Arc of the Hill Country

Saturday, May 9, 2020

How To Start | How To Become An Ethical Hacker

Are you tired of reading endless news stories about ethical hacking and not really knowing what that means? Let's change that!

This Post is for the people that:

Have No Experience With Cybersecurity (Ethical Hacking)
Have Limited Experience.
Those That Just Can't Get A Break

OK, let's dive into the post and suggest some ways that you can get ahead in Cybersecurity.

I receive many messages on how to become a hacker. "I'm a beginner in hacking, how should I start?" or "I want to be able to hack my friend's Facebook account" are some of the more frequent queries. Hacking is a skill. And you must remember that if you want to learn hacking solely for the fun of hacking into your friend's Facebook account or email, things will not work out for you. You should decide to learn hacking because of your fascination for technology and your desire to be an expert in computer systems. Its time to change the color of your hat 😀

I've had my good share of Hats. Black, white or sometimes a blackish shade of grey. The darker it gets, the more fun you have.

If you have no experience don't worry. We ALL had to start somewhere, and we ALL needed help to get where we are today. No one is an island and no one is born with all the necessary skills. Period.OK, so you have zero experience and limited skills…my advice in this instance is that you teach yourself some absolute fundamentals.

Let's get this party started.

What is hacking?

Hacking is identifying weakness and vulnerabilities of some system and gaining access with it.

Hacker gets unauthorized access by targeting system while ethical hacker have an official permission in a lawful and legitimate manner to assess the security posture of a target system(s)

There's some types of hackers, a bit of "terminology".
White hat — ethical hacker.
Black hat — classical hacker, get unauthorized access.
Grey hat — person who gets unauthorized access but reveals the weaknesses to the company.
Script kiddie — person with no technical skills just used pre-made tools.
Hacktivist — person who hacks for some idea and leaves some messages. For example strike against copyright.

Skills required to become ethical hacker.

Curosity anf exploration
Operating System
Fundamentals of Networking

*Note this sites

More information

CEH Practical: Information-Gathering Methodology

Information gathering can be broken into seven logical steps. Footprinting is performed during the first two steps of unearthing initial information and locating the network range.

Footprinting

Footprinting is defined as the process of establishing a scenario or creating a map of an organization's network and systems. Information gathering is also known as footprinting an organization. Footprinting is an important part of reconnaissance process which is typically used for collecting possible information about a targeted computer system or network. Active and Passive both could be Footprinting. The example of passive footprinting is assessment of a company's website, whereas attempting to gain access to sensitive information through social engineering is an example of active information gathering. Basically footprinting is the beginning step of hacker to get hacked someone because having information about targeted computer system is the main aspect of hacking. If you have an information about individual you wanna hack so you can easily hacked that individual. The basic purpose of information gathering is at least decide what type of attacks will be more suitable for the target. Here are some of the pieces of information to be gathered about a target
during footprinting:

Domain name
Network blocks
Network services and applications
System architecture
Intrusion detection system
Authentication mechanisms
Specific IP addresses
Access control mechanisms
Phone numbers
Contact addresses

Once this information is assemble, it can give a hacker better perception into the organization, where important information is stored, and how it can be accessed.

Footprinting Tools

Footprinting can be done using hacking tools, either applications or websites, which allow the hacker to locate information passively. By using these footprinting tools, a hacker can gain some basic information on, or "footprint," the target. By first footprinting the target, a hacker can eliminate tools that will not work against the target systems or network. For example, if a graphics design firm uses all Macintosh computers, then all hacking software that targets Windows systems can be eliminated. Footprinting not only speeds up the hacking process by eliminating certain tool sets but also minimizes the chance of detection as fewer hacking attempts can be made by using the right tool for the job. Some of the common tools used for footprinting and information gathering are as follows:

Domain name lookup
Whois
NSlookup
Sam Spade

Before we discuss these tools, keep in mind that open source information can also yield a wealth of information about a target, such as phone numbers and addresses. Performing Whois requests, searching domain name system (DNS) tables, and using other lookup web tools are forms of open source footprinting. Most of this information is fairly easy to get and legal to obtain.

Footprinting a Target

Footprinting is part of the preparatory pre-attack phase and involves accumulating data regarding a target's environment and architecture, usually for the purpose of finding ways to intrude into that environment. Footprinting can reveal system vulnerabilities and identify the ease with which they can be exploited. This is the easiest way for hackers to gather information about computer systems and the companies they belong to. The purpose of this preparatory phase is to learn as much as you can about a system, its remote access capabilities, its ports and services, and any specific aspects of its security.

