Blog - Page 47 of 49 - Hackercool Magazine

Posted on September 12, 2013August 5, 2023 by kanishka10 — 2 Comments

Configure UrlScan on IIS7.5 and IIS8

UrlScan is a security tool used to restrict types of HTTP requests that IIS will process. It is a simple tool which is very helpful in blocking harmful requests to the server. It seemingly supports only IIS 5.1, IIS 6.0, and IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It has been deprecated since IIS 7.5 and IIS 8. It is said that Microsoft has included the features of UrlScan in request filtering option for IIS 7.5 and IIS 8. But it definitely is not a match for the simplicity of UrlScan. Today I am going to show you how to configure UrlScan in IIS 7.5 and IIS8. (IIS 7.5 is available in Windows server 2008 R2 and IIS 8 is available in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 ).

I am going to configure this in Windows server 2012 i.e IIS 8 but do not worry the configuration steps are similar in IIS 7.5. First and foremost install Web Platform Installer in your machine. This will help us to install all the components we require in simple steps. From web platform installer, select component IIS 6 metabase compatibility. This is compulsory to install URLscan.

Then, select IIS ISAPI Filters. (ISAPI filters may already be installed in IIS 7.5 ).

Click on Install. You are shown a review of components you selected to install. Click on I accept.

The components are installed and will show you a Finish screen. Click on Finish.

We are all set to install UrlScan. Download Urlscan and click on the msi package. On the window, select the option “I select the terms of license agreement” and click on “Install”.

The installation is very quick. Once it finishes,click on “Finish”.

Now open IIS Manager. Click on ISAPI filters.

If everything went well, we should see a filter already set like below.

Click on it. We can see that there is already a filter named URLscan 3.1 linking to the executable urlscan.dll.

Before configuring UrlScan, let’s try a little banner grabbing to check whether UrlaScan is working or not. For this, we will use tool Idserve to fingerprint the server on which we have configured UrlScan. (www.shunya.com is fictional website i set on my server ).

We can see that the version is Microsoft-IIS/8.0. Now let’s go to the configuration file of urlscan (urlscan.ini) to make some changes to it. It is located by default at “C:WindowsSystem32inetservurlscan”and change the value of “RemoveServerHeader” to “1” from “0”. Save the file.

Now let’s again try to banner grab using Idserve. Restart the web server.

We can see that the server version has not been disclosed hence our UrlScan is working successfully. Hope it was helpful.

Posted on September 5, 2013June 25, 2024 by kanishka10 — 26 Comments

Virtual hacking lab for beginners

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In this blogpost, you will learn how to create a virtual hacking lab for practicing hacking. No matter how many articles or blogposts you read or how many hacking courses you take, you cannot truly understand the concept of hacking until you perform those hacking tutorials practically. To practice hacking effectively, you need a secure environment without the risk of compromising the security of a safe network or systems and attract legal consequences due to your actions.

What is a Hacking lab?

A hacking lab is a lab that provides a safe environment to practice hacking without the above-mentioned risks. The most basic hacking lab consists of two machines: attacker system (the system from which you hack) and target system (the system which you hack).

What is a virtual hacking lab?

Just now, you have learnt that a basic hacking lab needs to have one attacker system and target system. They can be installed on separate hardware but this may prove expensive especially as you upgrade your hacking lab in future. Luckily, hacking labs can be created on a single system itself using virtualization solutions. Virtualization allows you to install multiple operating systems on a single machine. Some of the popular virtualization solution are Oracle VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, QEMU etc.

The hacking labs created using this method is called virtual hacking lab. They are inexpensive compared to the cybersecurity lab and easily adaptable. Of all the solution mentioned above, I will be using Oracle Virtual Box as it is FREE and also rich in features. Oracle VirtualBox can be downloaded and installed on Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris etc. Here, I have installed virtual Box on a Windows machine.

How to create a virtual hacking lab?

