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Thursday, May 7, 2020

CEH: Fundamentals Of Social Engineering


Social engineering is a nontechnical method of breaking into a system or network. It's the process of deceiving users of a system and convincing them to perform acts useful to the hacker, such as giving out information that can be used to defeat or bypass security mechanisms. Social engineering is important to understand because hackers can use it to attack the human element of a system and circumvent technical security measures. This method can be used to gather information before or during an attack.

A social engineer commonly uses the telephone or Internet to trick people into revealing sensitive information or to get them to do something that is against the security policies of the organization. By this method, social engineers exploit the natural tendency of a person to trust their word, rather than exploiting computer security holes. It's generally agreed that users are the weak link in security; this principle is what makes social engineering possible.

The most dangerous part of social engineering is that companies with authentication processes, firewalls, virtual private networks, and network monitoring software are still wide open to attacks, because social engineering doesn't assault the security measures directly. Instead, a social-engineering attack bypasses the security measures and goes after the human element in an organization.

Types of Social Engineering-Attacks

There are two types of Social Engineering attacks

Human-Based 

Human-based social engineering refers to person-to-person interaction to retrieve the desired information. An example is calling the help desk and trying to find out a password.

Computer-Based 

​Computer-based social engineering refers to having computer software that attempts to retrieve the desired information. An example is sending a user an email and asking them to reenter a password in a web page to confirm it. This social-engineering attack is also known as phishing.

Human-Based Social Engineering

Human-Based further categorized as follow:

Impersonating an Employee or Valid User

In this type of social-engineering attack, the hacker pretends to be an employee or valid user on the system. A hacker can gain physical access by pretending to be a janitor, employee, or contractor. Once inside the facility, the hacker gathers information from trashcans, desktops, or computer systems.

Posing as an Important User

In this type of attack, the hacker pretends to be an important user such as an executive or high-level manager who needs immediate assistance to gain access to a computer system or files. The hacker uses intimidation so that a lower-level employee such as a help desk worker will assist them in gaining access to the system. Most low-level employees won't question someone who appears to be in a position of authority.

Using a Third Person

Using the third-person approach, a hacker pretends to have permission from an authorized source to use a system. This attack is especially effective if the supposed authorized source is on vacation or can't be contacted for verification.

Calling Technical Support

Calling tech support for assistance is a classic social-engineering technique. Help desk and technical support personnel are trained to help users, which makes them good prey for social-engineering attacks.

Shoulder Surfing 

Shoulder surfing is a technique of gathering passwords by watching over a person's shoulder while they log in to the system. A hacker can watch a valid user log in and then use that password to gain access to the system.

Dumpster Diving

Dumpster diving involves looking in the trash for information written on pieces of paper or computer printouts. The hacker can often find passwords, filenames, or other pieces of confidential information.

Computer-Based Social Engineering

Computer-based social-engineering attacks can include the following:
  • Email attachments
  • Fake websites
  • Pop-up windows


Insider Attacks

If a hacker can't find any other way to hack an organization, the next best option is to infiltrate the organization by getting hired as an employee or finding a disgruntled employee to assist in the attack. Insider attacks can be powerful because employees have physical access and are able to move freely about the organization. An example might be someone posing as a delivery person by wearing a uniform and gaining access to a delivery room or loading dock. Another possibility is someone posing as a member of the cleaning crew who has access to the inside of the building and is usually able to move about the offices. As a last resort, a hacker might bribe or otherwise coerce an employee to participate in the attack by providing information such as passwords.

Identity Theft

A hacker can pose as an employee or steal the employee's identity to perpetrate an attack. Information gathered in dumpster diving or shoulder surfing in combination with creating fake ID badges can gain the hacker entry into an organization. Creating a persona that can enter the building unchallenged is the goal of identity theft.

Phishing Attacks

Phishing involves sending an email, usually posing as a bank, credit card company, or other financial organization. The email requests that the recipient confirm banking information or reset passwords or PINs. The user clicks the link in the email and is redirected to a fake website. The hacker is then able to capture this information and use it for financial gain or to perpetrate other attacks. Emails that claim the senders have a great amount of money but need your help getting it out of the country are examples of phishing attacks. These attacks prey on the common person and are aimed at getting them to provide bank account access codes or other confidential information to the hacker.

