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!

Mucking about with a fresh copy of Kali brings to attention that it’s packaged with an Armitage that doesn’t correctly work.

I know what you’re thinking… Good. Type the commands into Msfconsole like a real man, y’uh lazy good-fer-naught! And, in practice, that was my immediate solution. But I can’t resist a good tinker when things are misbehaving.

I was anticipating that the problem would be thoroughly solved when I ixquicked it. That was partially correct. Surprised, however, when apt-get update && apt-get upgrade didn’t fix the issue. More surprised at the age of the issue. Most surprised that I could see lots of evidence that users have been plagued by this issue — but no clear work arounds were quickly found.

Guess what we’re doing today?

Okay. The issue is quite minor but just enough to be heartbreaking to the fledgling pentester trying to get a VM off the ground.

In brief, the owner of Armitage’s Github explains:

The MSF Scans feature in Armitage parses output from Metasploit’s portscan/tcp module and uses these results to build a list of targets it should run various Metasploit auxiliary modules against. A recent-ish update to the Metasploit Framework changed the format of the portscan/tcp module output. A patch to fix this issue just needs to account for the new format of the portscan/tcp module.

That is, a colon makes it into the input for the Msfconsole command to define RHOSTS. I.e.: set RHOSTS 172.16.223.150: - 172.16.223.150

An other kind coder tweaked the regex and submitted the patch and pull request, which was successfully incorporated into the project.

Sadly, things have stalled out there. So if this problem is crippling your rig, let’s fix it!

We just want a fresh copy of the project.
root@kali:~/armitage# git clone https://github.com/rsmudge/armitage

Cloning into ‘armitage’…
remote: Counting objects: 7564, done.
remote: Total 7564 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 7564
Receiving objects: 100% (7564/7564), 47.12 MiB | 2.91 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (5608/5608), done.

Kali is Debian-based and we’re going to need Apache Ant:
root@kali:~/armitage# apt-get install ant

Then, we’ll build our new fella:
root@kali:~/armitage# cd armitage
root@kali:~/armitage# ./package.sh

Buildfile: /root/test/armitage/build.xml

clean:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds
Buildfile: /root/test/armitage/build.xml

init:
[mkdir] Created dir: /root/test/armitage/bin

compile:
[javac] Compiling 111 source files to /root/test/armitage/bin
[javac] depend attribute is not supported by the modern compiler
[javac] Note: /root/test/armitage/src/ui/MultiFrame.java uses or overrides a deprecated API.
[javac] Note: Recompile with -Xlint:deprecation for details.
[javac] Note: Some input files use unchecked or unsafe operations.
[javac] Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds
Buildfile: /root/test/armitage/build.xml

init:

compile:

jar:
[unzip] Expanding: /root/test/armitage/lib/sleep.jar into /root/test/armitage/bin
[unzip] Expanding: /root/test/armitage/lib/jgraphx.jar into /root/test/armitage/bin
[unzip] Expanding: /root/test/armitage/lib/msgpack-0.6.12-devel.jar into /root/test/armitage/bin
[unzip] Expanding: /root/test/armitage/lib/postgresql-9.1-901.jdbc4.jar into /root/test/armitage/bin
[unzip] Expanding: /root/test/armitage/lib/javassist-3.15.0-GA.jar into /root/test/armitage/bin
[copy] Copying 4 files to /root/test/armitage/bin/scripts-cortana
[jar] Building jar: /root/test/armitage/armitage.jar
[jar] Building jar: /root/test/armitage/cortana.jar

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 second
armitage/
armitage/readme.txt
armitage/teamserver
armitage/cortana.jar
armitage/armitage.jar
armitage/armitage-logo.png
armitage/armitage
armitage/whatsnew.txt
adding: readme.txt (deflated 55%)
adding: armitage.exe (deflated 49%)
adding: cortana.jar (deflated 5%)
adding: armitage.jar (deflated 5%)
adding: whatsnew.txt (deflated 65%)
armitage/
armitage/readme.txt
armitage/teamserver
armitage/cortana.jar
armitage/armitage.jar
armitage/armitage-logo.png
armitage/armitage
armitage/whatsnew.txt
Archive: ../../armitage.zip
inflating: readme.txt
inflating: armitage.exe
inflating: cortana.jar
inflating: armitage.jar
inflating: whatsnew.txt

And here, best I can guess from messages read, is where a lot of people are running into trouble. We have successfully produced our new working copy of armitage. However, it is in our own local directory and will not be run if we just enter the command: armitage

Let’s review how to figure out what we want to do about that.

First, we want to verify what happens when we run the command armitage.
root@kali:~/armitage# which armitage

/usr/bin/armitage

Good! Let’s check and see what that does!
root@kali:~/armitage# head /usr/bin/armitage

#!/bin/sh

cd /usr/share/armitage/
exec ./armitage “$@”

Almost there! It’s running /usr/share/armitage/armitage with whatever variables we’ve passed in. We’ll check that out.
root@kali:~/armitage# head /usr/share/armitage/armitage

#!/bin/sh
java -XX:+AggressiveHeap -XX:+UseParallelGC -jar armitage.jar $@

We have enough information to assemble a solution.

I trust that the people behind Kali and Armitage will get this corrected so I don’t want to suggest a solution that would replace the armitage command and prevent an updated version from running later. So, let’s just make a temporary replacement?