DNS Enumeration

DNS enumeration is the process of locating all the DNS servers and their corresponding records for an organization. A company may have both internal and external DNS servers that can yield information such as usernames, computer names, and IP addresses of potential target systems.

NSlookup and DNSstuff

One powerful tool you should be familiar with is NSlookup (see Figure 2.2). This tool queries DNS servers for record information. It's included in Unix, Linux, and Windows operating systems. Hacking tools such as Sam Spade also include NSlookup tools. Building on the information gathered from Whois, you can use NSlookup to find additional IP addresses for servers and other hosts. Using the authoritative name server information from Whois ( AUTH1.NS.NYI.NET ), you can discover the IP address of the mail server.

Syntax
nslookup www.sitename.com

nslookup www.usociety4.com

Performing DNS Lookup

This search reveals all the alias records for www.google.com and the IP address of the web server. You can even discover all the name servers and associated IP addresses.

Understanding Whois and ARIN Lookups

Whois evolved from the Unix operating system, but it can now be found in many operating systems as well as in hacking toolkits and on the Internet. This tool identifies who has registered domain names used for email or websites. A uniform resource locator (URL), such as www.Microsoft.com , contains the domain name ( Microsoft.com ) and a hostname or alias ( www ).
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) requires registration of domain names to ensure that only a single company uses a specific domain name. The Whois tool queries the registration database to retrieve contact information about the individual or organization that holds a domain registration.

Using Whois

Go to the DNSStuff.com website and scroll down to the free tools at the bottom of the page.
Enter your target company URL in the WHOIS Lookup field and click the WHOIS button.
Examine the results and determine the following:
- Registered address
- Technical and DNS contacts
- Contact email
- Contact phone number
- Expiration date

Visit the company website and see if the contact information from WHOIS matches up to any contact names, addresses, and email addresses listed on the website.

If so, use Google to search on the employee names or email addresses. You can learn the email naming convention used by the organization, and whether there is any information that should not be publicly available.

Syntax
whois sitename.com
whois usociety4.com

Removing Windows 8/8.1 Password With CHNTPW

[Update] If you want to recover Windows 8/8.1 passwords instead of removing them see this tutorial

Cracking Windows 8/8.1 passwords with Mimikatz

So we are back. About a Year ago I wrote a post on how to remove Windows Password using CHNTPW but many readers complained that it was not working on Windows 8. I tried myself on many it worked but once I also got stuck. So I did a little work around. In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to remove Windows 8/8.1 passwords using CHNTPW. Well it's little bit tedious than the older one but believe me it's fun too.

Background:

Let's get started with a little bit background. Windows OSs have a User known as Administrator which is hidden by default. This user is there for security reasons (maybe it's the way around). Most of the users who use Windows are lame, sorry to say that but I'm not talking about you, they don't even know that such an invisible account exists so it is almost everytime without a password. But this Administrator user is a SU (Super User), that means you work wonders once you get access to this account. So our first task will be to make it visible and then we'll access it and using it's power privilages we'll remove password of other accounts (which is not really neccessary cuz you can access any user folder or file using Administrator Account).

Requirements:

1. Physical Access to the Victems computer.
2. A Live Bootable Kali/Backtrack Linux Pendrive or DVD.
(You can downoad Kali Linux here)

Steps:

1. Plug in the Live Bootable Pendrive/DVD into to victim's computer and then boot from it.

2. After accessing kali linux (I'm using Kali Linux) from victim's computer open a terminal.

3. Now we have to mount the drive on which the victim's OS is loaded. In my case it is sda2. So in order to mount that drive I'll type the command:
mount /dev/sda2 /media/temp

this means that I'm mounting the drive in folder /media/temp if you haven't created a temp folder in /media then you must create one by typing these command:
cd /
mkdir /media/temp

4. After mounting the OS we need to access the SAM file and make visible Administrator account using chntpw. It's so simple lemme show you how.
first we'll navigate to /media/temp/Windows/System32/config:
cd /media/temp/Windows/System32/config

now we display the list of users on our victim's computer:
chntpw SAM -l

You'll see an Administrator User there which is disabled. Now we'll enable that:
chntpw SAM -u Administrator

now type 4 and hit return

press 'y' to save changes to SAM file.

OK voila! the hard part is done.

5. Now restart your Computer and take out your Pendrive/DVD from your computer and boot into windows 8 OS. You should be able to see Administrator User on Logon screen now. If not then look for a backward pointing Arrow besides the user Login Picture. Click on that Arrow and you should see an Administrator User. Click on the Administrator Account and wait for a while until windows 8 sets it up.

