Being a good internet citizen

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All, I noticed a tweet by HD Moore today giving a shout out to this post written last week by Ed Skoudis. Very good read. Here's a link and an excerpt:

http://pen-testing.sans.org/blog/pen-testing/2013/04/08/when-offense-and-defense-become-one

"at sufficiently advanced technical levels, offense and defense sometimes merge and become one. Offensive techniques can be used to achieve defensive ends; defensive means can be used to achieve offensive ends; and, sometimes, the inherent technical skills of offense and defense are actually identical."


"Consider these examples:

• Endpoint security suites: Have you ever pondered what these tools really are? With their integrated anti-virus, personal firewall, and host-based Intrusion Prevention Systems, they operate at a fairly low-level of most operating systems, hooking all kinds of system calls so that administrators can maintain control of the machine. Wait... that's a rootkit! The only difference between an endpoint security suite and most rootkits is the level of functionality and who controls it: good guy administrators or bad guys. So, we've got a multi-billion dollar segment of the infosec industry that is actually built on selling commercial rootkits, also known as endpoint security suites."

Ed Skoudis is a very dynamic teacher there at SANS, and I recommend his courses to everyone.

Habit 1

I gave a presentation at a conference last year, and someone commented that if I have a blog called "the 7 habits of highly effective hackers", I should probably have a list of 7 actual habits on said blog. I guess that's fair.

So here we go starting with habit 1, which I promise will be the only non-technical habit of the 7.

Habit 1: Effective hackers know that the game they play IS the real world.
In a sentence; Effective Hackers understand the repercussions of their actions.
There's something about computer systems that causes many people to act in a way that they never would in real life. Some of us would never read a stranger's physical mail, yet would feel no guilt whatsoever about reading their email. We make silly excuses to justify why our online world is different than our real world. That person should have changed the default password on their router; they're stupid and deserve it. That company knows their environment/product is insecure, if they wanted to keep me out they'd have fixed it.

Think this one over. Although there's no CVE number for it yet, it is now being reported that human beings are vulnerable to having bricks thrown at their heads. All versions are affected, and easy methods for exploiting this weakness have reportedly been in the wild for some time now....Would anyone think that the public disclosure of this knowledge, would in any way justify them throwing bricks, and hurting others? Are we more justified because they should have known better?

This probably all sounds really preachy. I'm actually not trying to tell you that you should feel guilt for hurting others (that's between you and your own conscience). I AM trying to say you should understand the repercussions of your actions. If you post someone's PII on pastebin, someone, A REAL PERSON, will experience real grief over it. When you gain access to someone's network, it could mean real impact for that organization. Real people could lose their jobs over it. I'm not telling you to care, I'm telling you that you MUST understand.
You must do whatever you do with your eyes wide open. Know and accept all possible impacts of every scan, every exploit, every move.

Okay, gotta go. My shirt just got out of the dryer. I'm sure we're all familiar with MITM (Mythbuster In The Middle).

Thanks, and UtahSAINT Conference 2012

First off, I'd like to thank all those who have build on my proof of concept, Using twitter to build password cracking wordlist. Some of you have seriously taken it to the next level, and I applaud your efforts.

Including, but not limited to:
http://www.digininja.org/projects/twofi.php
http://blog.hacktalk.net/twitscrape/
http://www.damnsecure.org/?p=833
http://www.nathanv.com/2012/07/18/shell-script-use-twiter-and-bing-to-generate-wordlists/
Nicely done, effective hackers.

Now on to the main reason for this post.
I'll be presenting at the UtahSAINT Conference 2012, this upcoming Oct 9-12 in Saint George UT.
My topic will be "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Hackers: Effective hacking techniques and countermeasures."

Other speakers include:
Kevin Young- whose unique passphrase cracking techniques helped his team take 2nd place at this year's "crack me if you can" contest at Defcon
Miles Johnson- Security Analyst at Utah State University (and my old mentor)
Special Agent Cheny Engtow- of the FBI
And many more...

If you're attending the conference or just in the area, swing by and say hello.
Until next time...

