Welcome to duststar theory

Happy Chinese New Year 2010!

Author duststar | 13.02.2010 | Category blog

Firstly, I would like to apologise for leaving this blog unattended for quite some time. Many things are concurrently happening in real life, and because of that I need to “pause” this blog for a while.

Secondly, having been real busy, I have decided not to continue to work on the ranking script for MapleSEA because it is too resource intensive (time and money) and this is something which is not in my top priority list. However, the network uptime and registry of marriage codes will still be maintained and updated as and when required.

Last but not least, wishing everyone a very happy Chinese New Year. For this blog, I hope to share more interesting cybersecurity stuffs with everyone!

.duststar

MapleSEA Ranking Database – 2

Author duststar | 23.01.2010 | Category MapleSEA

A quick update on progress.

The database design for the ranking database is finally done and tested. Right now, I am working on summarising data. To improve SELECT query performance, all data needs to “summarised” before I insert them into the database e.g. aggregate by day, week, month etc

Let’s look at BOOTES dataset for the past 10 hours! (From 0000 hours to 1000 hours, GMT +8)

1. Congrats to all those who level up (A total of 81 players). Below are the top 10 climbers based on level descending sequence.

2. Top 10 climbers based on levels gained descending sequence.

Hope you like them and watch out for more coming soon as the project gets nearer to completion!

.duststar

MapleSEA Ranking Database – 1

Author duststar | 22.01.2010 | Category MapleSEA

I have announced the development of this project for MapleSEA few days ago at Asiasoft Forums. The MapleSEA’s ranking website we know of currently only allow us to search for players statistics based on their in-game nickname. Though it allow us to see rankings for various criteria e.g. All, Job, World and Fame, I felt that more could be done.

From data analysis point-of-view, perhaps we could make use of this provided data set to answer some of the following questions:
1. How many level 200 are there in each world? Of which, what are the distribution of level 200 among all jobs?
2. Who are the players that are going to reach level 200 soon?
3. How can we know if a particular player is leveling at a very fast speed?
4. How many 4th jobbers does each world have? And, what are the distribution of 4th jobbers among all jobs? So, which job is the most popular (in terms of 4th jobbers) and which job is the least popular?

Thus this is what the whole project is about.

Yesterday wrote and tested a script to fetch ranking information from MapleSEA’s ranking website. Now looking at database design which is very important because if I need to store the delta difference of all players’ statistics at each poll by the script, the database will be very huge! (A quick check on Bootes tells us that we have about 11,500 players with between level 120 to 200. That would means at every 2 hour poll I would probably have inserted 11,500 entries into my database. 24 hours = over 130,000 entries. 1 month = 3.9 million entries. 1 year = 46.8 million entries. And this is only Bootes! What about other worlds?)

Some fun facts:

1.  As of point of writing, Bootes has 1,690 level 120 players. The job distribution are as follows:

2. That would means for Knight of Cynus. We have (from most popular to least popular):
Flame Wizard, Soul Master, Night Walker, Wind Breaker, Striker.

3. For Adventurer Class, We have (from most popular to least popular):
Magician, Thief, Warrior, Bowman, Pirate

4. That probably explained why Magician and Thief jobs’ items and scrolls are still so expensive. Zzz.

5. The only Beginner at level 120 is … Sattva

Please look out for more cool stuffs coming soon!

.duststar

Analysis on Global Maplestory (GMS) leaked accounts

Author duststar | 20.01.2010 | Category Cyber Security, MapleGlobal

Following this post.

I am posting a short analysis on the leaked accounts.

A total of 139 accounts were leaked. The attackers may have more because the “id”s were in running sequence (which seems to indicate it was “ripped” off from a database or any structured data source).

Findings

1. There were 3 accounts that uses same credentials for both login ID and password.

2. Shortest password length was 6.

Examples:
112991
kablam
dragon
123123
123321
hacker
abc123
123456
……

Examples:
narutoistheb
fataliity225
412173lesche
manquehue199
samsung770k1

4. There were 113 (81.29%) unique passwords and  26 (18.71%) duplicated passwords.

 Examples of duplicated passwords used:
pokemon = 2
112991 = 2
kablam = 3
pspds3 = 2
21coryt21 = 2
123123 = 2
annaviv1 = 2
i2345i = 2
pokemaniac = 3
stephanie = 2
google = 2
kiko052500 = 2

5. Passwords used by players are generally WEAK.

Weak = 107 (76.98%) e.g. yonatan
Medium = 32 (23.02%) e.g. samsung770k1

Conclusion

1. People are still using WEAK passwords.
2. If these passwords are stored in anywhere, they should be at least hashed with a industry recognised hashing algorithmn such as MD5, SHA1 etc and salted.
3. You should consider changing your account passwords to at least 12 characters with mixture of alphabets (big and small), and numbers. If possible, include in symbols such as !.$.? etc.

.duststar

Global Maplestory (GMS) leaked accounts

Author duststar | 20.01.2010 | Category Cyber Security, MapleGlobal

I saw this piece of news from: http://forums.asiasoftsea.net/showthread.php?t=753468

Then followed to: http://www.southperry.net/forums/showthread.php?t=22241

It seems like some people had posted a list of global Maplestory (GMS) accounts with password and pin in-clear online. At current point of writing, I can still find this list within 5 seconds on the Internet.

Just read the 20+ pages at southperry forum and someone did “try out” the listof ids and passwords and was able to login. This probably validates that its real data.

Let’s assume it is real.

Here is my ONE and ONLY question. Is the password and pin stored as clear-text in the database?

.duststar