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Sunday, June 7, 2020

Kali Linux VM Installation And Setup

Preface

From time to time I realize that certain tasks that are trivial for me are not necessarily easy for others, especially if they are just getting started with IT security stuff.

As I am going to be a Facilitator at SANS Munich 2015 on SEC 401, plus we have a few people at work who are just dipping their toe into the wonderful world of Kali Linux, it seemed like a good opportunity to make a short getting started / installation guide on the Kali VMWare VMs that you can download and quickly get started.

On top of that, when I check the statistics of the blog, I always see that the most popular posts are the detailed howtos and tutorials and I assume that it is because there is a need for this kind of posts too, so here it goes! :)

Step -1: Check in your BIOS/UEFI if virtualization is enabled

We are going to use virtualization, so it would be nice to enable it, right?

In BIOS/UEFI menus this is somewhere around "Security" and/or "Virtualization" and it is something like "Intel (R) Virtualization Technology" and "Intel (R) VT-d Feature" that needs to be set to "Enabled".

Step 0: Install VMWare Player or VMWare Workstation

The Kali Linux VMs are VMWare-based, so you need to install VMWare Player (free), VMWare Workstation (paid) or VMWare Fusion (paid, for OS-X).

The more desirable choice is to use VMWare Workstation or VMWare Fusion, as they have a Snapshot feature, while with VMWare Player, you are forced to take a full copy in order to have a sort of rollback feature.

Step 1: Download Kali VM

We need to download the Kali VMs from the "Custom Kali Images" download site, where you can find a 64 bit (amd64) and a 32 bit PAE (i686) too.

There are also Torrent files for the images and based on experience, using Torrent is much more faster and reliable than the HTTP download, so if you can, use that!

Once you have downloaded the VMs, do not forget to check their SHA1 hash!!! On Linux, you can simply use the sha1sum command at a terminal. For Windows, you can use something like the MD5 & SHA Checksum Utility.

Step 2: Change Kali VM default root password

The Kali VM comes with a preset root password, which is "toor" (without the quotes), therefore, it has to be changed.

Here is how you do it:

root@kali:~# passwd
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

Step 3: Change Kali VM default SSH keys

The Kali VM also comes with SSH preinstalled, so we need to change the SSH keys to avoid SSH MiTM attacks.

Here is how you do it:

root@kali:~# cd /etc/ssh/
root@kali:/etc/ssh# mkdir default_kali_keys
root@kali:/etc/ssh# mv ssh_host_* default_kali_keys/
root@kali:/etc/ssh# dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server
Creating SSH2 RSA key; this may take some time ...
Creating SSH2 DSA key; this may take some time ...
Creating SSH2 ECDSA key; this may take some time ...
insserv: warning: current start runlevel(s) (empty) of script `ssh' overrides LSB defaults (2 3 4 5).
insserv: warning: current stop runlevel(s) (2 3 4 5) of script `ssh' overrides LSB defaults (empty).

Now we can check if the keys are really changed:

root@kali:/etc/ssh# md5sum /etc/ssh/*key*
md5sum: /etc/ssh/default_kali_keys: Is a directory
6abe210732068fa7ca95854c3078dba5  /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
1b5f3c1a1b5c48cc3cce31b116e8b6f8  /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub
8f0f60855e5ab8cac8103d64faab090f  /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key
aace49ae9236815c9a1672f8ecb2b1e2  /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub
cf861a9f743fb4584ab246024465ddf1  /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
d5d65d8ad023a6cb1418ae05007bc6d3  /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
root@kali:/etc/ssh# md5sum /etc/ssh/default_kali_keys/*key*
c8d5b82320a4ddde59d0e2b6d9aad42a  /etc/ssh/default_kali_keys/ssh_host_dsa_key
6b12ddecd463677cde8097e23d0f219a  /etc/ssh/default_kali_keys/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub
fecf056571a3dfbf3635fc2c50bf23c5  /etc/ssh/default_kali_keys/ssh_host_ecdsa_key
e44b7c50635de42e89b3297414f5047d  /etc/ssh/default_kali_keys/ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub
e9e0267484e020878e00a9360b77d845  /etc/ssh/default_kali_keys/ssh_host_rsa_key
ceee93d7bbc9f9b9706e18f23d4e81f1  /etc/ssh/default_kali_keys/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub

See http://www.blackmoreops.com/2014/06/19/kali-linux-remote-ssh/ for more info on this.

