c0d3 :: j0rg3

I’m not entirely certain when BackTrack/Kali began behaving more like a regular desktop distro but I seem to recall that originally, networking subsystems were down when you booted up into Run Level 3. It was up to you to turn on the interfaces and fire up a GUI if such was desired. IMO, that’s precisely how it should be. I get it. Most of us aren’t ever won’t ever find ourselves in a clandestine lot, inside of a snack and caffeine filled, non-descript, conversion van with a Yagi pointed at the bubble-window, ready to pilfer innocent datums just trying to get by in this lossy-protocoled, collision-rife, world.

Rather, very many of us just want the stinking box online so we can run through our tutorials and hack our own intentionally vulnerable VMs. A thorough taste of hacking’s un-glamorous underbelly is quite enough for many.

I’m confident that the BT fora were inundated with fledgling hackers complaining that their fresh install couldn’t find WiFi or didn’t load the desktop. However, I feel that distros dedicated to the Red Team should try to instill good habits. Having your machine boot and activate an interface announcing your presence and spewing out MAC and hostname is bad for business. Booting into a (comparatively) heavy GUI is also not where I want to begin.

Let’s imagine that we’re trying to crack into a thing. Don’t we want to apply maximal CPU resources, rather than having GUI elements bringing little beyond cost? If you notice, very many of the related tools still live on the CLI. The typical course of development (e.g.: Nmap, Metasploit) is that the CLI version is thoroughly developed before someone drops a GUI atop (respectively: Zenmap, Armitage).

So let’s take our Kali and make a few quick changes. We want to boot up in text/CLI mode and we want networking left off until we choose to make noise. Further, we want to randomize our MAC address and hostname at every boot.

We’ll use iwconfig to enumerate our wireless interfaces.
lo        no wireless extensions.

wlan1     IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"ESSID"
          Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 17:23:53:96:BE:67
          Bit Rate=72.2 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-21 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:253 Invalid misc:400 Missed beacon:0

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11 ESSID:off/any
          Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm
          Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:on

We have two wireless interfaces: wlan0, wlan1

Okay, first let’s configure to start up in text mode:
> systemctl set-default multi-user.target
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/default.target → /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.

Traditionally from text mode, we bring up the GUI desktop with the command startx. Since we don’t yet have that command, let’s create it:
> echo "systemctl start gdm3.service" > /usr/sbin/startx && chmod +x /usr/sbin/startx


Disable network-manager autostart:
> systemctl disable network-manager.service
> sed -i 's/5min/30sec/' /etc/systemd/system/network-online.target.wants/networking.service


Now, let’s randomize our hostname and MAC addresses at every boot by adding some cronjobs:
> crontab -e

We’ll add two jobs to randomize MAC address and one for our host name:
@reboot macchanger -r wlan0
@reboot macchanger -r wlan1
@reboot hostname `strings /dev/urandom | grep -o '[[:alnum:]]' | head -n 30 | tr -d '\n'`


We ‘re good! We’ve improved efficiency by staving off the GUI for when we genuinely want it and improved anonymity by randomizing some common ways of identifying the rig.

Recently I decided that I wanted my blog to be available inside of the Deep, Dark Onion (Tor).

First time around, I set up a proxy that I modified to access only the clear web version of the blog and to avail that inside Tor as a ‘hidden service’.

My blog is hosted on equipment provided by the kind folk at insomnia247.nl and I found that, within a week or so, the address of my proxy was blocked. It’s safe for us to assume that it was simply because of the outrageous popularity it received inside Tor.

By “safe for us to assume” I mean that it is highly probable that no significant harm would come from making that assumption. It would not be a correct assumption, though.

What’s more true is that within Tor things are pretty durn anonymous. Your logs will show Tor traffic coming from 127.0.0.1 only. This is a great situation for parties that would like to scan sites repeatedly looking for vulnerabilities — because you can’t block them. They can scan your site over and over and over. And the more features you have (e.g., comments, searches, any form of user input), the more attack vectors are plausible.

So why not scan endlessly? They do. Every minute of every hour.

Since insomnia247 is a provider of free shells, it is incredibly reasonable that they don’t want to take the hit for that volume of traffic. They’re providing this service to untold numbers of other users, blogs and projects.

For that reason, I decided to set up a dedicated mirror.

Works like this: my blog lives here. I have a machine at home which uses rsync to make a local copy of this blog. Immediately thereafter it rsyncs any newly gotten data up to the mirror in onionland.

