Category: Hacking

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Beginners guide to Nishang

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt about Post-exploitation in detail. In this article, you will learn about Nishang, a post-exploitation framework.

Nishang post-exploitation framework is a collection of PowerShell scripts and payloads that aids us in penetration testing and red teaming. Nishang can be useful in all the phases of penetration testing.

Let’s learn about how Nishang works. For this, we will be using Kali Linux as our attacker system as Nishang is available by default in its repositories. As target, we will be using the same virtual hacking lab but replace the Metasploitable 2 target with Windows 10 for this article.

As you can see in the above image, the PowerShell scripts and payloads of nishang are placed into different folders based on the purpose it fulfils. Let’s see all of them.

Let’s use one of the scripts of nishang in the “Gather” folder. As the name suggests, the scripts in this folder are useful in collecting information about the target. As you already read at the beginning of this article, the role of Nishang comes during Post-exploitation. So, we first need to be gaining access to the target system. For this article, let’s say we have a meterpreter session on the target system as shown below.

Let’s use “check_vm.ps1” script from Nishang for this tutorial. This script checks whether the target system is a virtual machine or not. We use upload command of meterpreter to upload this “check_vm.ps1” script to the target system.

After this, we need to execute this script on the target system. This can be done in two ways. If you have RDP access on the target system, you can just open PowerShell and execute the uploaded script.

By default, PowerShell doesn’t allow execution of scripts for security purposes. So we may need to first bypass this execution policy. It can be done as shown below.

Next, we need to import the script as module and execute it.

As you can see, the result is out. What if you don’t have RDP access on the target system. Then you have to get a shell from meterpreter as shown below and then execute commands just like above.

The result is same. We can use all other scripts of nishang in the same way. Learn about PowerSploit POST-exploitation framework.

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Beginners guide to Uniscan

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogposts, you learnt about various vulnerabilities affecting web apps and websites like Local File Inclusion (LFI), Remote File Inclusion (RFI) and remote command execution (RCE) vulnerabilities. In this blogpost, you will learn about Uniscan, a web vulnerability scanner that scans and detects the above mentioned vulnerabilities in a website or web app.

Uniscan is a simple web vulnerability scanner that scans for LFI, RFI and RCE vulnerabilities. Let’s see how this tool works. For this, we will be using Kali Linux as attacker machine as this tool is available by default in its repositories. As target system, we will be using Metasploitable 2 installed as part of our virtual hacking lab.

Scan a single URL (-u)

All we have to do to scan a website with uniscan is to supply the URL with the (-u) argument as shown below.

Scan for directories (-q)

By enabling this option, we can scan for directories on the target website.

Here, is the result.

Scan for files (-w)

with this option, you can scan for files located on the web server.

Here, is the result.

Scan “robots.txt” and “sitemap.xml” files (-e)

With this option, you can scan the target website’s “robots.txt” and “sitemap.xml” files.

Here are the entries of robots.txt file of our target.

Perform dynamic checks (-d)

The option is useful to perform dynamic checks on the target website.

Perform stating checks (-s)

This option is used to perform static checks on the target. This is the scan that helps in detecting LFI, RFI and RCE vulnerabilities.

Here’s the output.

As you can see in the above image, uniscan detected a LFI vulnerability in the target.

Perform stress checks (-r)

Stress checks help us to see if the target is vulnerable to DoS or DDos attacks.

Fingerprint the server (-j)

With this option, we can perform OS fingerprinting on the target. Uniscan can perform ping, traceroute, nslookup, detect open ports and the services running on them.

Here’s the output.

Combining the scans

All these above explained types of scans can be performed at once as shown below.

Run uniscan in background (-b)

With this option, you can send uniscan to background.

Target multiple URLs at once (-f)

Instead of a single URL, we can scan multiple URLs with uniscan at once. All we have to do is save the URLs you want to scan in a text file and use ‘-f’ option to supply this text file to uniscan as shown below.

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Beginners guide to Ophcrack

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt about password cracking. In this article, you will learn about a tool that cracks Windows log-in passwords offline. The name of this tool is Ophcrack.

