Category Security

If you follow me on Twitter @xxByte you must have seen the tweets about scaning a large scope of IPs and how did I approach that.

The goal: To scan all TCP ports (0-65536) of ~800 IPs spread across Europe and detect any low hanging fruits using automated tools or manual assessment in the most efficient way with the least resources needed.

The approach:

Let’s first do some math. Scanning 65536 TCP ports on 800 IPs means:
65536 x 800 = 52428800. That’s 52428800 SYN packet out and waiting for a SYN ACK reply packets in total.

To have the rest of the project requirements we need to scan each open port with deeper script scan and version detection scan, which means even more packets.

At such scale we cannot afford to script scan blindly all TCP ports...

If you work in security and don’t encrypt your drives, maybe you should consider something else 😉

I recently was trying to make peace with Windows 10 co-living with Kali 2019 and it was really painful process. Each time I got one side working the other side was complaining.

Eventually it boils down to this:

1- Install Windows 10 fully (including setting up a user, and password, etc.) Failign to do so will corupt the encrypted partition of kali

2- Install Kali until you reach the step to partition the disk. Choose “Manual”

3- now create 3 partitions:
– one is for /boot (~256mb)
– one for swap area (8-10gb)
– the rest is for the root mount /

4- now go to “Encrypt partition” and click “Yes” for writing the current partitions

5- now choose wherever you have swap and root...

Getting snort to work under Windows is a pain in the ass, so I wrote a quick guide on how I got it working and shared some config files which will save you hours of work.

All can be accessed under my github page: https://github.com/AddaxSoft/snort-windows/

Enjoy

the reason why I’m writing this post is due to the lack of reviews I found online about AWE course offered by offensive security. If you look up for OSCP or OSCE they are plenty but not so much for OSEE/AWE. If there is something I learned from hacking cons is that you can contribute to the infosec world by creating any kind of helpful material for other people (refer to the hacker manifesto); hence I decided to contribute to the infosec world in my own way too.

a little background:
To be honest it took me quite some energy and time to even get into this course due to its high demand and lack of availability. Fast forward I was sitting with almost other 30 students in Blackhat 2018 fronted by the offsec staff to teach us some exploitation black magic; and oh boy was it black magic…

the 4...

1. create an iptables.rules file in /etc/

If you missed this one; please head to this link, and try it yourself before going to the solution.

I’m a great believer in automation; as one of my interviewers said to me once: If we do it twice; we automate it.
I adopted this style throughout my work; hence I wanted to show how would I upgrade/update the WordPress core and plugins using cron to keep all my blogs and sites secure and up to date with security patches.

1- get & install wp-cli (how/where)
2- write a script to use wp-cli to update WordPress [see attached code]

Recently I was working on one of the vulnhub vulnerable boxes and once I finally got a reverse shell it was a restricted one. What a bummer!
In this post I want to document how did I breakout of it in a simple way.

There many ways to break out of the restricted shell (aka /bin/rbash). One simple way for example is to use perl or python to call /bin/sh:

Perl/Python aren’t the only ways. You can STILL breakout if vim, vi, awk, gdb, more, less, etc. are allowed!

• check out this slide for full list and explanation.
• This SANS article is also detailed and full of examples

What I want to add here is a special case of a restricted bash, that’s when the rbash is called with an output redirection.
So might be able to use the earlier tricks to breakout but it’s no good as all the output is being r...

Note: This post is part of the “20p Everyday” project.

I was fortunate enough to attend one of the best information security schools in the world. Yes that’s Royal Holloway University of London after a long academic journey, ups and downs of course..
I was even more fortunate to have the author of this book, Keith Martin, as one of my professor back in RHUL.
He taught me “Crypto 1”. I enjoyed his lecture very much. It was one of the most interesting lecture at times.

Personally I had some ideas about cryptology (the correct term btw.) since my computer security course I took with Fadi Aloul at the American University of Sharjah (AUS). I had an idea about
what is a public key what is a private key, and what’s PGP (pretty good privacy), thanks to Taha Landolsi and his course “Networks II” at...

We mentioned before how did we switch to SSL since 2017.

I want to add here how to set HSTS to prevent a wellknown SSL attack called SSL-Strip.

• What is SSL Strip?

You can watch the full talk to understand in details how this works here.
Basically the attacker is somehow (we don’t care how) a MITM setting in between the victim and the authentic server.
The attacker in this case can do a downgrade attack on SSL and transfer all HTTPs connection to the normal plain text HTTP connections.
Now the attack can simply sniff all data being communicated between the victim and the server.
The attacker is also free now to change the data and execute other attacks such as injecting malware into the traffic.

• What is HSTS

HSTS or HTTP Strict Transport Security allows web servers to declare that web b...