After consideration, I realized that this was also a better choice just in case there is something exploitable in my blog. Instead of even risking the possibility that an attacker could get access to insomnia247, they can only get to my completely disposable VPS which has hardly anything on it except this blog and a few scripts to which I’ve already opened the source code.

I’ve not finished combing through but I’ve taken efforts to ensure it doesn’t link back to clear web. To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Tor users will only appear as the IP address of their exit node and should still remain anonymous. To me, it’s just onion etiquette. You let the end-user decide when they want to step outside.

To that end, the Tor mirror does not have the buttons to share to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus.

That being said, if you’re a lurker of those Internet back-alleys then you can find the mirror at: http://aacnshdurq6ihmcs.onion

Happy hacking, friends!

Happy new year! New year means new servers, right?

That provides its own set of interesting circumstances!

The server we’re investigating in this scenario was chosen for being a dedicated box in a country that has quite tight privacy laws. And it was a great deal offered on LEB.

So herein is the fascinating bit. The rig took a few days for the provider to set up and, upon completion, the password for SSHing into the root account was emailed out. (o_0)

In very security-minded considerations, that means that there was a window of opportunity for bad guys to work on guessing the password before its owner even tuned in. That window remains open until the server is better secured. Luckily, there was a nice interface for reinstalling the OS permitting its purchaser to select a password.

My preferred approach was to script the basic lock-down so that we can reinstall the base OS and immediately start closing gaps.

In order:

In this post, we’re focused on the first two steps.

The tasks to be handled are:

We’ll use ssh-keygen to generate a key — and stick with RSA for ease. If you’d prefer ECC then you’re probably reading the wrong blog but feel encouraged to contact me privately.

The code:

We just run this script soon as the OS is reinstalled and we’re substantially safer. As a Deb8 install, quickly pulling down fail2ban and PortSentry makes things quite a lot tighter.

In another post, we’ll visit the 2017 version of making a DIY script to batten the hatches using a variety of publicly provided blocklists.

Download here:
    ssh_quick_fix.sh

Seems I’ve always just a few more things going on than I can comfortably handle. One of those is an innocent little server holding the beginnings of a new project.

If you expose a server to the Internet, very quickly your ports are getting scanned and tested. If you’ve an SSH server, there are going to be attempts to login as ‘root’ which is why it is ubiquitously advised that you disable root login. Also why many advise against allowing passwords at all.

We could talk for days about improvements; it’s usually not difficult to introduce some form of two-factor authentication (2FA) for sensitive points of entry such as SSH. You can install monitoring software like Logwatch which can summarize important points from your logs, such as: who has logged via SSH, how many times root was used, etc.

DenyHosts works primarily with SSH and asks very little from you in way of configuration, especially if you’re using a package manager to install a version that is configured for the distribution on which you’re working. If you’re installing from source you may need to find where are your SSH logs (e.g., /var/log/secure, /var/log/auth.log). It’s extremely easy to set up DenyHosts to synchronize so that you’re automatically blocking widely-known offenders whether or not they’re after your server.

In contrast, Fail2ban is going to take more work to get set up. However, it is extremely configurable and works with any log file you point it toward which means that it can watch anything (e.g., FTP, web traffic, mail traffic). You define your own jails which means you can ban problematic IP addresses according to preference. Ban bad HTTP attempts from HTTP only or stick their noses in the virtual corner and don’t accept any traffic from them until they’ve served their time-out by completely disallowing their traffic. You can even use Fail2ban to scan its own logs, so repeating offenders can be locked out for longer.

Today we’re going to assume that you’ve a new server that shouldn’t be seeing any traffic except from you and any others involved in the project. In that case, you probably want to block traffic pretty aggressively. If you’ve physical access to the server (or the ability to work with staff at the datacenter) then it’s better to err in the direction of accidentally blocking good guys than trying to be overly fault-tolerant.

The server we’re working on today is a Debian Wheezy system. It has become a common misconception that Ubuntu and Debian are, intents and purposes, interchangeable. They’re similar in many respects and Ubuntu is great preparation for using Debian but they are not the same. The differences, I think, won’t matter for this exercise but I am unsure because this was written using Wheezy.

Several minutes after bringing my new server online, I started seeing noise in the logs. I was still getting set up and really didn’t want to stop and take protective measures but there’s no point in securing a server after its been compromised. The default Fail2ban configuration was too forgiving for my use. It was scanning for 10 minutes and banning for 10 minutes. Since only a few people should be accessing this server, there’s no reason for anyone to be trying a different password every 15 minutes (for hours).

