From Ping to Pwn - Part 2: Attack

This post will be updated constantly and is essentially a live draft.

In Part 1 we found out all the vulnerabilities in our target system that we could. This is where we're going to initiate attacks and (hopefully) pwn the machine.

Layer 2 Attacks
There's a few things we can try (and honestly, easily mitigate afterwards) to get information from the switches in our network. Unfortunately I don't have a switch in my network so the results may not be useful, but in a pen test we won't know if there's a switch or not and there's only one way to find out!

I'm going to go over five layer 2 attacks, DHCP starvation, CAM table overflow, VLAN hopping, STP root hijacking, and ARP poisoning.

Let's first try the ones that will be against the switches themselves opposed to any router/firewall in the network (so everything but ARP and DHCP).

CAM tables are where a switch stores all of its known MAC addresses, allowing it to switch packets to the appropriate port. Especially on older switches, the number of entries in this table is limited, and as to not interrupt (drop) network traffic, when it reaches it's limit it simple floods the network; every packet is going to go to our every port in hopes it reaches it's intended recipient. And thanks to STP it will ripple to every switch in the network!

Easiest way to do this is to specify the egress interface, opposed to a target.

This will allow us to reconstruct TCP streams on the network, and essentially sniff all traffic going through the switching network in our VLAN. You'll need to have Wireshark running when this happens, just keep that in mind; this will also cause the network to be really slow due to congestion, and if the target has any sort of network monitoring like SolarWinds set up they'll be able to see this happen.

Next up is going to be VLAN hopping, if we do this, we can repeat the above to get information about the other subnets that might be out there. VLAN hopping is done by exploiting a broken default config in switches (Cisco specifically from my experience) which allows DTP (dynamic trunking protocal) to be negotiated on a whim. Morale of the story, turn off DTP and for the love of god don't use VLAN1 on your network. This attack along with STP root hijacking, I unfortunately can't test because I don't have a switch! But both are done using Yersinia (in Kali, and looks like BT5, Yersinia's ncurses GUI is broken, so use the GTK GUI).

For VLAN hopping:

Select DTP tab
Select neighbour from list
Click Launch Attack from top left
Select enable trunking and press OK

For STP root hijacking:

Select STP tab
Select neighbour from list
Click Launch attack from top left
Select claiming root role and press OK

Both of these attacks will require Wireshark logging to get anything useful. With VLAN hopping you'll be able to sniff (and reconstruct) VoIP streams fairly easily.

That leaves DHCP starvation, and ARP poisoning. Both will allow for MiTM attacks on the network; should be noted that most NGFWs these days won't allow this sort of stuff to happen, but A LOT of people are running legacy gear so it's worth a shot.

DHCP Starvation:

Again in Yersinia
Select DHCP tab
Click Launch Attack
Select sending discover packets
Click Launch

After this is going, it'll use up all the DHCP addresses on the network, once this happens we can position ourselves as a DHCP server responding to all DHCP DISCOVER requests and allow us to be the gateway for all traffic, we'll be able to see all traffic in the network. We can attempt DHCP spoofing with Ettercap.

And lastly for the ARP poisoning we can actually use a different tool that isn't Yersinia! Ettercap.

-Tq means text-only and quiet (non-verbose) mode. -i is interface, -w output file, -M is MitM mode, and the IPs are the target and the default gateway.

arp_poison.cap

Now this one actually did work, but it can be pretty noisy, below you can see what happens when I run it on my entire subnet. So be careful when selecting your target.

My host firewall (Glasswire) detecting ARP changes.

Ettercap is a brilliant tool and definitely something to reach for when you're actually in the network; you can actually do live SSL decryption attacks with it by spoofing SSL certs. The manual is something worth checking out. Sadly these types of attacks are becoming less and less and viable due to network visibility and firewalls like Palo Alto. We'll go over mitigation towards the end of this series.

Continuing on!

Port 21 - FTP
If you remember, we went through ports one at a time, so we're going to be getting started with FTP.

Here's the exploit that we found.

We'll need to load up the exploit and assign our target to it. Each exploit has local variables it uses to exploit with. We can however, assign a global variables (such as RHOST, which is the target) as we're only attacking a single machine; let's just use local variables for now.

Well that was pretty easy. Let's keep going.

Since we're root, we can access most things. Lets first grab the shadow file and the passwd files so we can use them later. These are found in /etc/. This isn't an actual Meterpreter shell so we can't use the download commands, but if we shove the session into the background, the session will stay open so we can interact with it using other modules.

Note the "unshadowed password file", hashdump took the passwd file and the shadow file and combined them for us so we don't have to do it manually once we load it into John the Ripper to attempt a crack. It also conveniently stashed it in the "loot" directory for future access.

I killed this before it finished because the one username that's left, root, is too complex for John to brute force, especially since I'm using a very slow VM.