Step 4: Update Kali VM

Next you need to update your Kali VM so that everything is patched.

Here is how you do it:

root@kali:~# apt-get update
Get 1 http://http.kali.org kali Release.gpg [836 B]               
Get:2 http://security.kali.org kali/updates Release.gpg [836 B]
********************************* SNIP *********************************
Fetched 16.7 MB in 14s (1,190 kB/s)                                                                                                                                                    
Reading package lists... Done
root@kali:~# apt-get upgrade
eading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
********************************* SNIP *********************************
The following packages will be upgraded:
********************************* SNIP *********************************
241 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 16 not upgraded.
Need to get 740 MB of archives.
After this operation, 130 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
Get:1 http://security.kali.org/kali-security/ kali/updates/main libc6-i386 amd64 2.13-38+deb7u7 [4,044 kB]
Get:2 http://http.kali.org/kali/ kali/main base-files amd64 1:1.1.0 [77.5 kB]       
********************************* SNIP *********************************
root@kali:~#

Step 5: Create a Snapshot/Copy the VM

Once you are done with all the above, you can make a Snapshot in case of VMWare Workstation or copy the files of the VM in case of VMWare Player, so that you can roll back to this clean stat in case you misconfigure something.

Hope this was helpful. Happy hacking!

Linux Command Line Hackery Series - Part 4

Welcome back to Linux Command Line Hackery, hope you have enjoyed this series so far. Today we are going to learn new Linux commands and get comfortable with reading text files on Linux.

Suppose that you wanted to view your /etc/passwd file. How will you do that? From what we have learned so far what you'll do is type:

cat /etc/passwd

And there you go, but really did you see all the output in one terminal? No, you just ended up with last few lines and you'll have to cheat (i,e use graphical scroll bar) in order to see all the contents of /etc/passwd file. So is there a command line tool in linux with which we can see all the contents of a file easily without cheating? Yes, there are actually a few of them and in this article we'll look at some common ones.

Command: more
Syntax: more [options] file...
Function: more is a filter for paging through text one screenful at a time. With more we can parse a file one terminal at a time or line by line. We can also go backward and forward a number of lines using more.

So if we're to use more on /etc/passwd file how will we do that? We'll simply type

more /etc/passwd

now we'll get a screenful output of the file and have a prompt at the bottom of terminal. In order to move forward one line at a time press <Enter Key>. Using enter we can scroll through the file one line at a time. If you want to move one screen at a time, you can press <Space Key> to move one screen at a time. There are more functions of more program, you can know about them by pressing <h key>. To exit out of more program simply type <q key> and you'll get out of more program.

Command: less
Syntax: less [options] file...
Function: less is similar to more but less has more functionality than more. less is particularly useful when reading large files as less does not have to read the entire input file before starting, so it starts up quickly than many other editors.

less command is based on more so what you've done above with more can be done with less as well. Try it out yourself.

Command: head
Syntax: head [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Function: head command prints the head or first part of a file. By default head prints out first 10 lines of a file. If more than one file is specified, head prints first 10 lines of all files as a default behavior.

If we want to see only first 10 lines of /etc/passwd we can type:

head /etc/passwd

We can also specify to head how many lines we want to view by using the -n flag. Suppose you want to see first 15 lines of /etc/passwd file you've to type:

head -n 15 /etc/passwd

Ok you can view the first lines of a file what about last lines, is there a tool for that also? Exactly that's what our next command will be about.

Command: tail
Syntax: tail [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Function: tail is opposite of head. It prints the last 10 lines of a file by default. And if more than one file is specified, tail prints last 10 lines of all files by default.

To view last 10 lines of /etc/passwd file you'll type:

tail /etc/passwd

and as is the case with head -n flag can be used to specify the number of lines

tail -n 15 /etc/passwd

Now one more thing that we're going to learn today is grep.

Command: grep
Syntax: grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...]
Function: grep is used to search a file for lines matching the pattern specified in the command.

A PATTERN can simply be a word like "hello" or it can be a regular expression (in geek speak regex). If you aren't familiar with regex, it's ok we'll not dive into that it's a very big topic but if you want to learn about it I'll add a link at the end of this article that will help you get started with regex.

Now back to grep say we want to find a line in /etc/passwd file which contains my user if we'll simply type:

grep myusername /etc/passwd

Wohoo! It gives out just that data that we're looking for. Remember here myusername is your username.
One cool flag of grep is -v which is used to look in file for every line except the line containing the PATTERN specified after -v [it's lowercase v].

