The Life of a Writer: June 2020

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Finlandia Y Varanger (Noruega) 6 (2006) Encuentro Con El Fiordo De Varanger

Faro en el fiordo Varanger. Foto: C.M. Aguilar Gómez.

Al cruzar a Noruega dejamos atrás la taiga. Aparecieron los suelos quemados por la nieve durante meses, la hierba recién brotada, los sauces enanos y los abedules arbustivos.

El fiordo Varanger se presentó con un quietud extraña, con sus aguas como una balsa de aceite. Dicen de él que no es un verdadero fiordo, que en sus orillas no aparecen las huellas del modelado glaciar, esos abruptos cortados tan característicos de los fiordos. Sus 100 km de longitud, a diferencia de lo que ocurre en otros fiordos de la zona, se orientan hacia el este y no hacia el norte. De ahí que actúe como un refugio frente a los temporales del norte.

Eider menor (P. stelleri) y común. Foto: Óscar Gutiérrez

Varanger es un lugar de invernada para muchos patos marinos de distribución ártica. Allí pasan la estación más dura del año en sus aguas libres de hielo gracias a la corriente del golfo. La misma que atempera el clima y hace que esas latitudes de Noruega sean habitables para el hombre.

En las aguas del fiordo disfrutamos de numerosos limícolas y patos marinos, entre ellos del eider común (Somateria mollissima) y del eider menor (Polysticta stelleri). Para esta última especie, Varanger es el único lugar de Europa donde es posible verlo, antes de que regrese a criar al este.

En los secaderos de bacalao. Foto: Diego Benavides.

Los días que pasamos en Varanger usamos la población de Vestre Jakobselv como base. Durante cuatro días recorrimos distintas zonas del fiordo, nos adentramos en la tundra del interior de la península y nos embarcamos hacia las colonias de aves marinas en costa este.

En los alrededores de Vestre Jakobselv pudimos ver los pintorescos secaderos de bacalao, habituales también en otras zonas costeras de Noruega. El bacalao es otro de los animales que tienen mucho que agradecer a la corriente del golfo. Las capturas se dejan secar al sol y al viento en unas estructuras de madera que constituyen un sistema barato y práctico sin recurrir al salado.

Puerto Vestre Jakobselv. Foto: C.M. Aguilar Gómez.

Otro de los atractivos del fiordo son sus luces. Los atardeceres se prolongaban durante horas y su luz cálida sacaba los vivos colores con que pintaban las casas. Parece como si sus habitantes tuvieran que alegrar sus viviendas con rojos, azules y amarillos intensos para resarcirse, por unos meses, de tanta oscuridad del invierno.

En junio las luces de tarde parecían eternas. El sol se posaba en el horizonte despacio, sin llegar a ocultarse y, al cabo de unas horas, volvía a salir de nuevo. Sentir el ambiente irreal del sol de medianoche es algo que no se olvida fácilmente.Related articles

Top 10 Hacking Websites 2018

Hacked Gadgets: A resource for DIY project documentation as well as general gadget and technology news.
Packet Storm: Information Security Services, News, Files, Tools, Exploits, Advisories and Whitepapers.
SecTools.Org: List of 75 security tools based on a 2003 vote by hackers.
Metasploit: Find security issues, verify vulnerability mitigations & manage security assessments with Metasploit. Get the worlds best penetration testing software now.
Hakin9: E-magazine offering in-depth looks at both attack and defense techniques and concentrates on difficult technical issues.
Exploit DB: An archive of exploits and vulnerable software by Offensive Security. The site collects exploits from submissions and mailing lists and concentrates them in a single database.
Phrack Magazine: Digital hacking magazine.
The Hacker News: The Hacker News — most trusted and widely-acknowledged online cyber security news magazine with in-depth technical coverage for cybersecurity.
HackRead: HackRead is a News Platform that centers on InfoSec, Cyber Crime, Privacy, Surveillance, and Hacking News with full-scale reviews on Social Media Platforms.
KitPloit: Leading source of Security Tools, Hacking Tools, CyberSecurity and Network Security.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Web-fu - The Ultimate Web Hacking Chrome Extension

Web-fu Is a web hacking tool focused on discovering and exploiting web vulnerabilitites.

BROWSER INTEGRATION

This tool has many advantages, as a browser-embedded webhacking tool, is very useful for scanning browser-authenticated applications, if browser can authenticate and access to the web application, the tool also can. Note that some other tools do not support neither certificate authentication nor web vpn accesses.
The integration with chrome, provides a more comfortable and agile way of web-hacking, and you have all the application data loaded on the hacking tool, you don't need to copy the url, cookies, etc. to the tool, just right click and hack.
The browser rendering engine is also used in this tool, to draw the html of the responses.