So if we want to keep going with password cracking, there's two things we can try, a dictionary attack or a GPU-based hash brute force. Let's try both.

Kali includes a wordlist we can use for our attempt at /usr/share/wordlists/. For simplicity's sake I put just root's hash into a separate file.

root is the username
$1 shows us that this is an MD5 encryption
$/avpfBJ1 is the salt
$x0z8w5UF9Iv./DR9E9Lid. is the actual hash

John wasn't able to find the password using the wordlist that's included in Kali. But surely there's more words than what's in there. I already have downloaded a 15GB wordlist file we can try, and since I have a pretty powerful GPU, let's try using Hashcat.

Quick breakdown of Hashcat options we're using:
-m is the attack method, 500 suggests MD5(unix)
-a is the attack method, 0 is dictionary attack
-o assigns an out file where any recovered passwords will be written to.

So it didn't look like it was able to find a match. We can configure Hashcat to account for additional variants by changing our attack type to hybrid dictionary + mask (-a 6). This attack type allows us to combine our wordlists with a mask. A mask may contain any number of the following five variables:

?l attempts every combination of a-z
?u attempts every combination of A-Z
?d attempts every combination of 0-9
?s attempts every combination of special characters
?a attempts every combination of a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and special characters.

I ran some variables for half a day and didn't get any match. Brute force was also going to take 3 days for 8-character length passwords, I cancelled it early as seen below:

-m is the encryption method, in this case it's MD5(unix) which is 500, -a is the attack mode, 3 for brute force, and -o specifies our outfile.

Port 22 - SSH
With SSH we found that Nessus detected a viable vulnerability regarding predictable RSA keys. Unfortunately, reading over the documentation on this exploit reveals that we need the public key for this exploit to work, so we'll need that first. Luckily we just found some credentials to play with.

We can go back into the session we already had open with the FTP exploit and grab the authorized_key file from root's SSH directory.

We can use this with the downloaded RSA key list from the exploit page itself. The vulnerability that we're trying to exploit relies on the fact that RSA key generation (in older versions of OpenSSH) weren't so random as they were originally believed to be. There was a total of 32,767 possible keys for any given architecture. More info on this can be found here. Continuing on...

Now that we have the authorized keys from the target machine, lets run it against the public key list we have to see if there's a match we can use to attempt an SSH connection.

Okay, so that didn't work, the key is blacklisted due to this vulnerability being known. After seeing this I did some Googling around and saw other people, attacking this same machine, being successful and were prompted to continue anyway. I can't seem to get that to come up so let's just chalk this up to it doesn't work. And if you're wondering about the Python script we found on the exploit-db page:

The script will essentially dictionary attack the SSH service on the target using the RSA key list we have, this way you can attack the service itself without having the public key already. The variable at the end denotes keys-per-second. It didn't work either.

Port 23 - Telnet
So what do we know. Nmap tells us that the target machine is running plain out Linux telnetd. Nessus is telling us that they're using unencrypted telnet, which would be good if this was a live host and we could MiTM it, but alas, we cannot. What's left to try? Let's explore Hydra.

From the hashes we cracked earlier, we can create a file which to give to Hydra of usernames and passwords and see who has authorization to access telnet on the machine. We only have a handful of users and can probably go about this manually, but say you compromise a server with a hundred users on it, would you want to do that manually? I don't think so!

Now we know that all the logins we got from John are good for Telnet access. Now, Hydra is capable of brute-forcing using a user list and a password list - it'll just take a very, very, very long time on my VM.

From Ping to Pwn - Part 1: Recon & Scanning

This post will be updated constantly and is essentially a live draft.

I've had a hard time finding pentest labs/how-tos/etc that are complete (without paying $1000+ on training). Most things include tid bits that they expect you to put together, well my brain needs structure so I'm going to do it myself. I've noticed a lot of people complaining that CEH isn't practical and that you should be doing OSCP, or eCCPT, or GPEN or whatever else is out there. I think this is a misconception - CEH is practical, they just don't test you on it.

This isn't going to cover everything, because I'm using Metasploitable 2 for a victim, meaning no Windows-based hacks, but it should be good enough to get your (and my) head around the methodology and tools used in your average grey box pen test. I'm also not going to go into depth about setting up Kali, Metasploit, or any other tools that I'll be using (Nessus, etc).

First up, reconnaissance.

Since this is a grey box pen test, meaning I know a little bit about the victim but not everything; we're in a closet somewhere plugged into an access switch; lets start off with a look around the LAN.

Fire up the Metasploit and create a new workspace - this will allow us to organize all our findings in a database for later reference. We'll need this information for our report at the end.

Before we get to scanning, let say we don't have a DHCP server, or we do and it's locked down with MAC reservations, we can plug into the network all we want but without an IP address we're not gonna get very far. Luckily layer 2 doesn't operate with an IP address.