6. After a while you get Access to the computer and you can access anything. Enjoy :)

7. What you want to remove the password? I don't think it's a stealth mode idea, is it? OK I'll tell you how to do that but It's not a good hacker way of doing.
Open up the command prompt, simple way to do it is:

Press Ctrl + 'x' and then Press 'a' and if prompted click yes.
After that Enter following commands:

net user
(This command will display all users on computer)

net user "User Name" newPassword
(This Command will change the Password of User Name user to newPassword).
OK you're done now logout and enter the new password. It will work for sure.

8. If you want to disable the Administrator Account again then type in command prompt:
net user Administrator /active:no

I tried it on Windows 8/8.1 all versions and it works. Guess what it works on all windows OSs.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Don't forget to share it and yes always read the Disclaimer.

Continue reading

CEH: Gathering Network And Host Information, Types Of Scan

In Hacking the main focus is over gathering the information about victim or victim's machine. Which will help to find out which type of exploit will works according to the given circumstances. Gathering the network and host information means to find out by which network, the which victim's machine is connected and communicating over the network. Moreover, scanning is also performed for gathering information about open and closed ports. After that they'll able to find the vulnerabilities in the target system and try to get access to the system.

Types Of Scan

As a CEH you should know the scan types and uses:

SYN

SYN scan doesn't complete the TCP three way handshake that is why it is known as a half-open scan. An attacker send a SYN packet to the victim machine if SYN/ACK packet is received back to attacker, then it clarify that the port is listening due to the acknowledgment by the victim that it has completed the connection. While if the attacker is received the RST/ACK packet then it assumed that the port is closed or open.

XMAS

XMAS scan works only on target system that has the RFC 793 development of TCP/IP and it doesn't works against any version of windows.
XMAS scan send a packet with by setting up the FIN, URG and PSH flags of the TCP header. The function of this scan is if the port is active there will be no response but if the port is closed the target responds with a RST/ACK packet.

FIN

A FIN scan send a packet by setting up only the FIN flag of the TCP. This scan is similar to XMAS scan. FIN scan receives no response if the port is active while if the port is closed it receives the RST/ACK packet.

NULL

NULL scan is also similar to the XMAS scan. But the only difference is that it sends a packet without setting up the any flag of TCP header. NULL scan receives no response if the port is open but if the port is closed it receives the RST/ACK packet.

IDLE

It is just like spoofing an IP address by sending a SYN packet to the victim's machine to find out which services are available over the system. This scan is completed with the help of another system called as "Zombie" (that is not receiving or transmitting any information).

Related posts

Shellerator - Simple CLI Tool For The Generation Of Bind And Reverse Shells In Multiple Languages

Shellerator is a simple command-line tool aimed to help pentesters quickly generate one-liner reverse/bind shells in multiple languages (Bash, Powershell, Java, Python...). This project is inspired by Print-My-Shell. I just rewrote it and added some options and glitter to it. The lists of reverse and bind shells are not perfect yet. I'll work on this when I have the time to. I'll be happy to review pull requests too :)

Install
The install is pretty simple, just clone this git and install the requirements.

git clone https://github.com/ShutdownRepo/shellerator
pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt

Usage
Usage is dead simple too.

usage: shellerator.py [-h] [-b | -r] [-t TYPE] [-p LPORT] [-i LHOST]

Generate a bind/reverse shell

optional arguments:
  -h, --help              show this help message and exit
  -l, --list            Print all the types of shells shellerator can generate
  -b, --bind-shell        Generate a bind shell (you connect to the target)
  -r, --reverse-shell     Generate a reverse shell (the target connects to you)(Default)

Bind shell options:
  -t TYPE, --type TYPE    Type of the shell to generate (Bash, Powershell, Java...)
  -p LPORT, --port LPORT  Listener Port

Reverse shell options:
  -t TYPE, --type TYPE    Type of the shell to generate (Bash, Powershell, Java...)
  -i LHOST, --ip LHOST    Listener IP address
  -p LPORT, --port LPORT  Listener Port

Without CLI menus
If you already know what type of shell you want to generate and don't have time to select the language in the beautiful CLI menu, you can set it with the appropriate -t (or --type) option.

python3 shellerator.py [-r | -b] -t/--type bash -i/--ip 192.168.56.1 -p/--port 1337

To-Do List

Things to add
Here are some things to add that I have in mind, I'll work on that asap

