Etienne
SensePost Challenge – Winners and Walkthrough
We recently ran our Black Hat challenge where the ultimate prize was a seat on one of our training courses at Black Hat this year. This would allow the winner to attend any one of the following:
BlackOps – Our intermediate pentesting course Infrastructure Bootcamp – Introduction to pwning over the Internet Mobile Bootcamp – Introduction to mobile hacking Web Application Bootcamp – Introduction to web app hacking The challenge was extremely well received and we received 6 successful entries and numerous other attempts. All the solutions were really awesome and we saw unique attacks, with the first three entrants all solving the challenge in a different way.
Hacking Challenge: Drive a tank through it
At SensePost we get to enjoy some challenging assessments and do pretty epic things. Some days it feels like the only thing that could make it better would be driving tanks while doing it. The best hacks normally make their way into our training courses as practical exercises where students get to replicate (and improve on) these hacks. However, we know that there isn’t always room for all the epicness and unfortunately not everyone can attend the training. So we put some into a challenge for you. We’ve taken a few recent hacks and rolled them into one challenge, can you crack it?
Revisting XXE and abusing protocols
Recently a security researcher reported a bug in Facebook that could potentially allow Remote Code Execution (RCE). His writeup of the incident is available here if you are interested. The thing that caught my attention about his writeup was not the fact that he had pwned Facebook or earned $33,500 doing it, but the fact that he used OpenID to accomplish this. After having a quick look at the output from the PoC and rereading the vulnerability description I had a pretty good idea of how the vulnerability was triggered and decided to see if any other platforms were vulnerable.
Botconf 2013
Botconf’13, the “First botnet fighting conference” took place in Nantes, France from 5-6 December 2013. Botconf aimed to bring together the anti-botnet community, including law enforcement, ISPs and researchers. To this end the conference was a huge success, especially since a lot of networking occurred over the lunch and tea breaks as well as the numerous social events organised by Botconf.
I was fortunate enough to attend as a speaker and to present a small part of my Masters research. The talk focused the use of Spatial Statistics to detect Fast-Flux botnet Command and Control (C2) domains based on the geographic location of the C2 servers. This research aimed to find novel techniques that would allow for accurate and lightweight classifiers to detect Fast-Flux domains. Using DNS query responses it was possible to identify Fast-Flux domains based on values such as the TTL, number of A records and different ASNs. In an attempt to increase the accuracy of this classifier, additional analysis was performed and it was observed that Fast-Flux domains tended to have numerous C2 servers widely dispersed geographically. Through the use of the statistical methods employed in plant and animal dispersion statistics, namely Moran’s I and Geary’s C, new classifiers were created. It was shown that these classifiers could detect Fast-Flux domains with up to a 97% accuracy, maintaining a False Positive rate of only 3.25% and a True Positive rate of 99%. Furthermore, it was shown that the use of these classifiers would not significantly impact current network performance and would not require changes to current network architecture.
Mobile Hacking on the West Coast
December sees SensePost presenting Hacking by Numbers: Mobile at BlackHat West Coast Trainings. This course was first presented at BlackHat Vegas 2013 and 44Con 2013, growing in popularity and content with each iteration. For more information continue reading below or visit https://blackhat.com/wc-13/training/Hacking-by-Numbers-Mobile.html.
The mobile environment has seen immense growth and has subsequently seen organisations racing to be the first to market with the next best app. The rapid increase in mobile popularity and the speed at which developers are forced to produce new applications has resulted in an ecosystem full of security vulnerabilities. As more organisations are moving from web applications to mobile applications, penetration testers are required to adapt their testing methodology to keep pace with the changing platforms. Mobile applications developers have been lulled into a false sense of security due to the belief that “the platform will take care of the security”. The Hacking by Numbers: Mobile course aims to help both penetration testers and mobile applications developers to find and understand common security vulnerabilities on a wide range of mobile platforms. The course teaches a mobile application security testing methodology that can easily be applied to mobile applications on Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.