The first thing we can try to do is just fire up Wireshark and see if anything comes in. If we're on an access port with other hosts, we should see some broadcast traffic at the very least.

My Juniper is very noisy.

You can see above that my Juniper is harassing my LAN with ARPs. This tells us that there's a Juniper firewall on the network acting as the gateway, and we can also see the local subnet (10.10.1.0/24) for the VLAN we're connected to. From here we can try a couple Layer-2 attacks to gather more information; these aren't necessarily things you want to be doing when you're trying to be stealthy but in a professional pen-test they'll need to be done to ensure there's no gaps in your network. I'm going to put the Layer 2 attacks at the top of the second post in this series to keep all attacks organized, in a real hack you'll be bouncing back and forth between every phase outlined in the CEH, but for the purpose of this series it's going to attempt to keep them separate.

Now lets do a ping sweep of the LAN (based on the IP our Kali box has via DHCP) for potential targets. If you've ever looked at the manual for nmap, you know there's a couple dozen options and based solely on CEH content, it's hard to know when to use what. 

TCP uses a three-way-handshake, SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK. Nmap uses this in the following way (by default): I send a SYN packet to my target, if I receive a RST, the port is closed, if I receive a SYN-ACK the port is open. Simple. Ok back to what we were talking about...

The lab network I'm using doesn't have an IPS, and the target doesn't have HIDS or a firewall configured (but I do have a stateful firewall in between) - but if I'm a hacker, I'm not supposed to know that. So let's try some evasion techniques.

The first thing you wanna do is  use ACK - this way IF there is a firewall on the host, you'll be able to know pretty easily, and you'll also decrease your chance of detection as the firewall (probably) won't log ingress ACKs (I say probably because it depends on your firewall). Using the db_nmap command directly from Metasploit allows us to log all of our findings to the workspace database we created earlier.

The unfiltered result tells us there is no firewall present on the machine.

Following this we can do a TCP SYN scan on the target knowing that we're not going to trigger the firewall. To avoid any inline IPS or SIEM we can do our scan slowly using the -T option, -T0 for insanely slow and -T5 for very fast (-T3 is the default); hopefully this way no scanning patterns will be picked up.

Small breakdown of Nmap options:

TCP SYN Scan

nmap -sS <target>

The SYN scan is the default and most popular scan option. It's fast and relatively unobtrusive and stealthy. This is also known as a half-open TCP scan, as it does not complete the TCP handshake.

TCP Connect Scan

nmap -sT <target>

Similar to above, however it does open a connection (full three-way handshake) to the target machine, thus it's not as stealthy.

Version detection

nmap -sV <target>

Uses a TCP SYN scan to find open ports and fingerprints them, attempting to identify services running. Additional does a banner grab, which is displayed in the info column of our services output in Metasploit.

Ping Scan

nmap -sP <target>

Probably the simplest Nmap function, simply checks if hosts respond to ICMP packets.

Operating System detection

nmap -O <target>

Attempts to identify the operating system. This also ID's any open ports.

You can use the --osscan_limit in conjunction with this to only do a service scan and ignore the OS detection.

Another useful option is -PN, which runs scans regardless if the host is alive. It does this by omitting ICMP-based health checks against the target machine. This is useful for evading firewalls and IPS devices in the network as they can easily pick up ping sweeps.

I should use this time to point out one of the best resources on nmap and network scanning is Secrets of Network Cartography by James Messer - definitely worth a read.

Another thing you can attempt, which is going to be good if you've got a server you know is in the network, such as a DNS server, is a Zombie Scan (AKA Idle Scan). You'll be able to mascaraed your scan's source address as another on the LAN. The first thing you want to do is identify an idle machine on the network. It's important it's idle so we can use it to essentially relay our scan. It's going to do this by first telling us it's IP ID - this is a counter in the header of every IP packet the system sends out. It's going to work something like this:

We send out our SYN to our target using the zombie's IP as the source address, if the IP ID of our zombie increase by two (SYN-ACK, ACK) then we know the port is open, if it increased by one (RST) then we know the port is closed. But before that we need to ID a zombie, Metasploit has an auxiliary module for us to use for this purpose.

Hosts returning "Incremental" are gonna be our Zombies.

So there's only two zombies in my home network that we can play with.

-Pn treats all hosts as alive, --source-port is source port spoofing, --data-length changes the packet size to avoid detection based on 58-byte default length of nmap scans, and -sI is our idle scan, the first IP being the zombie, the second our target.

The response from my firewall.

Unfortunately it looks like none of them work (probably because my firewall is preventing it), this is something that's gonna happen during most tests. Lets continue with using the CEH-default scan.

The db_nmap command ensures all data is saved to our workspace database.

Using the hosts command we can see the list of hosts in our network that the Nmap scan found.

And the services command to see the ports open on each machine.

And with that we have our initial scan complete and successfully identified our target (sort of obvious with every service possible running on it, it's not called Metasploitable for no reason!).