I found a ‘close-enough’ script and modified it. Here, we’ll deal with a simplified version.

First, lets create a name for these ne’er-do-wells in iptables:
iptables -N bad_traffic

For this one, we’ll use Perl. We’ll look at our Apache log files to find people sniffing ‘round and we’ll block their traffic. Specifically, we’re going to check Apache’s ‘error.log’ for the phrases ‘File does not exist’ and ‘client denied by server configuration’ and block people causing those errors. This would be excessive for servers intended to serve the general populace. For a personal project, it works just fine as a ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ sign.

That gives us some great, utterly unforgiving, blockage. Looking at the IP addresses attempting to pry, I noticed that most of them were on at least one of the popular block-lists.

So let’s make use of some of those block-lists! I found a program intended to apply those lists locally but, of course, it didn’t work for me. Here’s a similar program; this one will use ipset for managing the block-list though only minor changes would be needed to use iptables as above:

#!/bin/bash
IP_TMP=ip.tmp
IP_BLACKLIST_TMP=ip-blacklist.tmp

IP_BLACKLIST=ip-blacklist.conf

WIZ_LISTS="chinese nigerian russian lacnic exploited-servers"

BLACKLISTS=(
"http://danger.rulez.sk/projects/bruteforceblocker/blist.php" # BruteForceBlocker IP List
"http://rules.emergingthreats.net/blockrules/compromised-ips.txt" # Emerging Threats - Compromised IPs
"http://www.spamhaus.org/drop/drop.txt" # Spamhaus Don't Route Or Peer List (DROP)
"http://www.spamhaus.org/drop/edrop.txt" # Spamhaus Don't Route Or Peer List (DROP) Extended
"http://cinsscore.com/list/ci-badguys.txt" # C.I. Army Malicious IP List
"http://www.openbl.org/lists/base.txt" # OpenBL.org 90 day List
"http://www.autoshun.org/files/shunlist.csv" # Autoshun Shun List
"http://lists.blocklist.de/lists/all.txt" # blocklist.de attackers
)

for address in "${BLACKLISTS[@]}"
do
echo -e "\nFetching $address\n"
curl "$address" >> $IP_TMP
done

for list in $WIZ_LISTS
do
wget "http://www.wizcrafts.net/$list-iptables-blocklist.html" -O - >> $IP_TMP
done

wget 'http://wget-mirrors.uceprotect.net/rbldnsd-all/dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net.gz' -O - | gunzip | tee -a $IP_TMP

grep -o '^[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}[/][0-9]\{1,3\}' $IP_TMP | tee -a $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP
grep -o '^[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}[^/]' $IP_TMP | tee -a $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP

sed -i 's/\t//g' $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP
sort -u $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP | tee $IP_BLACKLIST

rm $IP_TMP
rm $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP

wc -l $IP_BLACKLIST

if hash ipset 2>/dev/null
then
ipset flush bloxlist
while IFS= read -r ip
do
ipset add bloxlist $ip
done < $IP_BLACKLIST
else
echo -e '\nipset not found\n'
echo -e "\nYour bloxlist file is: $IP_BLACKLIST\n"
fi


Download here:
    bad_traffic.pl
    bloxlist.sh

My primary machines are *nix or BSD variants, though I certainly have some Windows-based rigs also. Today we’re going to share some love with Windows 7 and PowerShell.

One of my favorite utilities is Synergy. If you’re not already familiar it allows to you seamlessly move from the desktop of one computer to another with the same keyboard and mouse. It even supports the clipboard so you might copy text from a GNU/Linux box and paste it in a Windows’ window. Possibly, they have finished adding drag and drop to the newer versions. I am not sure because I run a relatively old version that is supported by all of the machines that I use regularly.

What’s the problem, then? The problem was that I was starting my Synergy client by hand. Even more disturbing, I was manually typing the IP address at work and at home, twice or more per weekday. This behavior became automated by my brain and continued for months unnoticed. But this is no kind of life for a geek such as myself, what with all this superfluous clicking and tapping!

Today, we set things right!

In my situation, the networks that I use happen to assign IP addresses from different subnets. If you’ve not the convenience of that situation then you might need to add something to the script. Parsing an ipconfig/ifconfig command, you could possibly use something like the Default Gateway or the Connection-specific DNS Suffix. Alternatively, you could check for the presence of some network share, a file on server or anything that would allow you to uniquely identify the surroundings.