Add bindshells
Add encrypted shells and separate them from bind/rev ?
Add some kind of option to help user get info on how to improve shell/tty (rlwrap, stty, ConPty (cf. PayloadsAllTheThings))

Sources
Shells mostly come from the following links

Download Shellerator

via KitPloitMore info

Friday, May 8, 2020

OWASP API Security Project Media Coverage

A list of must read articles on OWASP API Security Project:

10/3/19, APISecurity.IO (UMV: 1,510): Issue 51: Gartner Releases Full Report on API Security
10/2/19, ADT Magazine (UMV: 117,500): API Security Project Identifies Top 10 Vulnerabilities
9/26/19, Dark Reading (UMV: 57,800): Why You Need to Think About API Security
9/24/19, The Daily Swig (UMV: 30,500): OWASP Reveals Top 10 Security Threats Facing API Ecosystem
9/20/19, Security Boulevard (UMV: 29,100): New OWASP List Highlights API Security Holes
9/13/19, Security Boulevard (UMV: 29,100): Why You Need to Be Thinking About API Security
9/13/19, CyberWire (UMV: 49,380): Daily Briefing: OWASP API Security Project
9/12/19, Dark Reading (UMV: 57,800): APIs Get Their Own Top 10 Security list

Also included in Dark Reading's weekly newsletter on 9/19/19

Printer Security

Printers belong arguably to the most common devices we use. They are available in every household, office, company, governmental, medical, or education institution.

From a security point of view, these machines are quite interesting since they are located in internal networks and have direct access to sensitive information like confidential reports, contracts or patient recipes.

TL;DR: In this blog post we give an overview of attack scenarios based on network printers, and show the possibilities of an attacker who has access to a vulnerable printer. We present our evaluation of 20 different printer models and show that each of these is vulnerable to multiple attacks. We release an open-source tool that supported our analysis: PRinter Exploitation Toolkit (PRET) https://github.com/RUB-NDS/PRET

Full results are available in the master thesis of Jens Müller and our paper.

Furthermore, we have set up a wiki (http://hacking-printers.net/) to share knowledge on printer (in)security.
The highlights of the entire survey will be presented by Jens Müller for the first time at RuhrSec in Bochum.

Background

There are many cool protocols and languages you can use to control your printer or your print jobs. We assume you have never heard of at least half of them. An overview is depicted in the following figure and described below.

Device control

This set of languages is used to control the printer device. With a device control language it is possible to retrieve the printer name or status. One of the most common languages is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP is a UDP based protocol designed to manage various network components beyond printers as well, e.g. routers and servers.

Printing channel

The most common network printing protocols supported by printer devices are the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), Line Printer Daemon (LPD), Server Message Block (SMB), and raw port 9100 printing. Each protocol has specific features like print job queue management or accounting. In our work, we used these protocols to transport malicious documents to the printers.

Job control language

This is where it gets very interesting (for our attacks). A job control language manages printer settings like output trays or paper size. A de-facto standard for print job control is PJL. From a security perspective it is very useful that PJL is not limited to the current print job as some settings can be made permanent. It can further be used to change the printer's display or read/write files on the device.

Page description language

A page description language specifies the appearance of the actual document. One of the most common 'standard' page description languages is PostScript. While PostScript has lost popularity in desktop publishing and as a document exchange format (we use PDF now), it is still the preferred page description language for laser printers. PostScript is a stack-based, Turing-complete programming language consisting of about 400 instructions/operators. As a security aware researcher you probable know that some of them could be useful. Technically spoken, access to a PostScript interpreter can already be classified as code execution.

Attacks

Even though printers are an important attack target, security threats and scenarios for printers are discussed in very few research papers or technical reports. Our first step was therefore to perform a comprehensive analysis of all reported and published attacks in CVEs and security blogs. We then used this summary to systematize the known issues, to develop new attacks and to find a generic approach to apply them to different printers. We estimated that the best targets are the PostScript and PJL interpreters processing the actual print jobs since they can be exploited by a remote attacker with only the ability to 'print' documents, independent of the printing channel supported by the device.

We put the printer attacks into four categories.

Denial-of-service (DoS)

Executing a DoS attack is as simple as sending these two lines of PostScript code to the printer which lead to the execution of an infinite loop:

Denial-of-service%!
{} loop

Other attacks include:

Offline mode. The PJL standard defines the OPMSG command which 'prompts the printer to display a specified message and go offline'.
Physical damage. By continuously setting the long-term values for PJL variables, it is possible to physically destroy the printer's NVRAM which only survives a limited number of write cycles.
Showpage redefinition. The PostScript 'showpage' operator is used in every document to print the page. An attacker can simply redefine this operator to do nothing.