Ophcrack is a free, open-source program that uses rainbow tables to crack Windows log-in passwords. It can import hashes in a variety of formats and can even dump them from SAM files of Windows. It can usually crack any password within minutes. It can be downloaded from here. Ophcrack is also available as a a LiveCD distribution that automatically retrieves, decrypts and cracking of passwords from a Windows system. LiveCD’s are available for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Let’s see how Ophcrack works. For this tool to work, you need to have physical access to the computer whose password you want to crack. Let’s download Ophcrack-XP- live cd for this tutorial since I am testing this on a WIndows XP target. After downloading, you need to make a USB boot device out of this image. Then you need to boot from this USB device. This is what you will see as soon as Ophcrack boots.

Then, Ophcrack automatically starts loading and cracking hashes of passwords of the user accounts from the target system.

As you can see, Ophcrack cracked the password of user “Administrator”. The password is ‘123456’. All this happens automatically. On the statistics tab, you can see the stats of this tool.

On the preferences tab, you can set the preferences for this tool.

You can even load a single hash, PWDUMP file, session file or encrypted SAM file as shown below.

You have read at the beginning of this article that this tool this uses rainbow tables to crack Windows passwords. In the “Tables” option, you can see all the tables installed. You can also download and install other tables as required.

You can save the file with cracked passwords using “save” option. On the Ophcrack logout option, you can see cracked passwords or you can shutdown or reboot the system.

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Beginners guide to PHPSploit

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you have learnt what is backdoor. In this blogpost, you will learn about PHPSploit, a backdoor for web servers. PHPSploit is a fully featured command & control (C&C) framework that is used for persistence on web servers after gaining access. Let’s see how PHPSploit works and learn about its functions.

For this, we will be using Kali Linux as PHPSploit is available for download on Kali’s repositories by default. As target system, we will be using Metasploitable2 as part of our virtual hacking lab. Let’s see how it works.

PHPSploit can be started using the command shown below.

phpsploit

To place the PHPSploit backdoor on any target system, all you have to do is insert a PHP one liner into the code of the website. The PHP one liner is given below.

<?php @eval($_SERVER['HTTP-PHPSPLOIT']); ?>

I copy the above script into a PHP file named “bd.php” and upload this file to the target web server after web server hacking.

After uploading this file to the target web server, open PHPSploit on attacker system (Kali) and set the URL of the PHP backdoor as target as shown below. Then we have to run the command “exploit”. This gives us access as shown below.

Once the exploit is successful, the interface of PHPSploit shows the target IP address or the domain name on which we installed the backdoor. To view all the commands PHPSploit supports, type command “help”.

For example, let’s try “phpinfo” command that gives us the information about the web server.

To know the user account with whose privileges you compromised the target system, you have to use the “whoami” command.

PHPSploit also supports file system commands like cd, pwd, cat, ls etc.

Cat command can be used to view the contents of files on the target system. For example, let’s view the “/etc/passwd” file on the target Metasploitable2 system.

We can also download files from the target web server. For example, let’s download “/etc/passwd” file from the target system to the “/tmp” directory of our attacker system.

Here is the downloaded file.

Similarly, we can also upload files to the target system using the “upload” command. For example, let’s upload the meterpreter binary to the target system as shown below.

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Beginners guide to msfpc

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt how to create payloads with msfvenom. In this blogpost, you will learn about MSFPC (MSFvenom payload creator), a tool that simplifies generation of Metasploit payloads with msfvenom.

MSFvenom payload creator (MSFPC) is a wrapper to generate multiple types of payloads based on users choice. The concept of this tool is to be as simple as possible while generating a payload.

Let’s see how to use this tool. For this, we will be using Kali Linux, as msfpc is installed by default on Kali Linux.

The simplest way to create a payload using MSFPC is to specify the type of payload you want. MSFPC can generate APK, ASP, ASPx, bash (-sh), Java (.jsp), Linux (.elf), OSX (macOS), Perl (.pl), PHP, PowerShell (.ps1), Python, Tomcat (.war) and Windows (.exe or dll) payloads.

For example, let’s see how to generate an exe payload.

The only option we need to set to create a payload with msfpc is the attacker system’s IP address or the listener address which can be selected from the given options. All other options are automatically set.

By default, this tool creates a reverse shell payload. We can also create a bind shell payload as shown below.

By default the listening port of the generated payload is set to 443. This can be changed as shown below.

We can also create payloads with this tool by specifying the target operating system.

MSFPC creates staged payloads by default. We can also create stageless payload as as shown below.