Take your time practicing with these commands especially grep and more. We'll learn a lot more about grep in other upcoming articles.

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
http://www.regular-expressions.info/
Awesome website to learn Regular expressions - http://www.regexr.com/

Saturday, June 6, 2020

Spykey - FUD Win32 Keylogger And Reverse Shell

Tricks To Bypass Device Control Protection Solutions

Preface

As I wrote in a previous blog post, I had an engagement last year where my task was to exfiltrate data from a workstation on some sort of storage media. The twist in that task was Lumension Sanctuary Device Control, and the version was 4.3.2, but I am not sure how newer version work and this seems to be a more general problem with device control solution, for example with Symantec products.

But what is a device control solution? In short, they audit I/O device use and block the attempts to use unauthorized devices. This includes hardware such as USB, PS/2, FireWire, CD/DVD so basically every I/O port of a computer. In my opinion, these are pretty good things and they offer a better looking solution than de-soldering the I/O ports from the motherboards or hot-gluing them, but on the other hand, they can be bypassed.

Bypass

OK, so what is the problem? Well the way these device control solutions work is that they load a few kernel drivers to monitor the physical ports of the machine. However... when you boot up the protected computer in safe mode, depending on the device control solution software, some of these drivers are not loaded (or if you are lucky, none of those modules will be loaded...) and this opens up the possibility to exfiltrate data.

In theory, if you have admin (SYSTEM maybe?) privileges, you might as well try to unload the kernel drivers. Just do not forget, that these device control solutions also have a watchdog process, that checks the driver and automatically loads it back if it is unloaded, so look for that process and stop or suspend it first.

In my case with the Lumension Sanctuary Device Control, I have found that when I boot the Workstation protected by the device control software in Safe Mode where, software's key logger protection module is not running... so I was still unable to use a USB stick, or a storage media, but I could plug in a keyboard for example...hmmm :)

As some of you probably already figured it out, now it is possible to use a pre-programmed USB HID, for example a Teensy! : ) I know about three different project, that uses this trick like these two mentioned in a Hackaday post, or this one. Unfortunately, the site ob-security.info no longer seems to be available (well, at least it is no longer related to infosec :D ), but you can still find the blog post and the files with the Wayback Machine.

For the hardware part, the wiring of the Teensy and the SD card adaptor is the same as I showed in the post on Making a USB flash drive HW Trojan or in the Binary deployment with VBScript, PowerShell or .Net csc.exe compiler post, so I will not copy it here again.

I have to note here that there are other ways to bypass these device control solutions, like the method what Dr. Phil Polstra did with the USB Impersonator, which is basically looks for an authorized device VID/PID and then impersonates that devices with the VID/PID.

Mitigation

Most probably, you will not need safe mode for the users, so you can just disable it... I mean, it is not that easy, but luckily there is a great blog post on how to do that. BTW, the first page of the post is for Windows XP, but you are not using XP anymore, aren't you? ;)

Alternatively, as I mentioned at the beginning, you might as well use some physical countermeasure (de-soldering/hot-gluing ports). That shit is ugly, but it kinda works.

Conclusion

Next time you will face a device control solution, try out these tricks, maybe they will work, and if they do, well, that's a lot of fun. :)

But don't get me wrong, these device control solutions and similar countermeasures are a good thing and you should use something like this! I know that they make doing business a bit harder as you are not able to plugin whatever USB stick you want, but if you buy a pile of hardware encrypted flash drives, and only allow those to be plugged in, you are doing it right ;)

Related links

How To Crack A Password

What is Password Cracking?

Password cracking is the process of attempting to gain Unauthorized access to restricted systems using common passwords or algorithms that guess passwords. In other words, it's an art of obtaining the correct password that gives access to a system protected by an authentication method.

Password cracking employs a number of techniques to achieve its goals. The cracking process can involve either comparing stored passwords against word list or use algorithms to generate passwords that match

In this Tutorial, we will introduce you to the common password cracking techniques and the countermeasures you can implement to protect systems against such attacks.

Topics covered in this tutorial

What is password strength?

Password strength is the measure of a password's efficiency to resist password cracking attacks. The strength of a password is determined by;

Length: the number of characters the password contains.
Complexity: does it use a combination of letters, numbers, and symbol?
Unpredictability: is it something that can be guessed easily by an attacker?

