Category: Hacking Tools

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In one of our previous blogposts, you learnt in detail about website footprinting. In this blogpost, you will learn in detail about dirb tool, a tool often used in website footprinting. DIRB is an open-source web content or directory scanner. It is used to scan for web objects.

DIRB achieves this by using a pre-configured wordlist to perform a dictionary attack on the web server specified as target. The default usage of DIRB is given below.

Here is its output.

Ignore the warnings (-w)

By default, while scanning, it avoids going into any directories that are listable. This makes common sense too. It displays the message saying “directories are testable”. If you want it to scan inside such directories, you can use this option (-w).

Use case-insensitive search (-i)

Usually, DIRB scans uses case-sensitive searches. Setting this option allows to perform case-insensitive searches.

Saving the output (-o)

You can save the output of this tool to a file using the “-o” option.

Scan using a proxy (-p)

For all its awesome features, it produces a lot of noise which can raise suspicions on the target side. To beat this a bit, DIRB provides a option to use a proxy to perform directory busting.

Don’t perform recursive searches (-r)

Setting this option will stop dirb from performing recursive scan of the directories.

Interactive recursion (-R)

Similarly, this option is used to set Interactive Recursion while scanning.

Show pages that don’t exist (-v)

By default, DIRB scans the web server and shows only pages or directories that are found on it. Setting this option will make it show non-existent objects also.

Search for files with a specific extension (-X)

You can use this option if you want to search for files with a particular extension. For example, to search for text files (.txt) extension, we can use dirb as shown below.

You can also search for multiple file extensions using dirb. Just add all the file extensions you want to search for in a text file and use the (-x) option as shown below. For example, to search for all file extensions specified in a file named “ext_text”.

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In one of our previous blogposts, you learnt about network scanning. In this blogpost, you will learn about netdiscover tool. It is an active/passive network address discovering tool that was actually developed to discover wireless networks during wardriving but can also detect addresses on switched networks. It used ARP packets to detect network addresses.

It is mostly used to find the target IP address in hack the box challenges. But it can also be used to scan for network addresses of a network in real-world pen testing. It is installed by default in Kali Linux and we are going to use same for this tutorial.

The simplest way of using netdiscover to find out network addresses is to simply type the command “netdiscover” in the terminal as shown below.

Then it slowly scans for network addresses as shown below. This is how most people use it.

Fast mode

However, you don’t have to wait for netdiscover to finish scanning as long as it takes. You can scan faster with netdiscover too using the “-f” option.

Interface mode

Netdiscover can be set to scan network addresses on a specific network interface you want. For example, on Kali Linux, let’s use the command “ip a” to view all the network interfaces connected to it.

Interface mode can be set with the “-i” option. For example, let’s scan the interface “eth0” as shown below.

Scan a specific range

Similarly, netdiscover can be used to scan a specific range as shown below. For example, let’s scan the range 192.168.248.0/24.

Printable form (-p)

Netdiscover can also display its output in a way easy for printing using the “-p” option.

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In one of our previous blogposts, you learnt in detail about Nmap, the popular port scanner. If you are like me, you thought all those commands, types of scans and options are very difficult to grasp. Well, maybe even the makers of Nmap also thought the same. Hence, they release a GUI version of Nmap called Zenmap.

Zenmap is the official GUI version of Nmap security scanner. It works on almost all platforms (Linux, Windows, mac OSX, BSD etc.). Just like Nmap it is also open-source. In this blogpost you will learn in detail about Zenmap. It can be downloaded from here. Kali Linux has Zenmap in its repository as part of kaboxer. For this tutorial, we will be using this only.

In Kali Linux, open a terminal in kali and type the command “Zenmap-kbx”. If Zenmap is not already installed, the system will prompt you if you want to install it.

Type “y” to install it, Otherwise, it will open Zenmap GUI as shown below.

The interface of Zenmap can be divided in to five sections.

1. Target section
2. Profile section
3. Output section
4. Host / services section
5. Command section
   
   The target section is where we specify a target. The target can be specified in all the variety of ways Nmap allows. The profile section allows you to choose a type of scan. There are various scan options available.

Let’s select Quick scan for now. The command section shows the command for each scan type you select. Yes, you can type the command also directly and run Zenmap here. But if you want to do it, you would have been content with Nmap only. For now, let’s click on ‘scan’. Very soon, the results will be out and can be seen in output section as shown below.

The output section has many other tabs that provide additional information about the target scanned. The ports/hosts tabs show the open ports, type of protocol it uses and the service running on it separately and clearly.

The “Topology” sub-section shows that our attacker machine and target machine in visual form.

You can even zoom on the visual representation for a better view.

The “Host details” tab shows details about the target host separately.

The “scans” section shows all the scans you have performed.

Let’s select a “Regular scan” now.

The “Hosts/services” section provides information about the target host and services running on it.

That was all about Zenmap. See how simple it is to use Zenmap for port scanning.