How we take rapid screen shots for our reports

Our penetration test report shows exploits with step-by-step screen shots. Never was the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” more true than in our reports :)

How do we take screen shots quickly?

In the past we took screen shots painfully - Alt+PrintScreen to copy the active window to the clip board, then copy paste to MSPaint, save the file in our preferred format after navigating to the right folder, switch to Microsoft Word and “Insert -> Picture from File”. Slow, very slow.

Then we saw Screen Shooter, written by Dave Armstrong of bindshell. Screen Shooter is a lightweight screen capture utility. It lets us assign Windows hotkeys for the common tasks - save the current window, or the desktop. The files are placed in the folder of our choice automatically, in the format we want. The filenames increment each time. Neat. Thank you Dave.

We like the PNG format for our screen shots. We get clear pictures with small file sizes. They can be stretched or compressed to fit the page, and they still retain good clarity. If you know of a better format for screen shots, we’d love to hear that.

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