Let’s create a simple hacking lab with an attacker system and target system on VirtualBox. The operating system on which Oracle VirtualBox (or any another virtualization software) is installed is known as the Host machine. The operating systems that are installed in Oracle VirtualBox as called as GUEST machines. So here, in VirtualBox, we are going to install two guest machines: one is Kali Linux (attacker system) and Metasploitable 2 (target system).

What do we need?

1. Oracle VirtualBox. (Download)

2. Kali Linux. (Download)

3. Metasploitable 2. (Download)

Install Kali Linux and Metasploitable 2 in VirtualBox.

See how to install Kali Linux in VirtualBox.

See how to install Metasploitable 2 in VirtualBox.

Once both the virtual machines are installed, turn on both the machines. Login into the Metasploitable 2 VM. Default username and password are “msfadmin / msfadmin”.

Type the command “ifconfig”to find out the IP address of your target system.

Similarly login into the Kali Linux machine and in the terminal, type command “ip a” to find out its IP address.

Test whether the attacker system can communicate with the target system by pinging the target system from the attacker system as shown below.

The connection is successful. Our virtual hacking lab is ready. Happy practicing hacking.

Various networking modes of VirtualBox

Above, we created a simple virtual hacking lab successfully. Go to “settings” of any of the above GUEST machines and go to “Network settings”, you will see that this Guest machine is attached to a NAT adapter.

When you install a GUEST machine in VirtualBox, the default network mode is NAT. Apart from NAT, there are other network modes on VirtualBox.

Each networking mode plays a different role in hacking. So, it’s good to learn about each of them.

1. NAT:

NAT stands for Network Address Translation (NAT). This is the default networking mode of VirtualBox. This mode allows web access, downloading of files from internet, etc. Our simple lab above is NAT. This is used to create a hacking lab when both attacker system and target system need internet access.

2. NAT network:

This is useful in creating hacking lab on a separate internal network that uses outbound connections.

3. Bridged adapter:

When you use a Bridged adapter, the virtual machine uses the network adapter of the Host machine and acts as a separate machine in the LAN network of the Host machine.

4. Internal network:

This creates a different kind of network separated from the host system. This network doesn’t have access to the outside internet.

5. Host-only network:

This creates a network in which the virtual machines have access to the Host machine.

6. Not attached:

In this type of network, the virtual machine is disconnected from everything. This might be useful in creating a malware analysis lab.

Posted on September 5, 2013June 18, 2024 by kanishka10 — 7 Comments

How to install Metasploitable 2 in VirtualBox

Hello aspiring Ethical Hackers. In this article, you will learn how to install Metasploitable 2 in VirtualBox. What is Metasploitable? Learning penetration testing or ethical hacking requires practical knowledge and good practice needs a vulnerable target. That is where Metasploitable comes into picture. It is an intentionally vulnerable operating system made by the makers of Metasploit themselves so that aspiring ethical hackers can practice and hone their hacking skills. As its name conveys Metasploitable is loaded with vulnerabilities that can be exploited with Metasploit modules.

This virtual machine can be used to conduct security training, test security tools, and practice common penetration testing techniques. For this i am going to use Metasploitable 2 which can be downloaded from here. After downloading the zip archive, extract the files into a folder. The file contents look like below.

Open VirtualBox and click on “New Virtual machine wizard”. Type the name of your choice. I am using ‘Metasploitable-2‘. Choose ‘Type’ as Linux and ‘version’ as Ubuntu. Click on “Next”.

Choose the memory size appropriate to the availability of RAM on your host machine although 512MB is more than enough. Click on “Next”.

In the hard drive creation window, select option “Use an existing virtual hard drive”, browse to the folder where we have extracted our zip files and select the ‘vmdk’ file available. Click on “Create”.

Then you are automatically booted into the metasploitable OS. The default username and password are “msfadmin”.

You learnt how to install Metasploitable 2 in VirtualBox. See how to create a penetration testing lab.