Let's now look at a practical example. We will use three passwords namely

1. password

2. password1

3. #password1$

For this example, we will use the password strength indicator of Cpanel when creating passwords. The images below show the password strengths of each of the above-listed passwords.

Note: the password used is password the strength is 1, and it's very weak.

Note: the password used is password1 the strength is 28, and it's still weak.

Note: The password used is #password1$ the strength is 60 and it's strong.

The higher the strength number, better the password.

Let's suppose that we have to store our above passwords using md5 encryption. We will use an online md5 hash generator to convert our passwords into md5 hashes.

The table below shows the password hashes

Password	MD5 Hash	Cpanel Strength Indicator
password	5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99	1
password1	7c6a180b36896a0a8c02787eeafb0e4c	28
#password1$	29e08fb7103c327d68327f23d8d9256c	60

We will now use http://www.md5this.com/ to crack the above hashes. The images below show the password cracking results for the above passwords.

As you can see from the above results, we managed to crack the first and second passwords that had lower strength numbers. We didn't manage to crack the third password which was longer, complex and unpredictable. It had a higher strength number.

Password cracking techniques

There are a number of techniques that can be used to crack passwords. We will describe the most commonly used ones below;

Dictionary attack– This method involves the use of a wordlist to compare against user passwords.
Brute force attack– This method is similar to the dictionary attack. Brute force attacks use algorithms that combine alpha-numeric characters and symbols to come up with passwords for the attack. For example, a password of the value "password" can also be tried as p@$$word using the brute force attack.
Rainbow table attack– This method uses pre-computed hashes. Let's assume that we have a database which stores passwords as md5 hashes. We can create another database that has md5 hashes of commonly used passwords. We can then compare the password hash we have against the stored hashes in the database. If a match is found, then we have the password.
Guess– As the name suggests, this method involves guessing. Passwords such as qwerty, password, admin, etc. are commonly used or set as default passwords. If they have not been changed or if the user is careless when selecting passwords, then they can be easily compromised.
Spidering– Most organizations use passwords that contain company information. This information can be found on company websites, social media such as facebook, twitter, etc. Spidering gathers information from these sources to come up with word lists. The word list is then used to perform dictionary and brute force attacks.

Spidering sample dictionary attack wordlist

1976 <founder birth year>

smith jones <founder name>

acme <company name/initials>

built|to|last <words in company vision/mission>

golfing|chess|soccer <founders hobbies

Password cracking tool

These are software programs that are used to crack user passwords. We already looked at a similar tool in the above example on password strengths. The website www.md5this.com uses a rainbow table to crack passwords. We will now look at some of the commonly used tools

John the Ripper

John the Ripper uses the command prompt to crack passwords. This makes it suitable for advanced users who are comfortable working with commands. It uses to wordlist to crack passwords. The program is free, but the word list has to be bought. It has free alternative word lists that you can use. Visit the product website http://www.openwall.com/john/ for more information and how to use it.

Cain & Abel

Cain & Abel runs on windows. It is used to recover passwords for user accounts, recovery of Microsoft Access passwords; networking sniffing, etc. Unlike John the Ripper, Cain & Abel uses a graphic user interface. It is very common among newbies and script kiddies because of its simplicity of use. Visit the product website http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Decrypting-Decoding/Cain-and-Abel.shtml for more information and how to use it.

Ophcrack

Ophcrack is a cross-platform Windows password cracker that uses rainbow tables to crack passwords. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS. It also has a module for brute force attacks among other features. Visit the product website http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/ for more information and how to use it.

Password Cracking Counter Measures

An organization can use the following methods to reduce the chances of the passwords been cracked
Avoid short and easily predicable passwords
Avoid using passwords with predictable patterns such as 11552266.
Passwords stored in the database must always be encrypted. For md5 encryptions, its better to salt the password hashes before storing them. Salting involves adding some word to the provided password before creating the hash.
Most registration systems have password strength indicators, organizations must adopt policies that favor high password strength numbers.

Hacking Activity: Hack Now!

In this practical scenario, we are going to crack Windows account with a simple password. Windows uses NTLM hashes to encrypt passwords. We will use the NTLM cracker tool in Cain and Abel to do that.

Cain and Abel cracker can be used to crack passwords using;

Dictionary attack
Brute force
Cryptanalysis

We will use the dictionary attack in this example. You will need to download the dictionary attack wordlist here 10k-Most-Common.zip

For this demonstration, we have created an account called Accounts with the password qwerty on Windows 7.