Protection Bypass

Resetting a printer device to factory defaults is the best method to bypass protection mechanisms. This task is trivial for an attacker with local access to the printer, since all tested devices have documented procedures to perform a cold reset by pressing certain key combinations.
However, a factory reset can be performed also by a remote attacker, for example using SNMP if the device complies with RFC1759 (Printer MIB):

Protection Bypass# snmpset -v1 -c public [printer] 1.3.6.1.2.1.43.5.1.1.3.1 i 6

Other languages like HP's PML, Kyocera's PRESCRIBE or even PostScript offer similar functionalities.

Furthermore, our work shows techniques to bypass print job accounting on popular print servers like CUPS or LPRng.

Print Job Manipulation

Some page description languages allow permanent modifications of themselves which leads to interesting attacks, like manipulating other users' print jobs. For example, it is possible to overlay arbitrary graphics on all further documents to be printed or even to replace text in them by redefining the 'showpage' and 'show' PostScript operators.

Information Disclosure

Printing over port 9100 provides a bidirectional channel, which can be used to leak sensitive information. For example, Brother based printers have a documented feature to read from or write to a certain NVRAM address using PJL:

Information Disclosure@PJL RNVRAM ADDRESS = X

Our prototype implementation simply increments this value to dump the whole NVRAM, which contains passwords for the printer itself but also for user-defined POP3/SMTP as well as for FTP and Active Directory profiles. This way an attacker can escalate her way into a network, using the printer device as a starting point.
Other attacks include:

File system access. Both, the standards for PostScript and PJL specify functionality to access the printers file system. As it seems, some manufacturers have not limited this feature to a certain directory, which leads to the disclosure of sensitive information like passwords.
Print job capture. If PostScript is used as a printer driver, printed documents can be captured. This is made possible by two interesting features of the PostScript language: First, permanently redefining operators allows an attacker to 'hook' into other users' print jobs and secondly, PostScript's capability to read its own code as data allows to easily store documents instead of executing them.

Credential disclosure. PJL passwords, if set, can easily retrieved through brute-force attacks due to their limited key space (1..65535). PostScript passwords, on the other hand, can be cracked extremely fast (up to 100,000 password verifications per second) thanks to the performant PostScript interpreters.

PRET

To automate the introduced attacks, we wrote a prototype software entitled PRET. The main idea of PRET is to facilitate the communication between the end-user and the printer. Thus, by entering a UNIX-like command PRET translates it to PostScript or PJL, sends it to the printer, and evaluates the result. For example, PRET converts a UNIX command ls to the following PJL request:

Information Disclosure@PJL FSDIRLIST NAME="0:\" ENTRY=1 COUNT=65535

It then collects the printer output and translates it to a user friendly output.

PRET implements the following list of commands for file system access on a printer device:

Evaluation

As a highly motivated security researcher with a deep understanding of systematic analysis, you would probably obtain a list of about 20 - 30 well-used printers from the most important manufacturers, and perform an extensive security analysis using these printers.
However, this was not our case. To overcome the financial obstacles, we collected printers from various university chairs and facilities. While our actual goal was to assemble a pool of printers containing at least one model for each of the top ten manufacturers, we practically took what we could get. The result is depicted in the following figure:

The assembled devices were not brand-new anymore and some of them were not even completely functional. Three printers had physically broken printing functionality so it was not possible to evaluate all the presented attacks. Nevertheless, these devices represent a good mix of printers used in a typical university or office environment.

Before performing the attacks, we of course installed the newest firmware on each of the devices. The results of our evaluation show that we could find multiple attacks against each printer. For example, simple DoS attacks with malicious PostScript files containing infinite loops are applicable to each printer. Only the HP LaserJet M2727nf had a watchdog mechanism and restarted itself after about ten minutes. Physical damage could be caused to about half of the tested device within 24 hours of NVRAM stressing. For a majority of devices, print jobs could be manipulated or captured.

PostScript, PJL and PML based attacks can even be exploited by a web attacker using advanced cross-site printing techniques. In the scope of our research, we discovered a novel approach – 'CORS spoofing' – to leak information like captured print jobs from a printer device given only a victim's browser as carrier.
A proof-of-concept implementation demonstrating that advanced cross-site printing attacks are practical and a real-world threat to companies and institutions is available at http://hacking-printers.net/xsp/.

Our next post will be on adapting PostScript based attacks to websites.

Authors of this Post

Jens Müller
Juraj Somorovsky

Vladislav Mladenov