Online Scams

Some websites that make free offers or other special deals can lure a victim to enter a username and password that may be the same as those they use to access their work system.
The hacker can use this valid username and password once the user enters the information in the website form. Mail attachments can be used to send malicious code to a victim's system, which could automatically execute something like a software keylogger to capture passwords. Viruses, Trojans, and worms can be included in cleverly crafted emails to entice a victim to open the attachment. Mail attachments are considered a computer-based social-engineering attack.

More information


Scanning For Padding Oracles

As you might have heard, we recently got our paper on padding oracle attacks accepted to the USENIX Security Conference. In this paper, we describe and evaluate a scanning methodology with which we found several padding oracle vulnerabilities in devices from various vendors. In total, we found that 1.83% of the Alexa Top 1 Million have padding oracle vulnerabilities.

To test whether a server is vulnerable, we specified different padding oracle vectors which we send to the system under test, using different cipher suites and protocol versions. If the server does not behave identically (on both the TLS and TCP layers), we consider it to be vulnerable to a padding oracle attack, since it is leaking information about the plaintext via behavior differences. Depending on the responses to such padding oracle vectors, one can estimate which implementation is responsible for the vulnerability. We contacted quite a few website owners and tried to cooperate with them, to find out which vendors and TLS stacks are responsible for the identified vulnerabilities. You can find our current disclosure status on this issue on https://github.com/RUB-NDS/TLS-Padding-Oracles.
We are currently in contact with other vendors to fix the remaining vulnerabilities, but the some of the rare (in terms of the number of affected hosts) vulnerabilities are currently not attributed. To fix the remaining vulnerabilities, we ask for your assistance to help get rid of this issue. For this purpose, we integrated a standalone version of our padding oracle evaluation tool into our TLS-Scanner (v.2.7) project. This tool allows you (among other things) to evaluate if a specific server is vulnerable.

When the tool detects a vulnerability, it tries to attribute the vulnerability to a specific vendor or CVE. If we already know of the vulnerability of the server you scanned, the tool will print its details. If the tool does not have a description of the vulnerability in its database, it will ask you to notify us about the vulnerable server, such that we can notify the vendor and get the device fixed. To be clear: the tool never sends any data to us - you have the choice of whether to notify us (and what details to include). There is a chance that the tool's attribution is also mistaken, that is, the tool lists a vendor for your host, but you know for sure that you do not use an implementation by this vendor. Please contact us in such cases as well.

How to use the Tool

First, you need to grab hold of the tool. There are 3 ways to get your hands dirty: pre-compiled, self-compiled or Docker. We provide a pre-compiled version of the tool since the compilation process can get quite messy if you are not familiar with java and maven. You can directly download the resulting project here. However, if you also want to play around with the code, you have to compile everything yourself.

Building the TLS-Scanner

For this, you will need (Git), maven (sudo apt-get install maven), OpenJDK-8  (I can guarantee that this version works, other versions might work as well, have not tested it).

You will need to get TLS-Attacker 2.9 (if you do not already have it):
Now we can clone and install the TLS-Scanner

Docker

We also provide a Dockerfile, which lets you run the scanner directly

Getting Started


If you start the TLS-Scanner you should be greeted by a usage info, similar to the one below:

 or


This should give you an overview of the supported command line flags. The only really required one is the -connect flag (similar to OpenSSL and TLS-Attacker), with which you specify which host to scan. The most basic command is therefore:

Your output may look something like this:

By default, TLS-Scanner will run single-threaded. In such cases the scanning will take a while; just how long it will take depends on your server configuration. The scanner also supports multi-threading, which drastically improves the performance. There are two parameters to play around with, -threads, which controls how many different "probes" are executed in parallel, and -aggressive , which controls how many handshakes can be executed simultaneously. If you want the fastest results the following parameters are usually a good choice:

But lets get back to the results of the Scanner. Currently the Scanner supports a bunch of well known tests, like supported ciphersuites or protocol versions. These are very similar to what you may be used to from other scanners like ssllabs or testssl.sh.

