SHOKDIAL

The longevity of ToneLoc and THC-Scan may be due either to their intrinsic usefulness or the lack of desire on behalf of hackers in a broadband Internet world to update the tools. After all, they produce great results and give you an excuse to leave a Windows system lying around on your network. (The truly brave could try running the dialers from a Windows VMware session on a Linux host.) Yet the fact that a tool more than 10 years old may still serve as part of a security arsenal is testament to the necessity of war dialers.

Shokdial is one of a handful of Linux-based derivatives. It can be downloaded from the W00W00! (a hacking group ) site at http://www.w00w00.org/files/misc/shokdial/. Download all of the files in this directory. A simple make command should successfully compile the software.

Tip	You may need to change the MODEMPORT definition (line 45) in the shokdial.c file to match your system's modem entry in the /dev device structure.

Implementation

The easiest way to use shokdial is to create a text file that contains one phone number per line. The number may contain numerals, dashes, commas, or the asterisk. The hash symbol (#) is reserved as a comment delimiter , so it's not available as a character to send to the modem. Run shokdial with the c option to load the phone number list. Phone numbers needn't be sequential, within the same exchange, or limited to a certain amount. Shokdial will dial whatever number is entered on the line.

Even though shokdial runs on Unix-based platforms, it doesn't have the data manipulation and scan management of ToneLoc or THC-Scan. On the other hand, you have more capabilities within the Unix shell to script many of the scan management functions. A single instance of shokdial can only deal with one modem. So, if you have a bank of modems, then you'll need to run multiple instancesjust as you would with the DOS-based tools.