Pro Hack

winAUTOPWN has been an old favourite to automate windows hacking and vulnerability testing.  The project is the brainchild of Azim Poonawala of [C4]Closed Circuit Corporate Clandestine and saw its first release in 2009. Fast forward to 4 years; it has matured into a good exploitation framework with a plethora of options. As the Author states about it  -

Autohack your targets - even if you have consumed and holding a bottle of 'ABSOLUT' in one hand and absolute ease (winAUTOPWN) in the other.

In layman terms, winAUTOPWN is a unique exploit framework which helps in gaining shell access and pwning (aka exploiting vulnerabilities) to conduct Remote Command Execution, Remote File/Shell Upload, Remote File Inclusion and other Web-Application attacks. To add cherry on the top, it can also help in conducting multiple types of Denial of Service attacks on targets, furthermore, It can also be used to test effectiveness of IDS/IPS and other monitoring sensors/softwares.

You can -

• Download winAUTOPWN from here / mirror
• Read its documentation from here

We have got a lot of packet sniffer/analyzer software out there, I am a self confessed Wireshark & Ettercap lover, but still, when it comes to analyzing network traffic from command line in a fast manner, ngrep is my one of my favourites. Written by Jordan Ritter its used to “grep” traffic patterns from the network interfaces. As per official documentation -

ngrep is a pcap-aware tool that will allow you to specify extended regular or hexadecimal expressions to match against data payloads of packets. It currently recognizes IPv4/6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4/6, IGMP and Raw across Ethernet, PPP, SLIP, FDDI, Token Ring and null interfaces, and understands BPF filter logic in the same fashion as more common packet sniffing tools, such as tcpdump and snoop.

ngrep runs on Windows & *nix platforms alike and you need WinPCAP to run it since it relies on it. 

Once you install it, it by default uses the first interface on your machine, so , make sure to check the detected interfaces by running -

C:\Users\RISHABH\Desktop>ngrep -L
idx     dev
---     ---
1:     \Device\NPF_{4D491111-D331-42BC-9A33-98EF8C40D422} (Microsoft)
2:     \Device\NPF_{ADBF6AC1-D111-463D-8D99-C58FA1BEF979} (Sun)
3:     \Device\NPF_{6F801AE0-CA61-4A6D-B5FF-DCB7CE8FC529} (VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter)
4:     \Device\NPF_{930B6EC8-A5E3-4FFA-B68F-F159FDFC2064} (VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter)
5:     \Device\NPF_{D1999293-A041-4C2A-B63F-5D8B4906000F} (Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller)
exit

Now for example you want to check out whats going on at port 23 using interface 5

C:\Users\RISHABH\Desktop>ngrep -d 5  port 23
interface: \Device\NPF_{D1999293-A041-4C2A-B63F-5D8B4906000F} (192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0)
filter: (ip or ip6) and ( port 23 )
exit
0 received, 0 dropped

Piece of cake.. and if you want to filter any website in you are searching for keyword "password" then :

ngrep -d 5 “password” port 80

Easy aint it ? Ngrep does it all : ] With some complex grep commands , you can become a pcap ninja.

Well, you can

1. Download Ngrep from here
2. Check out documentation and examples here
3. Learn about Wireshark from here

Cisco has issued a security advisory intimating that its new password hashing algorithm TYPE 4 is vulnerable,which allows Cisco TYPE 4 encoded hashes to be cracked easily. TYPE 4 is an update of TYPE 5 , and was supposed to salt passwords and apply 1000 iterations of SHA-256 .  Well, engineers at Cisco actually miscoded the algorithm by forgetting to salt passwords and setting the number of iterations to 1 which makes it even weaker than TYPE 5 algorithm .

“This approach causes a Type 4 password to be less resilient to brute-force attacks than a Type 5 password of equivalent complexity.”

Also, the code base (CISCO IOS 15) also disables TYPE 5 encryption on devices. Well..talk about rubbing salt on wounds.