As I imagined it, I wanted the script to accomplish the following things

• see if Synergy is running (possibly from the last location), if so ask if we need to kill it and restart so we can identify a new server
• attempt to locate where we are and connect to the correct Synergy server
• if the location is not identified, ask whether to start the Synergy client

This is how I accomplished that task:

Then I saved the script in "C:\Program Files\SynergyStart\", created a shortcut and used the Change Icon button to make the same as Synergy’s and made the Target:
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -WindowStyle Hidden & 'C:\Program Files\SynergyStart\synergy.ps1'

Lastly, I copied the shortcut into the directory of things that run when the system starts up:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Now, Synergy connects to the needed server at home and work. If it can’t figure out where it is, it asks if it should run it at all.

As they say, a millisecond saved is a millisecond earned.

This post was very nearly published without a Linux equivalent. Nearly.

Same trick for bash/zsh: #!/bin/zsh

# Define Synergy server IP addresses
synergyServerWork="192.168.111.11"
synergyServerHome="192.168.222.22"

# Define partial IP addresses that will indicate which server to use
synergyWorkSubnets=("192.168.111" "192.168.115")
synergyHomeSubnets=("192.168.222" "192.168.225")

# Path to Synergy Client (synergyc)
synergyClientProgram="/usr/bin/synergyc"

# Path to QuickSyngery, for when we cannot identify the network
synergyLauncherProgram="/usr/bin/quicksynergy"

# Remove path and file extension to give us the process name
processName=`basename $synergyClientProgram`

# Grab current IP address, assumes '192' is in use. (e.g., 192.168.1.1)
currentIPaddress=`ip addr show | grep 192 | awk "{print $2}" | sed 's/inet //;s/\/.*//;s/ //g'`

# Find the subnet of current IP address
location=`echo $currentIPaddress | cut -d '.' -f 1,2,3`

for i in "${synergyWorkSubnets[@]}"
do
if [ "${i}" = "${location}" ]
then
break
fi
done

#main

# If Synergy client is already running, do we need to restart it?
running=`ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $processName`
if [ $running ]
then
if `zenity --question --ok-label="Yes" --cancel-label="No" --text="Synergy is running.\nClose and start again?"`
then
pkill $processName
else
exit
fi
fi

# Do we recognize the current network?
for i in "${synergyWorkSubnets[@]}"
do
if [ "${i}" = "${location}" ]
then
notify-send "IP:$currentIPaddress Server:$synergyServerWork [WORK]"
$synergyClientProgram $synergyServerWork
exit
fi
done

for i in "${synergyHomeSubnets[@]}"
do
if [ "${i}" = "${location}" ]
then
notify-send "IP:$currentIPaddress Server:$synergyServerWork [HOME]"
$synergyClientProgram $synergyServerHome
exit
fi
done

if `zenity --question --ok-label="Yes" --cancel-label="No" --text="Network not recognized by IP address: $currentIPaddress\nLaunch Synergy?"`
then
$synergyLauncherProgram
fi


To get it to run automatically, you might choose to call the script from /etc/init.d/rc.local.

Download here:
  PowerShell:
    synergy.ps1
  GNU/Linux:
    synergy.sh

The other day, I was updating one of my systems and I noticed that it had decided to communicate with me in Chinese. Since I don’t know a lick of Chinese, it made for a clumsy exchange.

It was Linux Mint (an Ubuntu variant), so a snip of the output from an ‘apt-get upgrade’ looked like this:

I’m pretty sure I caused it — but there’s no telling what I was working on and how it slipped past me. Anyway, it’s not a difficult problem to fix but I imagine it could look like big trouble.

So, here’s what I did:
> locale

The important part of the output was this:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=zh_CN.UTF-8


If you want to set your system to use a specific editor, you can set $EDITOR=vi and then you’re going to learn that some programs expect the configuration to be set in $VISUAL and you’ll need to change it there too.

In a similar way, many things were using the en_US.UTF-8 set in LANG, but other things were looking to LANGUAGE and determining that I wanted Chinese.

Having identified the problem, the fix was simple. Firstly, I just changed it in my local environment:
> LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

That solved the immediate problem but, sooner or later, I’m going to reboot the machine and the Chinese setting would have come back. I needed to record the change somewhere for the system to know about it in the future.

> vim /etc/default/locale

Therein was the more permanent record, so I changed LANGUAGE there also, giving the result:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=”en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=”en_US.UTF-8”
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

And now, the computer is back to using characters that I (more-or-less) understand.