I finally got the Certified Expert Penetration Tester (CEPT) with a good score on the practical. There were two parts to the certification : an objective multiple choice written test and a practical. To qualify one needs 70% on the written and 70% on the practical portion of the test.
The written test was not too challenging if you follow the material taught at the InfoSec Institute’s Advanced Ethical Hacking course, however, the practical made up on the lack of challenge. The practical involved writing an unpublished stack overflow exploit for a real-world commercial software of IACRB’s choosing, a format string exploit for a custom application and writing a patch for windows binary to subvert registration mechanism on the binary. One could write the exploit in the form of a python script (that I chose), a shell script , a perl script or a binary written in a language of our choosing. The solution could be quite flexible when it came to the choice of language for writing the exploits.
Personally speaking, this was a great learning experience for me and I plan to continue learning in the interesting field of vulnerability development!
If you want to find out the components of a site’s certificate the following commands will help you.
If you want to find if the certificate is signed with the weak MD5 signature algorithm:
$ echo | openssl s_client -connect webserver.example.com:443 2>/dev/null | sed -ne ‘/—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–/,/—–END CERTIFICATE—–/p’ | openssl x509 -text | grep “Signature Algorithm”| gawk ‘{print $3}’
$ echo | openssl s_client -connect 167.155.38.24:443 2>/dev/null | sed -ne ‘/—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–/,/—–END CERTIFICATE—–/p’ | openssl x509 -text | grep “Exponent”
In a pen test, it’s always the race to the finish. Either you get to the domain admin or r00t or you die tryin’! 🙂 But thanks to some real l33t fu by Hernan Ochoa this has only been made easy for you.
The key to pass-the-hash attacks is that Windows NTLM authentication relies on the passing of the right hash to identify you. As long as the right hash is stored in the authenticated session you are who you say you are.
Hernan Ochoa’s Pass-the-hash toolkit (http://oss.coresecurity.com/projects/pshtoolkit.htm) is precisely the tool for that. Once you gain local admin rights on a box, just run the whosthere.exe utility on the box. Mind you, in differing versions of Windows you need some right addresses to pass as parameters. So the first thing to do is goto C:\WINDOWS\system32 and copy the lsasrv.dll file onto your local machine. The pass-the-hash src tar ball, has an IDA Pro script passthehash.idc that you need to run after opening the file in IDA Pro. This will give you the right addresses to pass to whosthere.exe:
whosthere.exe -a
Once you have the hash you could either use iam.exe or winexe (http://eol.ovh.org/winexe/) with pass-the-hash patch from jo-mo-kun (http://www.foofus.net/jmk/tools/winexe), or samba with jomo kun’s pass the hash patch.
Just set the Environment variable SMBHASH to the hash value such as
export SMBHASH="92D887C9910492C3254E2DF489A880E4:7A2EDE4F51B94203984C6BA21239CF63"
Then run winexe as
./winexe -U "Domain\\Username" //192.168.0.1 "cmd.exe"
Of course, you can also expend some time in cracking the LM hashes to get the actual passwords but it isn’t really necessary.
In the capitalist world, it is said that the companies survive on the hyper-consumerism of the people. The highly competitive economical scenario results in an environment where (as they say) consumer is the winner, but not without a fight.
A few weeks back, my Compaq Presario Laptop 2575us went bad. Well, the laptop is 2 yrs old and it has already been serviced twice so I guess my patience thresholds have diminished over a period of time. But this time around a person with even immense patience could have lost his mind. So here’s what happened. My laptop’s S-video port had been dysfunctional since the time I can recall but I never had so much time to let my laptop go out of my hands. This time when I sent it for repairs my laptop almost disappeared from the face of the earth for almost 25 days. And when they returned it to me to a wrong address I had a premonition of difficult times. The “repaired” laptop even failed to start.
This really infuriated me coz my 25 day wait had gone down the drain. So I called up the customer care and they asked me to ship the laptop to service center yet again. But this time around they wanted me to wait for 3 days before I could FedEx it to them. It was completely unacceptable to me. So I spoke to the supervisor and became as adamant as a stone. I continued to ask him for next day shipping and he continued to repeat that he could not do that. A 2hr45min sparring continued on the phone and it resulted in him being the loser as he disconnected the phone. He kept saying that this discussion is going nowhere as we cannot reach an agreement and I kept insisting that the call had multiple destinations : 1. To the HP supervisors and 2. To the BBB .
This guy called himself Nick and he also refused to give me his employee number. I knew very well (because of past experience that Compaq uses words like “You have no proof for your requests” etc.) so this time I needed some real strong evidence of my conversation. So I requested the permission from this Nick guy to allow me to record the conversation. I think this made him a little wary of my intentions. But still he did not give me his details. I think he was really scared because he felt that my wrath could result in him facing the music from his bosses in Palo Alto, CA. There were a few interesting discussions, for example, he said “I am Nick and you can identify me with this name alone.” to which I retorted by saying “Well…I know that Nick is a common name in U.S and you guys might as well redirect my call to NY Knicks judging by the way things are going.”.
So the next day I called up the HP Customer Care Service Manager’s Line at 1-877-917-4380 , code 94 option 1. This time I spoke to a guy called Douglas Gilmore who was equally tough with me (if not more). He refused to acknowledge any of my concerns initially. But later as the conversation progressed, it went on from being just a plain discussion to a heated argument. However, I did not utter even a single foul word because I knew that he could use my language as a pretext to disconnect my call which I was not willing to risk at all. So throughout the discussion I kept my head cool and tried to explain the things to him. But after going through the history of the whole thing, he realized that I had suffered a lot because of this laptop and that the attitude of the Customer care was rather cold. So he finally agreed to give me a replacement after much requests. This was probably my best argument till date and I think that it was some good thinking on my part as well as some codial behavior on the part of the managers that I could get what I truly deserved: a replacement to my defective laptop.
-Rajat.
Japanese art forms
Yosemite National Park located in Northern CA, USA is like a heaven on earth, as I found out this long weekend. From LA to Yosemite, we started our trip in early hours of morning at 12:30 am in a Dodge Caravan rented from Fox Rentals.
The trip was more like serendipity of fortunate events (not that this means anything ;-). 14 of us lonesome souls set out for an adventure of the hitherto unknown. The reason I say unknown is we had no clue as to what we were doing. We set out with no reservation for campgrounds with the free spirit of desis! Reached there at around 7:00 am and noticed a huge line to get the campground reservations. Well, patience eventually paid off, when Nimesh and I got our name in the waitlist for campgrounds we saw our window of opportunity. Our name was 32nd on the list and we came to know from other people that they generally released around 10-15 campsites daily. We went off to glacier point (After loads of arguments)….will be continued in later blogs!
To avoid saving the truecrypt password in history files and mounting the Truecrypt partitions on bash the following trick helps:
history -d $((HISTCMD-1)) && sudo truecrypt --mount <PATH_TO_TRUECRYPT_VOL> --non-interactive -p <PASSWORD>
This will avoid saving the password in the .bash_history file and also mount the truecrypt volume from the command line. Of course, if you use this in a shell script then the shell script will have the password in it, so you must not do that.