Password cracking steps

Open Cain and Abel, you will get the following main screen

Make sure the cracker tab is selected as shown above
Click on the Add button on the toolbar.

The following dialog window will appear

The local user accounts will be displayed as follows. Note the results shown will be of the user accounts on your local machine.

Right click on the account you want to crack. For this tutorial, we will use Accounts as the user account.

The following screen will appear

Right click on the dictionary section and select Add to list menu as shown above
Browse to the 10k most common.txt file that you just downloaded

Click on start button
If the user used a simple password like qwerty, then you should be able to get the following results.

Note: the time taken to crack the password depends on the password strength, complexity and processing power of your machine.
If the password is not cracked using a dictionary attack, you can try brute force or cryptanalysis attacks.

Summary

Password cracking is the art of recovering stored or transmitted passwords.
Password strength is determined by the length, complexity, and unpredictability of a password value.
Common password techniques include dictionary attacks, brute force, rainbow tables, spidering and cracking.
Password cracking tools simplify the process of cracking passwords.

@EVERYTHING NT

Friday, June 5, 2020

Workshop And Presentation Slides And Materials

All of our previous workshop and presentation slides and materials are available in one location, from Google Drive.

From now on, we are only going to keep the latest-greatest version of each talk/workshop and announce changes on Twitter.

More info

Top Linux Commands Related To Hardware With Descriptive Definitions

Commands in Linux are just the keys to explore and close the Linux. As you can do things manually by simple clicking over the programs just like windows to open an applications. But if you don't have any idea about commands of Linux and definitely you also don't know about the Linux terminal. You cannot explore Linux deeply. Because terminal is the brain of the Linux and you can do everything by using Linux terminal in any Linux distribution. So, if you wanna work over the Linux distro then you should know about the commands as well. In this blog you will exactly get the content about Linux hardware commands which are related to CPU and memory processes.

dmesg

The dmesg command is used in Linux distribution for the sake of detecting hardware and boot messages in the Linux system.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

The cat command is basically used to read something over the terminal like cat index.py will display all the content which exist in index.py over the terminal. So cat /proc/cpuinfo will display the model of the CPU over the terminal.

cat /proc/meminfo

This command is similar to the above command but the only difference is that this command shows the information of hardware memory over the terminal. Because it will open the memory info file over the terminal.

cat /proc/interrupts

This command is also similar to the above command but there is the difference of one thing that this command will display lists the number of interrupts per CPU per input output device.

lshw

This command is used in Linux operating system to displays information on hardware configuration of the system in Linux.

lsblk

The "lsblk" command is used in Linux operating system to displays block device related information in the Linux operating system.

dmidecode

The "dmidecode" command is used in Linux distributions to display the information about hardware from the BIOS.

hdparm -i /dev/sda

The hdparm command basically used to display the information about the disks available in the system. If you wanna know the information about the "sda" disk so just type "hdparm -i /dev/sda" and if you wanna know the information about "sdb" so just type "hdparm -i /dev/sdb".

hdparm -tT

The "hdparm" command is used for displaying the information about disks as we discussed in above command. If you wanna do a read speed test on the disk sda or sdb just type the command "hdparm -tT /dev/sda".

badblocks -s /dev/sda

This command is used in linux to display test operations for unreadable blocks on disk sda. If the command is like "badblocks -s /dev/sdb" it will display test operations for unreadable blocks on disk sdb.Related news

Sunday, June 7, 2020

Preface

Step -1: Check in your BIOS/UEFI if virtualization is enabled

Step 0: Install VMWare Player or VMWare Workstation

Step 1: Download Kali VM

Step 2: Change Kali VM default root password

Step 3: Change Kali VM default SSH keys

Step 4: Update Kali VM

Step 5: Create a Snapshot/Copy the VM

More articles

Related articles

Saturday, June 6, 2020

More articles

Preface

Bypass

Mitigation

Conclusion

What is Password Cracking?

Topics covered in this tutorial

What is password strength?

Password cracking techniques

Password cracking tool

Password Cracking Counter Measures

Hacking Activity: Hack Now!

Password cracking steps

Summary

Related articles

Friday, June 5, 2020

dmesg

cat /proc/cpuinfo

cat /proc/meminfo

cat /proc/interrupts

lshw

lsblk

dmidecode

hdparm -i /dev/sda

hdparm -tT

badblocks -s /dev/sda

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