Hereafter, we can use the command ‘tmparmitage’ (either CLI or ALT-F2) to run our fresh version until things catch up.

And, of course, to save you the time, weary hacker:

Download here:
    armitage_quick_fix.sh

Some time ago I had begun work on my own Pastebin-type project with a few goals. Basically, I wanted to eat all the cakes — and have them too.

The project, honestly, was going swimmingly when derailed by the goings-on of life.

One of the interesting components of the project was, of course, choosing crypto implementations. There are know shortcomings to handling it in JS but that’s still the most convenient for some users. Outside of the browser, server-side, you had all the same questions about which solution was best. Which protocol(s) should be available?

Well, I’ve just learned about a project which I would have loved to have available back then. Project Wycheproof can help you test your crypto solutions against known problems and attacks. Featuring 80 tests probing at 40 known bugs, here’s a snip from the introduction:

Project Wycheproof has tests for the most popular crypto algorithms, including

AES-EAXAES-GCM

AES-GCM

DH

DHIES

DSA

ECDH

ECDSA

ECIES

RSA

The tests detect whether a library is vulnerable to many attacks, including

Invalid curve attacks

Biased nonces in digital signature schemes

Of course, all Bleichenbacher’s attacks

And many more — we have over 80 test cases

Interesting stuff with exciting potential!

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

Last we were discussing the structure and design of your own CLI-centric blog platform, we had some crude methods of starting and resuming posts before publishing.

Today, let’s explore a little more into setting up a bloging-friendly environment because we need to either make the experience of blogging easy or we’ll grow tired of the hassle and lose interest.

We can reasonably anticipate that we won’t want to beleaguered with repetitious typing of HTML bits. If we’re going to apply paragraph tags, hyperlinks, codeblocks, etc. with any frequency, that task is best to be simplified. Using Vim as our preferred editor, we will use Tim Pope’s brilliant plug-ins ‘surround’ and ‘repeat’, combined with abbreviations to take away the tedium.

The plug-ins just need dropped into your Vim plugin directory (~/.vim/plugin/). The directory may not exist if you don’t have any plug-ins yet. That’s no problem, though. Let’s grab the plugins:

Expand the archives into the appropriate directories:

Ta-da! Your Vim is now configured to quickly wrap (surround) in any variety of markup. When working on a blog, you might use <p> tags a lot by putting your cursor amid the paragraph and typing yss<p>. The plug-in will wrap it with opening and closing paragraph tags. Move to your next paragraph and then press . to repeat.

That out of the way, let’s take advantage of Vim’s abbreviations for some customization. In our .vimrc file, we can define a few characters that Vim will expand according to their definition. For example, you might use:
ab <gclb> <code class="prettyprint lang-bsh linenums:1">
Then, any time you type <gclb> and bress <enter>, you’ll get:
<code class="prettyprint lang-bsh linenums:1">

The next time that we take a look at blogitecture, we will focus on making the posts convenient to manage from our CLI.

Recently, I ordered a Yubikey and, in the comments section of the order, I promised to write about the product. At the time, I assumed that there was going to be something about which to write: (at least a few) steps of setting up and configuration or a registration process. They’ve made the task of writing about it difficult, by making the process of using it so easy.

Plug it in. The light turns solid green and you push the button when you need to enter the key. That’s the whole thing!

Physically, the device has a hole for a keychain or it can slip easily into your wallet. It draws power from the USB port on the computer, so there’s none stored in the device, meaning it should be completely unfazed if you accidentally get it wet.

Let’s take a look at the device.

> lsusb | grep Yubico


Bus 005 Device 004: ID 1050:0010 Yubico.com Yubikey

> lsusb -v -s5:4

Bus 005 Device 004: ID 1050:0010 Yubico.com Yubikey
Couldn't open device, some information will be missing
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               2.00
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x1050 Yubico.com
  idProduct          0x0010 Yubikey
  bcdDevice            2.41
  iManufacturer           1 
  iProduct                2 
  iSerial                 0 
  bNumConfigurations      1
  Configuration Descriptor:
    bLength                 9
    bDescriptorType         2
    wTotalLength           34
    bNumInterfaces          1
    bConfigurationValue     1
    iConfiguration          0 
    bmAttributes         0x80
      (Bus Powered)
    MaxPower               30mA
    Interface Descriptor:
      bLength                 9
      bDescriptorType         4
      bInterfaceNumber        0
      bAlternateSetting       0
      bNumEndpoints           1
      bInterfaceClass         3 Human Interface Device
      bInterfaceSubClass      1 Boot Interface Subclass
      bInterfaceProtocol      1 Keyboard
      iInterface              0 
        HID Device Descriptor:
          bLength                 9
          bDescriptorType        33
          bcdHID               1.11
          bCountryCode            0 Not supported
          bNumDescriptors         1
          bDescriptorType        34 Report
          wDescriptorLength      71
         Report Descriptors: 
           ** UNAVAILABLE **
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
        bmAttributes            3
          Transfer Type            Interrupt
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0008  1x 8 bytes
        bInterval              10

There’s not a great deal to be seen here. As it tells you right on Yubico’s site, the device presents as a keyboard and it “types” out its key when you press the button, adding another long and complex password to combine with the long and complex password that you’re already using.

Keep in mind that this device is unable to protect you from keyloggers, some of which are hardware-based. It’s critically important that you are very, very careful about where you’re sticking your Yubikey. Even Yubico cannot protect us from ourselves.