As per advisory -

"A device running a Cisco IOS or IOS XE release with support for Type 4 passwords lost the capability to create a Type 5 password from a user-provided plaintext password.Backward compatibility problems may arise when downgrading from a device running a Cisco IOS or IOS XE release with Type 4 password support and Type 4 passwords configured to a Cisco IOS or Cisco IOS XE release that does not support Type 4 passwords. Depending on the specific device configuration, the administrator may not be able to log in to the device or to change into privileged EXEC mode, requiring a password recovery process to be performed."

It was meant to be discovered inevitably. Folks at Hashcat - Philipp Schmidt and Jens Steube found it and were able to decode a hash posted at inetpro.org . Since hashes were weak, the information was more than enough to crack millions of hashes in hours if anyone gets their hands on hashes. 

The aftermath ? Cisco says it will be creating new password type to counter it with new as of now unknown commands to implement it.  In the meantime, Cisco says you “may” want to replace Type 4 password with Type 5 , as quoted -

There are two options to generate a Type 5 password:

• Using another device running a Cisco IOS or Cisco IOS XE release without Type 4 support
• Using the openssl command-line tool (part of the OpenSSL Project)

You can read the advisory here

You might also want to read  -

• Static VRRP over Cisco and testing it.
• EIGRP Cheatsheet – EIGRP in 15 min

“ Incredible”

thats one word when you describe CARNA botnet, which is a single handed attempt to map the entire Internet by a researcher, which makes it a single most herculean feat I have witnessed in digital domain which both grips me with mixed feelings of  astonishment and Deja Vu.

As the paper states, the basic theory behind CARNA was

After completing the scan of roughly one hundred thousand IP addresses, we realized the number of insecure devices must be at least one hundred thousand. Starting with one device and assuming a scan speed of ten IP addresses per second, it should find the next open device within one hour. The scan rate would be doubled if we deployed a scanner to the newly found device. After doubling the scan rate in this way about 16.5 times, all unprotected devices would be found; this would take only 16.5 hours. Additionally, with one hundred thousand devices scanning at ten probes per second we would have a distributed port scanner to port scan the entire IPv4 Internet within one hour.

Impressive..  and the payload they devised was small, surgical and targeted routers with insecure logins.

The binary on the router was written in plain C. It was compiled for 9 different architectures using the OpenWRT Buildroot. In its latest and largest version this binary was between 46 and 60 kb in size depending on the target architecture.

Well, the end results ? ~ 420,000 infected routers are identified with 1,300,000,000 geolocated IPV4 devices with about one-third of those responding directly to pings.

Incredible..as I earlier said. Sceptics will say that It can be a hoax, as its difficult to verify with a 586GB bittorrent file compressed with ZPAQ which will decompress to 9TB , it needs somewhat of super human effort to download, unpack and analyze data if it really exists. But again, if its true, Its .. its awesome.

You can

1. Read the Paper here
2. Download Bit Torrent file here
3. See graphical results here

Like I said, prepare to be amazed.

Security researchers in Finland have turned up thousands of unsecured Internet-facing SCADA systems in that country, using the Shodan search engine.The researchers, from Aalto University, ran their test in January, and found 2,915 exposed systems running functions from building automation to transport and water supply. Those responses were out of a total of 185,000 Finnish IP addresses that responded to an HTTP request.

According to communications and networking professor Jukka Manner,exposed building automation systems, the researchers claimed, included a bank, a gaol, and a hospital.  Researchers claimed that many systems were vulnerable through their remote user interfaces.Interestingly, when the university re-ran its test in March, it found that a large number of the systems had been removed from the Internet, although 1,969 of the systems were still present.

“A lot of problems can … still be hiding”,

according to research assistant Seppo Tillkainen, since as much as 30 percent of the Finnish IP address space is still not mapped by Shodan. While systems spotted in the Shodan search even included a wind turbine, the majority of poorly-secured systems were in office blocks and residential towers, the study says. The researchers did not go as far as to actually try to penetrate the systems, citing Finland's computer crimes laws.

A Google translation of the university's press release is here. For Finnish readers, the whole study is here.

Blogged on Android Via The Register