Padding Oracles

The main advantage of our scanner is the ability to scan for padding oracle vulnerabilities (which is probably why you are reading this post). You will see if you are vulnerable in the "Attack Vulnerabilities" section. For example, when scanning hackmanit.de, the result is false. Good for us! But as you might have seen there is also another section in the scanner report:"PaddingOracle Responsemap"
This section lists the responses of the scanned host for each padding oracle vector, for each cipher suite and protocol version. For hackmanit.de, there is no detected difference in responses, which means hackmanit.de is not vulnerable to the attack:
If we want, we can also look at the concrete responses of the server. For this purpose, we start the scanner with the -reportDetail flag:

With this flag we now get the following details:

So what does this all mean? First of all, we named our malformed records. The interpretation of those names is visualized in the following table:
BasicMac-<position>-<XOR>  A Record with ApplicationData, MAC and padding bytes, where the padding byte at <position> is XOR'd <XOR>
 MissingMacByteFirst A Record without ApplicationData, where the first byte of the MAC is missing
 MissingMacByteLast A Record without ApplicationData, where the last byte of the MAC is missing
 Plain FF A Record without ApplicationData & MAC which only contains Paddingbytes: 64* 0xFF 
 Plain 3F A Record without ApplicationData & MAC which only contains Paddingbytes: 64* 0xF3
 InvPadValMac-[<position>]-<appDataLength>-<paddingBytes> A Record with invalid padding and valid MAC. The Record contains <appDataLength> many ApplicationData bytes and <paddingBytes> many PaddingBytes. The Padding is invalid at <position>.
 ValPadInvMac-[<position>]-<appDataLength>-<paddingBytes> A Record with valid padding and invalid MAC. The Record contains <appDataLength> many ApplicationData bytes and <paddingBytes> many PaddingBytes. The MAC is invalid at <position>.
 InvPadInvMac-[<position>]-<appDataLength>-<paddingBytes> A Record with invalid padding and invalid MAC. The Record contains <appDataLength> many ApplicationData bytes and <paddingBytes> many PaddingBytes. The MAC is invalid at the first position. The Padding is invalid at <position>.

Next to the name you can see what the actual response from the server was. Alert messages which are in [] brackets indicate that the alert was a fatal alert while () brackets indicate a warning alert. ENC means that the messages were encrypted (which is not always the case). The last symbol in each line indicates the state of the socket. An X represents a closed socket with a TCP FIN, a T indicates that the socket was still open at the time of measurement and an @ indicates that the socket was closed with an RST. So how did Hackmanit respond? We see a [BAD_RECORD_MAC]  ENC X, which means we received an ENCrypted FATAL BAD_RECORD_MAC alert, and the TCP connection was closed with a TCP FIN. If a server appears to be vulnerable, the scanner will execute the scan a total of three times to confirm the vulnerability. Since this response is identical to all our vectors, we know that the server was not vulnerable and the scanner is not re-executing the workflows.

Here is an example of a vulnerable host:
As you can see, this time the workflows got executed multiple times, and the scanner reports the cipher suite and version as vulnerable because of "SOCKET_STATE". This means that in some cases the socket state revealed information about the plaintext. If you look closely, you can see that for ValPadInvMac-[0]-0-59, ValPadInvMac-[8]-0-59 and ValPadInvMac-[15]-0-59 the server failed to close the TCP socket, while for all other vectors the TCP connect was closed with a TCP FIN. The server was therefore vulnerable.

Since the server was vulnerable, TLS-Scanner will also print an additional section: "PaddingOracle Details"

In this section we try to identify the vulnerability. In the example above, TLS-Scanner will print the following:

As you can see, we attribute this vulnerability to OpenSSL <1.0.2r. We do so by looking at the exact responses to our malformed records. We additionally print two important facts about the vulnerability: Whether it is observable and its strength. The precise details of these properties are beyond the scope of this blogpost, but the short version is:
If an oracle is observable, a man in the middle attacker can see the differences between the vectors by passively observing the traffic, without relying on browser or application specific tricks. A strong oracle has no limitations in the number of consecutive bytes an attacker can decrypt. If an oracle is STRONG and OBSERVABLE, then an attacker can realistically exploit it. This is the case in the example above.
For more details on this, you will have to wait for the paper.

