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michael Jackson

Are you tired of reading endless news stories about ethical hacking and not really knowing what that means? Let's change that!

This Post is for the people that:

Have No Experience With Cybersecurity (Ethical Hacking)
Have Limited Experience.
Those That Just Can't Get A Break

OK, let's dive into the post and suggest some ways that you can get ahead in Cybersecurity.

I receive many messages on how to become a hacker. "I'm a beginner in hacking, how should I start?" or "I want to be able to hack my friend's Facebook account" are some of the more frequent queries. Hacking is a skill. And you must remember that if you want to learn hacking solely for the fun of hacking into your friend's Facebook account or email, things will not work out for you. You should decide to learn hacking because of your fascination for technology and your desire to be an expert in computer systems. Its time to change the color of your hat 😀

I've had my good share of Hats. Black, white or sometimes a blackish shade of grey. The darker it gets, the more fun you have.

If you have no experience don't worry. We ALL had to start somewhere, and we ALL needed help to get where we are today. No one is an island and no one is born with all the necessary skills. Period.OK, so you have zero experience and limited skills…my advice in this instance is that you teach yourself some absolute fundamentals.

Let's get this party started.

What is hacking?

Hacking is identifying weakness and vulnerabilities of some system and gaining access with it.

Hacker gets unauthorized access by targeting system while ethical hacker have an official permission in a lawful and legitimate manner to assess the security posture of a target system(s)

There's some types of hackers, a bit of "terminology".
White hat — ethical hacker.
Black hat — classical hacker, get unauthorized access.
Grey hat — person who gets unauthorized access but reveals the weaknesses to the company.
Script kiddie — person with no technical skills just used pre-made tools.
Hacktivist — person who hacks for some idea and leaves some messages. For example strike against copyright.

Skills required to become ethical hacker.

Curosity anf exploration
Operating System
Fundamentals of Networking

*Note this sites

In this tutorial series I'm going to walk you through the damn vulnerable web application (DVWA) which is damn vulnerable. Its main goal according to the creators is "to aid security professionals to test thier skills and tools in a legal environment, help web developers better understand the process of securing web applications and to aid both students & teachers to learn about web application security in a controlled class room environment."

I am going to install DVWA in docker so the prerequisite for this tutorial will be an installation of docker (Docker is not the only way to install DVWA but if you have docker already installed then it may be the easiest way to install DVWA).

To install DVWA in docker run your docker deamon if it's not running already and open a terminal or powershell and type:

docker rum --rm -it -p 8080:80 vulnerables/web-dvwa

It will take some time to pull the image from docker hub depending on your internet speed and after it is complete it will start the dvwa application. In the command we have mapped the image instance's port 80 to our hosts port 8080 so we should be able to access the web application from our host at http://localhost:8080

Now open your favorite web browser and go to http://localhost:8080
You should be prompted with a login screen like this:

login with these creds:
username: admin
password: password

After login you'll see a database setup page since this is our first run. Click on Create / Reset Database button at the bottom. It will setup database and redirect you to login page. Now login again and you'll see a welcome page.

Now click on DVWA Security link at the bottom of the page navigation and make sure the security level is set to Low. If it is not click on the dropdown, select Low and then click submit.

Now our setup is complete, so lets try a simple SQL attack to get a taste of whats about to come.

Click on SQL Injection in navigation menu.
You'll be presented with a small form which accepts User ID.
Enter a single quote (') in the User ID input field and click Submit.
You'll see an SQL error like this:

From the error message we can determine that the server has a MariaDB database and we can see the point of injection.
Since there are many quotes we are not able to determine the exact location of our injection. Lets add some text after our single quote to see exactly where our injection point is.
Now I am going to enter 'khan in the User ID field and click Submit.

Now we can see exactly where the point of injection is. Determining the point of injection is very important for a successful SQL injection and is sometimes very hard too, though it might not be that much useful here in this exercise.

Now lets try the very basic SQL Injection attack.
In the User ID field enter ' or 1=1-- - and click Submit.

We will explain what is going on here in the next article.

References:-
1. DVWA Official Website: http://www.dvwa.co.uk/

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michael Jackson

Intro

Most of the web applications I see are kinda binary when it comes to CSRF protection; either they have one implemented using CSRF tokens (and more-or-less covering the different functions of the web application) or there is no protection at all. Usually, it is the latter case. However, from time to time I see application checking the Referer HTTP header.

A couple months ago I had to deal with an application that was checking the Referer as a CSRF prevention mechanism, but when this header was stripped from the request, the CSRF PoC worked. BTW it is common practice to accept empty Referer, mainly to avoid breaking functionality.

The OWASP Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Prevention Cheat Sheet tells us that this defense approach is a baaad omen, but finding a universal and simple solution on the Internetz to strip the Referer header took somewhat more time than I expected, so I decided that the stuff that I found might be useful for others too.

Solutions for Referer header strip

Most of the techniques I have found were way too complicated for my taste. For example, when I start reading a blog post from Egor Homakov to find a solution to a problem, I know that I am going to:

learn something very cool;
have a serious headache from all the new info at the end.

This blog post from him is a bit lighter and covers some useful theoretical background, so make sure you read that first before you continue reading this post. He shows a few nice tricks to strip the Referer, but I was wondering; maybe there is an easier way?

Rich Lundeen (aka WebstersProdigy) made an excellent blog post on stripping the Referer header (again, make sure you read that one first before you continue). The HTTPS to HTTP trick is probably the most well-known one, general and easy enough, but it quickly fails the moment you have an application that only runs over HTTPS (this was my case).

The data method is not browser independent but the about:blank trick works well for some simple requests. Unfortunately, in my case the request I had to attack with CSRF was too complex and I wanted to use XMLHttpRequest. He mentions that in theory, there is anonymous flag for CORS, but he could not get it work. I also tried it, but... it did not work for me either.

Krzysztof Kotowicz also wrote a blog post on Referer strip, coming to similar conclusions as Rich Lundeen, mostly using the data method.

Finally, I bumped into Johannes Ullrich's ISC diary on Referer header and that led to me W3C's Referrer Policy. So just to make a dumb little PoC and show that relying on Referer is a not a good idea, you can simply use the "referrer" meta tag (yes, that is two "r"-s there).

The PoC would look something like this:

<html>
  <meta name="referrer" content="never">
  <body>
    <form action="https://vistimsite.com/function" method="POST">
      <input type="hidden" name="param1" value="1" />
      <input type="hidden" name="param2" value="2" />
      ...
    </form>
    <script>
      document.forms[0].submit();
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Conclusion

As you can see, there is quite a lot of ways to strip the Referer HTTP header from the request, so it really should not be considered a good defense against CSRF. My preferred way to make is PoC is with the meta tag, but hey, if you got any better solution for this, use the comment field down there and let me know! :)

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Sunday, August 30, 2020

How To Start | How To Become An Ethical Hacker

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Learning Web Pentesting With DVWA Part 1: Installation

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CSRF Referer Header Strip

Intro

Solutions for Referer header strip

Conclusion

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