Hacking by Numbers – The mobile edition
West Coast in the house, well actually more like an African visiting Seattle for Blackhat’s West Coast Trainings.
We’ve had a great year delivering the latest course in our amazing Hacking by Numbers training series: Mobile. What’s cool about this course, is like the others, we teach a hacking methodology rather than punting a tool or a magic, do it all solutions.
Mobile was created to match the continuous growth in mobile phone usage, with a specific focus on showing you how you would go about testing the mobile platforms and installed applications, to ensure they have been developed in a secure manner. HBN Mobile provides a complete and practical window into the methods used when attacking mobile platforms and presents you with a methodology that can be applied across platforms. This course is structured to cater to penetration testers who are new to the mobile area and who need to understand how to analyze and audit applications on various mobile platforms using a variety of tools.
Your first mobile assessment
Monday morning, raring for a week of pwnage and you see you’ve just been handed a new assessment, awesome. The problem? It’s a mobile assessment and you’ve never done one before. What do you do, approach your team leader and ask for another assessment? He’s going to tell you to learn how to do a mobile assessment and do it quickly, there are plenty more to come.
Now you set out on your journey into mobile assessments and you get lucky, the application that needs to be assessed is an Android app. A few Google searches later and you are feeling pretty confident about this, Android assessments are meant to be easy, there are even a few tools out there that “do it all”. You download the latest and greatest version, run it and the app gets a clean bill of health. After all, the tool says so, there is no attack surface; no exposed intents and the permissions all check out. You compile your report, hand it off to the client and a week later the client gets owned through the application… Apparently the backend servers were accepting application input without performing any authentication checks. Furthermore, all user input was trusted and no server side validation was being performed. What went wrong? How did you miss these basic mistakes? After-all, you followed all the steps, you ran the best tools and you ticked all the boxes. Unfortunately this approach is wrong, mobile assessments are not always simply about running a tool, a lot of the time they require the same steps used to test web applications, just applied in a different manner. This is where SensePost’s Hacking by numbers: Mobile comes to the fore, the course aims to introduce you to mobile training from the ground up.
Windows Domain Privilege Escalation : Implementing PSLoggedOn in Metasploit (+ a bonus history module)
There are multiple paths one could take to getting Domain Admin on a Microsoft Windows Active Directory Domain. One common method for achieving this is to start by finding a system where a privileged domain account, such as a domain admin, is logged into or has recently been logged into. Once access to this system has been gained, either stealing their security tokens (ala Incognito or pass-the-hash attacks) or querying Digest Authentication (with Mimikatz/WCE) to get their clear-text password. The problem is finding out where these user’s are logged in.
Poking Around in Android Memory
Taking inspiration from Vlad’s post I’ve been playing around with alternate means of viewing traffic/data generated by Android apps.
The technique that has given me most joy is memory analysis. Each application on android is run in the Dalvik VM and is allocated it’s own heap space. Android being android, free and open, numerous ways of dumping the contents of the application heap exist. There’s even a method for it in the android.os.Debug library: android.os.Debug.dumpHprofData(String filename). You can also cause a heap dump by issuing the kill command:
CSIR Cyber Games
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) recently hosted the nation Cyber Games Challenge as part of Cyber Security Awareness month. The challenge pit teams of 4-5 members from different institutes against each other in a Capture the Flag style contest. In total there were seven teams, with two teams from Rhodes university, two from the University of Pretoria and three teams from the CSIR.
The games were designed around an attack/defence scenario, where teams would be given identical infrastructure which they could then patch against vulnerabilities and at the same time identify possible attack vectors to use against rival teams. After the initial reconnaissance phase teams were expected to conduct a basic forensic investigation to find ‘flags’ hidden throughout their systems. These ‘flags’ were hidden in images, pcap files, alternative data streams and in plain sight.
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