin). Don't expect to find this
on too many big websites (ie Yahoo, Microsoft.com, etc), I would think they would
know better. But on many websites this daemon is still being used. This tutorial
will cover just fake mail sending. You will not learn how to take down any mail
servers, because it is generally irresponsible to take down mail servers, and the
only practical application is testing the security of your own server (if you really
want to know how, use Google). That being said, you could potentially cause havoc
with fake mail as well, but the playing field is more even considering everyone
is equally at risk (not just those with outdated software on their servers), and
unless you are smarter than the average kill-random-computers-with-winnuke person
then the most harm you can do is anonymously insult people.
Fake Mail Commands Generally, the following commands will work fine: helo mail
from: someguy@random.com rcpt to: someotherguy@anywhere.com data content of email
. quit Entering those commands when connected via telnet to a Sendmail daemon will
send someotherguy@anywhere.com an email containing "content of email" from someguy@random.com.
In some cases, you might need to type "helo random.com" at the beginning (random.com
being the domain of the return address) to get this to work. The return and to addresses,
as well as the content of the e-mail, can be modified as much as you want. If it
doesn't work, the daemon might need authentication, or the syntax might be different
(try adding <>s on either side of the email addresses). And, backspace does not
work, even though it looks like that. If you mess up in typing a command and press
backspace, the command is void. In the contents of the e-mail, backspaces will show
up as boxes when read by the receiver. This is an invaluable social engineering
technique. Imagine sending an email to an AOL customer, faking the return address
as a system administrator, with contents something like "We are debugging the system
lost all our user data for your area. We require you to send your name, date of
birth, address, username, password, credit card number, and credit card expiration
date." They would happily comply, thinking you were someone you weren't. You are
not completely anonymous when using this technique. Anyone who is serious about
safety should know about email "headers," or information included in the email.
If you have pop3 enabled with your email (you do if you have gmail) then just open
up the mail with Thunderbird (of Outlook, ugg) and tell it to display the headers.
I will not go in depth on this, but a search on the internet will show you what
you need to know to spot fake mail.