FALSES POSITIVES

When I coded this tool, I was obsessed with false positives, which is the main problem in all detection tools. I have implemented a gauss algorithm, to reduce the faslse positives automatically which works very very well, and save a lot of time to the pentester.

VIDEO

Here is a video, with some of the web-fu functionalitites:

VISUAL FEATURES

This tool has a visual crawler. Normal crawlers doesn't parse the ajvascript, this tool does. The visual crawler loads each link of the web site, rendering the html and executing all the javascript as a normal load, then the links are processed from he DOM and clicked.
A visual form cracker, is also available, althow is experimental and only works on some kind of forms.

SCANNING FEATURES

The web-fu's portscanner, has a database of a common web ports, like 80,81,8080 and so on.
The cracker module, can bruteforce web directories to find new attack vectors, and can fuzz get and post parameters for discovering vulns, and also crack passwords. There are 9 preloaded wordlists, and you can also load a custom wordlist. Prefilters, falsepositive reductor and render will be helpful. The scanners support SSL, if the website can be loaded in the chrome, can be scanned by web-fu.

ENCODERS & DECODERS

The supported encoders and decoders are: base64, urlescape and urlencode

OTHER FEATURES

A web notepad is available, saving the information on the browser localStorage, there is one notepad per site. A cookie editor is also very useful for pentesting. The inteceptor, is like a web proxy but from the inside of the browser, you can intercept a request There is also a session locker and a exploit web search.

CHROME STORE
Here is the link to the chrome store, the prize is about one euro, very cheap if you compare with other scanners: Web-Fu on Chrome Store

With webfu, you will do the best web site pentest and vulnerability assessment.

Security Drift – The Silent Killer

Global spending on cybersecurity products and services is predicted to exceed $1 trillion during the period of five years, between 2017 to 2021, with different analysts predicting the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) at anywhere between 8 to 15%. It is not surprising to see this growth in spending, which is primarily driven by the evolving sophistication and volume of attacks as well as the

via The Hacker NewsRelated articles

Learning Web Pentesting With DVWA Part 6: File Inclusion

In this article we are going to go through File Inclusion Vulnerability. Wikipedia defines File Inclusion Vulnerability as: "A file inclusion vulnerability is a type of web vulnerability that is most commonly found to affect web applications that rely on a scripting run time. This issue is caused when an application builds a path to executable code using an attacker-controlled variable in a way that allows the attacker to control which file is executed at run time. A file include vulnerability is distinct from a generic directory traversal attack, in that directory traversal is a way of gaining unauthorized file system access, and a file inclusion vulnerability subverts how an application loads code for execution. Successful exploitation of a file inclusion vulnerability will result in remote code execution on the web server that runs the affected web application."
There are two types of File Inclusion Vulnerabilities, LFI (Local File Inclusion) and RFI (Remote File Inclusion). Offensive Security's Metasploit Unleashed guide describes LFI and RFI as:
"LFI vulnerabilities allow an attacker to read (and sometimes execute) files on the victim machine. This can be very dangerous because if the web server is misconfigured and running with high privileges, the attacker may gain access to sensitive information. If the attacker is able to place code on the web server through other means, then they may be able to execute arbitrary commands.
RFI vulnerabilities are easier to exploit but less common. Instead of accessing a file on the local machine, the attacker is able to execute code hosted on their own machine."
In simpler terms LFI allows us to use the web application's execution engine (say php) to execute local files on the web server and RFI allows us to execute remote files, within the context of the target web server, which can be hosted anywhere remotely (given they can be accessed from the network on which web server is running).
To follow along, click on the File Inclusion navigation link of DVWA, you should see a page like this:

Lets start by doing an LFI attack on the web application.
Looking at the URL of the web application we can see a parameter named page which is used to load different php pages on the website.

http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/fi/?page=include.php

Since it is loading different pages we can guess that it is loading local pages from the server and executing them. Lets try to get the famous /etc/passwd file found on every linux, to do that we have to find a way to access it via our LFI. We will start with this:

../etc/passwd

entering the above payload in the page parameter of the URL:

http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/fi/?page=../etc/passwd

we get nothing back which means the page does not exist. Lets try to understand what we are trying to accomplish. We are asking for a file named passwd in a directory named etc which is one directory up from our current working directory. The etc directory lies at the root (/) of a linux file system. We tried to guess that we are in a directory (say www) which also lies at the root of the file system, that's why we tried to go up by one directory and then move to the etc directory which contains the passwd file. Our next guess will be that maybe we are two directories deeper, so we modify our payload to be like this:

../../etc/passwd

we get nothing back. We continue to modify our payload thinking we are one more directory deeper.

