Category Security

In case you haven’t noticed. I’ve gone HTTPS with a green lock now 🙂

I also rate a “A” with Qualys’s SSL lab test. Check it here.

There is no more excuse not to be encrypting your traffic using TLS. A service like letsencrypt.org makes it so easy to switch to https you can finish the whole process in few mints (if not seconds!) using their certbot tool.
A quick guide to certbot can be found on youtube. If it doesn’t work by default, you will need to go the manual way. I might write a guide here when I have the time for it.

Keep encrypting!

As part of any post exploitation in a security auditing or testing engagement you will want to gather as much info as you want about the victim to be able to target your next victim in the chain.

Having said that sometimes you stumble upon strange files, encrypted data, and network traffic that you don’t know what to do with it. One of these was an .sdf file related to hmailserver. The last is an open source mail server, you can read more about it here.

When gaining access to this server you will want to read this file:

A sample output would look something like this:

While I was coding the ‘Twitter Short Handles Finder‘ I needed an efficient Alpha-Numeric Strings generator in Python. I coded this from scratch:

I was astonished by the fact that both Ooredoo and Vodafone the only telecom operators in Qatar still do not use HTTPS by default leaving user credentials to be easy targets for hackers.

To make a change I just pushed a Github commit to the famous HTTPS Everywhere Browsers Extension for both operators websites:

• Ooredoo.qa.xml
• Vodafone.qa.xml

You can also contribute to this project by adding rules and tweak the code on Github.

Intro:
Hacking is not only for computer, software, or websites. Any device can be hacked. I lately started having interests in Software Defined Radio where I was able to ‘sniff’ data of signals around me. One particularly interesting signal was the short distances devices. These include:

• Car remotes system. Also called: Remote Keyless System
• Garage Remotes
• Other home equipment remotes switches.

Some of these systems are known to have security flaws in them. Some have no security mechanisms. It is worth reading how these stuff work before going deeper into hacking them.

Requirements:

• Programming skills in: C++ or Java or Python.
• A micro-conotroller (Teensy, Aurdino) Raspberry Pi is ok too.
• 315Mhz / 430Mhz Transceiver. I bough this one > XD-RD-5V.

Connections:

to-be-updated

Coding:
to-...

I have previously demonstrated how to protect wp-admin and wp-login files in word-press website.
I wanted to do more. Something like: Attacking those attackers.

What Crashes Browsers?
What crashes applications is what hackers call: Buffer Overflow Exploit. Hackers use them to take control of applications/browsers to gain full system access later on. More about buffer-overflows here.
We are not interested to take control of the attacker’s system; Although that will be very ‘cool’ – maybe the next stage? 😉
We are more interested to stop them i.e: Crash their browsers, fuzzing and brute-force tools.

Results.
Amazingly I was able to reduce attacks from 4000~ to around 70 only!

What is happening behind the scenes?

Inspiration
I simply wanted to create my own -fast- NTLM hash cracker because the other ones online are ether dead, not maintained, obsolete, or the worst one: a rip off.
Of course the greatest inspiration was this:

Intro
NTLM is the hash mechanism used in Windows. It’s usually what a hacker want to retrieve as soon as he/she gets into the system.
Cracking NTLM hashes can also help normal users or administrators to retrieve a password without having to reset it.
Please refer to

Intro
I was lately surprised by my new ‘Ubuntu Server’ computer connecting back to a strange IP address: 91.189.92.11 on port 443! I immediately started investigating the case and did a whois lookup on the IP address to discover that the IP points to this domain productsearch.ubuntu.com – a page that will display a 403 Forbidden Error.

What is productsearch.ubuntu.com?
So apparently according to this website: If you’re an Ubuntu user and you’re using the default settings, each time you start typing in Dash (to open an application or search for a file on your computer), your search terms get sent to a variety of third parties, some of which advertise to you. Ubuntu should protect user privacy by default. Since it doesn’t, you can use the code to the left to disable the parts of Ubuntu which are invasive to your privacy.

You can also read more about Ubuntu 3rd parties: http://www.ubuntu.com/privacy-policy/third-parties

You’ve seen before how I got targeted by thousands of brute force attempts and how I mitigated the attacks earlier in this post; however, I wanted to do something better and more efficient. A filter at the firewall to block all these attempts from even establishing a basic TCP connection with the HTTP server.

The Problem
One major problem is that these attempts were not coming from a single IP address. Attackers will use TOR to hide themselves and to have different IPs to over-come the first obstacles that is: blocking the attacker’s source IP address.

Lately this blog has been targeted by many attackers varying from brute force attacks to D-DOS. Although I couldn’t do much about DDOS (servers provider takes care of that), I was able to mitigate the brute forcing attacks on my wordpress. I’ve been using this trick for a while and it keeps bad guys away from my wp sensitive pages.

First let me share with you a snippet from my logs. (I know you love these 😛 )

Yep that is a 4167 attempts to penetrate wp-login.php form. Fortunately I know this was coming so after installation I simply created a filter using Apache .htaccess to filter out all connection to wp-login.php and wp-admin/ except the one coming from my IP address!