Passively Cable Tapping Cat5

When someone shows off a novel idea/solution they came up with, there are typically about a thousand people who rush in to say "You should have done it this way instead."  Then others who attempt to build on the idea, and make it easier and even cooler. In this post I will attempt the latter.

In the most recent edition of 2600, The Hacker Quarterly, there was a story entitled "BUILDING A CAT-5 CABLE  TAP" that details how to create a passive hardware cable tap using alligator clips. I love seeing stuff like this. The author came up with this idea, made it work, and posted it for all to share.

This past spring while in a server room with a friend/co-worker, we noticed a cable that ran through our cage that belonged to a different group within our company. We joked about cutting it, attaching a RJ45 end to each side, and sticking a hub on it. The conversation progressed to methods for doing this passively, without having to cut the wire. Soon we came to the same idea as the author, and decided we could use alligator clips.

Later on that week I was online reading about wall jacks and decided to give this a try. I picked up a cat5 end for 1.40 at home depot. I stripped a small length of the cat5 outer shielding, and punched the wires down into the wall jack. Make sure you use a tool bit that doesn't cut the wire on one side.







This worked great. The target machine didn't even drop a packet. Basically the exact same thing as using alligator clips, but much less stripping.

My hat is off to the author of the article. I hope you don't mind me expanding a little on your idea.

Cracking the 3.5 Million Password Hashes That Were Redacted

The release of millions of SHA1 hashes from linkedin.com has the internet all buzzing today... but then comes the news that 3.5 million of them have the first 5 characters redacted and replaced with 00000.
Well, if we don't have the entire hash we can't crack them... Oh wait, we still have the remaining 36 characters to do a comparison against.
So let's try this:
First, let's get just the hashes that start with the 00000. Looks like there are 3,521,180.

Now, for each line in our word list (WORDS.txt) lets calculate the SHA1 hash, chop off the first 5 characters, and compare that to our hashes list. If the partial hash is there, echo the password to the screen.
For those that can't see that, the command is:
for i in `cat WORDS.txt` ; do grep -q `echo -n $i | sha1sum |  cut -b6-41` SHA1-0s.txt  && echo $i  ; done



And boom, there are thousands of passwords scrolling down the screen.
Enjoy.

Using twitter to build password cracking wordlist

This is going to be a quick one. We're going to show how to use twitter to build a word list for cracking passwords.
We'll use John the Ripper, and as a target we'll use the MilitarySingles.com md5 password hashes that were released by the artist formerly known as lulzsec.

First, let's hack out a quick script that will get relevant tweets for us. And yes, I use a lot of tabs. And I know I can do this cleaner... I'm in a get it done quick mood.
(EDIT: thanks to Supercow1127 and TheShadowFog for pointing out better ways to deal with JSON. See jshon, jsawk, etc).

The script will connect to twitter and get 500 tweets for the term supplied, then barf back all the words from those tweets in a list for us. Next we are going to pass the script some words that might be relevant to our target.

After we sort the list out, we're left with 4400 unique words.

Let's try those words against our hashes and see how many of them are used as passwords. We'll use the --rules option so that it mangles up various permutations of each word.

 And here come the passwords.....(scrolled off the screen)

So, from our word list of 4400 words, we yielded 1978 passwords. Let me say that again...
FROM OUR WORD LIST OF 4400 WORDS, WE YIELDED 1978 PASSWORDS!

And that's 1978 uniques. The number of accounts we actually cracked with these 1978 passwords is actually even more than 4400 accounts cause many use the same passwords as each other, and with the mangling rules John tries ~300 mutations of each word in the list (semperfi gives us semperFi, semperfi1, semperfi123, etc).

This is a very small example of what can be done to generate more relevant password lists using twitter/websites/social media to supply you with the related words. Download john, hash your passwords, build a list of words relevant to your organization, and test the security of your passwords. Heck, we haven't even started talking about GPUs and oclhashcat, but we'll leave that for another time.

Until next time, if you're going to hack, hack effectively.



And props to Kevin Young. Thanks for all the lengthy discussions about password security. I truly enjoy picking your brain.