Web Cash

While reading some forums this morning, I came upon an interesting question. Where is the category information stored in the Wordpress database?

I opened up phpmyadmin, expecting to see a “categories” table. No dice. After a few minutes I figured it out – and I decided it might be a good idea to explain how the Wordpress database is structured.
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Every php-script that involves some kind of user login and database interaction has one very important feature – password checking and encryption.

There are a bunch of ways you could create and check passwords – from an insecure string in a database to an encrypted “hash” that you check against user input. This tutorial will show you how to use the crypt() function to store and check passwords in a php script.
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While browsing through Technorati, I just stumbled on a post about a shell script attack. It seems the poor chap got a shell script uploaded to his server, and the attacker used it to create a bunch of bogus files full of hyperlinks.

The original post has some header information about this particular hack (a modified c100 shell), as well as a link to some search results about the file. I looked through the source code for the shell script and tested it out on my local server – getting some link-filled files is the least that this script could do.
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