Author: eblivion


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just those with outdated software on their servers), and unless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.