../../../etc/passwd

no luck again, lets try one more:

../../../../etc/passwd

nop nothing, we keep on going one directory deeper until we get seven directories deep and our payload becomes:

../../../../../../../etc/passwd

which returns the contents of passwd file as seen below:

This just means that we are currently working in a directory which is seven levels deep inside the root (/) directory. It also proves that our LFI is a success. We can also use php filters to get more and more information from the server. For example if we want to get the source code of the web server we can use php wrapper filter for that like this:

php://filter/convert.base64-encode/resource=index.php

We will get a base64 encoded string. Lets copy that base64 encoded string in a file and save it as index.php.b64 (name can be anything) and then decode it like this:

cat index.php.b64 | base64 -d > index.php

We will now be able to read the web application's source code. But you maybe thinking why didn't we simply try to get index.php file without using php filter. The reason is because if we try to get a php file with LFI, the php file will be executed by the php interpreter rather than displayed as a text file. As a workaround we first encode it as base64 which the interpreter won't interpret since it is not php and thus will display the text. Next we will try to get a shell. Before php version 5.2, allow_url_include setting was enabled by default however after version 5.2 it was disabled by default. Since the version of php on which our dvwa app is running on is 5.2+ we cannot use the older methods like input wrapper or RFI to get shell on dvwa unless we change the default settings (which I won't). We will use the file upload functionality to get shell. We will upload a reverse shell using the file upload functionality and then access that uploaded reverse shell via LFI.
Lets upload our reverse shell via File Upload functionality and then set up our netcat listener to listen for a connection coming from the server.

nc -lvnp 9999

Then using our LFI we will execute the uploaded reverse shell by accessing it using this url:

http://localhost:9000/vulnerabilities/fi/?page=../../hackable/uploads/revshell.php

Voila! We have a shell.

To learn more about File Upload Vulnerability and the reverse shell we have used here read Learning Web Pentesting With DVWA Part 5: Using File Upload to Get Shell. Attackers usually chain multiple vulnerabilities to get as much access as they can. This is a simple example of how multiple vulnerabilities (Unrestricted File Upload + LFI) can be used to scale up attacks. If you are interested in learning more about php wrappers then LFI CheetSheet is a good read and if you want to perform these attacks on the dvwa, then you'll have to enable allow_url_include setting by logging in to the dvwa server. That's it for today have fun.
Leave your questions and queries in the comments below.

References:

FILE INCLUSION VULNERABILITIES: https://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/file-inclusion-vulnerabilities/
php://: https://www.php.net/manual/en/wrappers.php.php
LFI Cheat Sheet: https://highon.coffee/blog/lfi-cheat-sheet/
File inclusion vulnerability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_inclusion_vulnerability
PHP 5.2.0 Release Announcement: https://www.php.net/releases/5_2_0.php

More articles

Networking | Routing And Switching | Tutorial 2 | 2018

Welcome to my 2nd tutorial of the series of networking. In this video I've briefly described peer to peer network (P2P). Moreover, you'll see how to make a peer to peer network? How it's working? How we can intercept traffic over the network by using Wireshark? and many more. Wireshark tool is integrated with eNSP so it'll be installed automatically when you install the eNSP. On the other hand, you can install the Wireshark for your personal use from its website.

What is Peer to Peer (P2P) network?

As when devices are connected with each other for the sake of communication that'll be known as a Network. Now what is peer to peer network? In P2P network each and every device is behaving like a server and a client as well. Moreover They are directly connected with each other in such a way that they can send and received data to other devices at the same time and there is no need of any central server in between them.

There is a question that mostly comes up into our minds that Is it possible to capture data from the network? So the answer is yes. We can easily captured data from the network with the help of tools that have been created for network troubleshooting, so whenever there will be some issues happening to the network so we fixed that issues with the help of tools. Most usable tool for data capturing that every network analyst used named Wireshark but there are so many other tools available over the internet like SmartSniff, Ethereal, Colasoft Capsa Network Analyze, URL Helper, SoftX HTTP Debugger and many more.

What is Wireshark?

Wireshark is an open source network analyzer or sniffer used to capture packets from the network and tries to display the brief information about the packets. It is also used for software and communication protocol development. Moreover, Wireshark is the best tool to intercept the traffic over the network.

The Life of a Writer