When you attack a network at the data link layer, you can ‘leapfrog’ over all protection mechanisms set at higher levels. This article will walk you through most of the attack vectors targeting this lowest level of the network.
Read full article →Gateway Bleeding. Pentesting FHRP systems and hijacking network traffic
There are many ways to increase fault tolerance and reliability of corporate networks. Among other things, First Hop Redundancy Protocols (FHRP) are used for this purpose. In this article, I will explain how pentesters interact with FHRP in the course of network attacks.
Read full article →Top 5 Ways to Use a VPN for Enhanced Online Privacy and Security
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Read full article →Challenge the Keemaker! How to bypass antiviruses and inject shellcode into KeePass memory
Recently, I was involved with a challenging pentesting project. Using the KeeThief utility from GhostPack, I tried to extract the master password for the open-source KeePass database from the process memory. Too bad, EDR was monitoring the system and prevented me from doing this: after all, KeeThief injects shellcode into a remote process in a classical oldie-goodie way, and in 2022, such actions have no chance to go unnoticed.
Read full article →Vulnerable Java. Hacking Java bytecode encryption
Java code is not as simple as it seems. At first glance, hacking a Java app looks like an easy task due to a large number of available decompilers. But if the code is protected by bytecode encryption, the problem becomes much more complicated. In this article, I will explain in detail how to circumvent this protection mechanism.
Read full article →Climb the heap! Exploiting heap allocation problems
Some vulnerabilities originate from errors in the management of memory allocated on a heap. Exploitation of such weak spots is more complicated compared to ‘regular’ stack overflow; so, many hackers security researchers have no idea how to approach them. Even the Cracking the Perimeter (OSCE) course doesn’t go beyond a trivial rewrite of SEH. In this article, I will explain the heap mechanics and show how to exploit its vulnerabilities.
Read full article →Quarrel on the heap. Heap exploitation on a vulnerable SOAP server in Linux
This paper discusses a challenging CTF-like task. Your goal is to get remote code execution on a SOAP server. All exploitation primitives are involved with the heap in one way or another; so, you’ll learn a lot about functions interacting with it. Also, you’ll reverse a Linux binary using a dynamic instrumentation framework.
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