Posted on September 3, 2013June 24, 2024 by kanishka10 — 198 Comments

How to install Kali Linux in VirtualBox (2024)

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In this blogpost, you will learn how to install Kali Linux in VirtualBox. The makers of Kali Linux have a released the latest version of the popular pen testing distro. So, we decided to update this article on how to install Kali in VirtualBox.

Every latest version of Kali Linux has many brand new features. Now, let’s see the simplest process to install Kali Linux in VirtualBox. The makers of Kali Linux provide pre-built VMs for popular virtualization software like VMware, VirtualBox, QEMU and Hyper-V. Go here and download the pre-built image of VirtualBox. We have performed this installation in the Oracle VirtualBox 6. In this article, we will be installing Kali Linux 2024.2 but the process is same for any version of Kali Linux.

The pre-built image will be downloaded in the form of an zip archive. Extract the contents of the zip archive. Your downloaded contents should look like below. As you can see, there will be two files: Virtual Disk Image (VDI) file and VBOX files.

How To Install Kali Linux In Virtualbox 1

Now open VirtualBox and go to Machine > Add. You can also use shortcut “CTRL+A” to get there.

How To Install Kali Linux In Virtualbox 2

In the window that opens, browse to the directory that consists of contents of the zip archive we have extracted at the beginning of this article. A window like below will open. Browse to the OVA file we downloaded.

How To Install Kali Linux In Virtualbox 3

Only the vbox file will be displayed. Select this file. Doing this will successfully create the virtual machine on VirtualBox as shown below.

How To Install Kali Linux In Virtualbox 4

Power ON the virtual machine by double clicking on it. You should see the login screen as shown below.

How To Install Kali Linux In Virtualbox 5 1 1024x542

Happy hacking practice.

Posted on August 23, 2013June 15, 2024 by kanishka10 — 20 Comments

Havij SQL injection tool: Complete guide

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt what SQL injection is and different types of SQL injection attacks. In this blogpost, you will learn about Havij, an automated SQL injection tool. Havij is a SQL Injection tool that helps penetration testers to find and exploit SQL Injection vulnerabilities on a web page. It can be used to perform back-end database fingerprinting, retrieve DBMS login names and password hashes, dump tables and columns, fetch data from the database, execute SQL statements against the server, and even access the underlying file system and execute operating system shell commands.

Let me give you a complete guide on Havij in this article. First download Havij and install it.

1. Specifying the target:

Then open it and enter the vulnerable URL in the target field (for this tutorial I am using my own vulnerable webpage).

2. List the current database:

Set the database option to ‘auto detect‘ and hit analyze. This should show you the current database name as shown below.

3. Get Host information:

Click on the “info” tab. This will show you information about the victim’s system. We can see information like Host IP address, web server version etc.

4. List all tables of the current database:

Click on the “Tables” tab.

5. List all databases from the target:

Click on “Get DBs” option. This will list all the databases as shown below.

7. List tables in a certain database:

To get tables in a specific database, select the database and click on “Get Tables”. This will list all the tables present in the selected database. I selected database “shunya”here.

8. List all columns from a particular table:

We can see that there is on table ‘users’ in our database ‘shunya’ .To get columns , select the table ‘ users’ and click on “Get Columns”.

This will list all the columns in the table. We can see that we have five columns in the table ‘users’. It’s time to dump the values of columns.

9. Dump data from the columns:

Select the columns whose data we want to dump and click on “Get data”. Here I selected all the columns.

10. Crack password hashes:

We got all the data including usernames and passwords. But passwords seem to be encrypted. No problem. Click on the password hashes and copy them. Then click on “MD5″ tab and paste the password. Click on “Start”. Havij automatically decrypts the password for us. Decrypt all passwords in the similar manner.

11. Find admin page:

Having passwords is not enough. You also need to know where to login with these passwords. Havij can do that too. Click on “Find admin”. This option finds the admin page of the website automatically. When it finds the admin page, you can try the username and passwords to get access to the website. Hope this was helpful.

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