Attribution

As you can see, we try to fingerprint the responsible device/implementation. However, we were not able to identify all vulnerable implementations yet. If we cannot attribute a vulnerability you will receive the following message:

Could not identify the vulnerability. Please contact us if you know which software/hardware is generating this behavior.

If you encounter this message, we do not know yet who is responsible for this padding oracle and would be happy to know which device/vendor is responsible. If you know who is, please contact us so that we can get in contact with the vendor to fix the issue. To reiterate, the tool never sends any data back to us, and it is your choice whether to contact us manually or not.

There are also some cases in which we can identify the vendor, but the vendor has not patched the vulnerability yet. If you encounter such a host, the scanner will tell you that we know the responsible vendor. To prevent abuse, we do not include further details.

Non-Determinism and Errors

In some cases, the scanner is unable to scan for padding oracles and reports ERROR or non-deterministic responses. The ERROR cases appear if the scanner failed could not handshake with the specified cipher suite and protocol version. This might be due to a bug in the tested TLS-Server or a bug in TLS-Attacker or TLS-Scanner. If you think the handshake fails because of an issue on our side, please open an issue on Github, and we will investigate. The more interesting cases are the non-deterministic ones. In such cases the scanner observed non-identical scan results in three separate scans. This can be due to non-determinism in the software, connection errors, server load or non-homogeneous load balancing. Currently, you will have to analyze these cases manually. In the paper, we excluded such hosts from our study because we did not want to artificially improve our results. But we understand that you as a tester want to know if the server is vulnerable or not. If the server is not truly vulnerable you would see the differences between the answers spread across all the different vectors. If the differences only appear on a subset of malformed records the server is very likely vulnerable. If you are unsure, you can also always scan multiple times (or scan slowly), increase the timeout, or if you are entirely lost get in touch with us. 


How YOU can help

Please use the scanner on all your hosts and check for padding oracle vulnerabilities. If the scanner can identify your vulnerability, a patch should already be available. Please patch your system! If the scanner does not identify the vulnerability (and instructs you to contact us), please contact us with the details (robert.merget@rub.de). If you can provide us with the detailed output of the scanner or even better, the name of the host, with the corresponding vendor, we could match the results with our database and help fix the issue. We can already attribute over 90% of the vulnerabilities, but there is still a lot to be discovered. We mostly scanned the Alexa top 1-million on port 443. Other protocols like IMAPS, POP3S, etc. might have different implementations with different vulnerabilities. If you find vulnerabilities with our tool, please give us credit. It helps us to get more funding for our project.

Issues with the Scanner


A notable feature of our scanner is that we do not actively try to avoid intolerances (like not scanning with a lot of cipher suites in the Hello messages etc.). We believe that doing so would hide important bugs. We are currently experimenting with intolerances checks, but the feature is now still in beta. If we cannot scan a server (most of the time due to intolerances or SNI problems), the scanner will report a lot of intolerances and usually no supported protocol versions. Some intolerances may trick the scanner into reporting false results. At the current stage, we cannot make any guarantees. If you are using this tool during a pentest, it might be smart to rescan with other scanners (like the recently released padcheck tool from our colleague Craig Young) to find the ground truth (this is good advice in general, since other mainstream scanners likely have the same issues). Note however that it is very unlikely that the scanner reports a false positive on a padding oracle scan.


Conclusion

There are still a lot of padding oracle vulnerabilities out there - and a lot of them are still unpatched. We hope you will find some bugs with the tool :) Happy H4cking :D


Acknowlegements

This is joint work from Robert Merget (@ic0nz1), Juraj Somorovsky (@jurajsomorovsky),  Nimrod Aviram (@NimrodAviram), Janis Fliegenschmidt (@JanisFliegens), Craig Young (@craigtweets), Jörg Schwenk (@JoergSchwenk) and (Yuval Shavitt).
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Discover: A Custom Bash Scripts Used To Perform Pentesting Tasks With Metasploit


About discover: discover is a custom bash scripts used to automate various penetration testing tasks including recon, scanning, parsing, and creating malicious payloads and listeners with Metasploit Framework. For use with Kali Linux, Parrot Security OS and the Penetration Testers Framework (PTF).

