Evidence of recent attacks on major political and financial systems suggests that large-scale attacks on critical infrastructures are still a focus of attackers, despite recent reports that cyber attackers are focusing on smaller targets. In an article titled “Are We Ready for a Financial Cyber Attack” the Wall Street Journal hints at several of the most serious potential cyber attacks the world could experience. The article alludes to a potential attack on Western financial institutions that could affect trillions of dollars of transactions everyday, and could have a destabilizing effect on economic and political stability. Unfortunately, in the last few months, some attacks on major financial and political systems have come close to that possibility.

Words like “privacy” and “confidentiality” and “cyber-security” are thrown around frequently in discussions of technology, but many people consider these issues more idealistic than essential. It may be widely accepted that confidentiality is better than no confidentiality, but few people would go out of their way to protect their information at the cost of convenience or practicality. The question becomes whether or not most of these people who give away their private information haphazardly realize the danger and ignore it, or are ignorant of the severity of the ramifications altogether. Unfortunately, some of those people will probably learn of the severe ramifications first hand- and there’s a significant chance that will happen when their fiscal situation takes a hit because of a financial cyber attack.

Use this .gdbinit. Make sure you save it as your ~/.gdbinit file in $HOME. This adds functionality: you can see the stack, data, registers and code and how they change on each cmd entered into gdb. For best results use 80x24 sized windows (It acts like a motion picture in that size.)

You are probably going to want to do this to make your initial exploit examples easier to work with and understand.