About authors:


discover Installation and Updating


About RECON in discover
   Domain

RECON

1. Passive

2. Active
3. Import names into an existing recon-ng workspace
4. Previous menu

   Passive uses ARIN, dnsrecon, goofile, goog-mail, goohost, theHarvester, Metasploit Framework, URLCrazy, Whois, multiple websites, and recon-ng.

   Active uses dnsrecon, WAF00W, traceroute, Whatweb, and recon-ng.
   [*] Acquire API keys for Bing, Builtwith, Fullcontact, GitHub, Google, Hashes, Hunter, SecurityTrails, and Shodan for maximum results with recon-ng and theHarvester.

API key locations:

recon-ng
   show keys
   keys add bing_api <value>

theHarvester
   /opt/theHarvester/api-keys.yaml

   Person: Combines info from multiple websites.

RECON

First name:

Last name:

   Parse salesforce: Gather names and positions into a clean list.

Create a free account at salesforce (https://connect.data.com/login).
Perform a search on your target company > select the company name > see all.
Copy the results into a new file.

Enter the location of your list:

About SCANNING in discover
   Generate target list: Use different tools to create a target list including Angry IP Scanner, arp-scan, netdiscover and nmap pingsweep.

SCANNING

1. Local area network
2. NetBIOS
3. netdiscover
4. Ping sweep
5. Previous menu


   CIDR, List, IP, Range, or URL

Type of scan:

1. External

2. Internal
3. Previous menu

  • External scan will set the nmap source port to 53 and the max-rrt-timeout to 1500ms.
  • Internal scan will set the nmap source port to 88 and the max-rrt-timeout to 500ms.
  • Nmap is used to perform host discovery, port scanning, service enumeration and OS identification.
  • Matching nmap scripts are used for additional enumeration.
  • Addition tools: enum4linux, smbclient, and ike-scan.
  • Matching Metasploit auxiliary modules are also leveraged.

About WEB in discover
   Insecure direct object reference

Using Burp, authenticate to a site, map & Spider, then log out.
Target > Site map > select the URL > right click > Copy URLs in this host.

Paste the results into a new file.


Enter the location of your file:

   Open multiple tabs in Firefox

Open multiple tabs in Firefox with:

1. List

2. Directories from robots.txt.
3. Previous menu

  • Use a list containing IPs and/or URLs.
  • Use wget to pull a domain's robot.txt file, then open all of the directories.

   Nikto

Run multiple instances of Nikto in parallel.

1. List of IPs.
2. List of IP:port.
3. Previous menu

   SSL: Use sslscan and sslyze to check for SSL/TLS certificate issues.

Check for SSL certificate issues.

Enter the location of your list:


About MISC in discover
   Parse XML

Parse XML to CSV.

1. Burp (Base64)

2. Nessus (.nessus)
3. Nexpose (XML 2.0)
4. Nmap
5. Qualys
6. revious menu

   Generate a malicious payload

Malicious Payloads

1. android/meterpreter/reverse_tcp
2. cmd/windows/reverse_powershell
3. java/jsp_shell_reverse_tcp (Linux)
4. java/jsp_shell_reverse_tcp (Windows)
5. linux/x64/meterpreter_reverse_https
6. linux/x64/meterpreter_reverse_tcp
7. linux/x64/shell/reverse_tcp
8. osx/x64/meterpreter_reverse_https
9. osx/x64/meterpreter_reverse_tcp
10. php/meterpreter/reverse_tcp
11. python/meterpreter_reverse_https 12. python/meterpreter_reverse_tcp
13. windows/x64/meterpreter_reverse_https
14. windows/x64/meterpreter_reverse_tcp
15. Previous menu

   Start a Metasploit listener

Metasploit Listeners

1. android/meterpreter/reverse_tcp
2. cmd/windows/reverse_powershell
3. java/jsp_shell_reverse_tcp
4. linux/x64/meterpreter_reverse_https
5. linux/x64/meterpreter_reverse_tcp
6. linux/x64/shell/reverse_tcp
7. osx/x64/meterpreter_reverse_https
8. osx/x64/meterpreter_reverse_tcp
9. php/meterpreter/reverse_tcp
10. python/meterpreter_reverse_https
11. python/meterpreter_reverse_tcp
12. windows/x64/meterpreter_reverse_https
13. windows/x64/meterpreter_reverse_tcp
14. Previous menu


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