Root privileges allow you to do whatever you want in the system: establish a foothold by creating a backdoor, inject a rootkit or a trojan, alter or delete any information, etc. Accordingly, privilege escalation is one of your primary objectives during an attack. In this article, I will…
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OSCP exam and how to pass it
Every information security specialist is aware of OSCP certification. It takes plenty of time to prepare to this exam, then it takes a whole day to take it, and then you produce a write-up describing your experience. Those willing to take the OSCP exam post tons of questions in Twitter,…
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Battle Linux. Best pentesting and OSINT distributions
In this article, we will briefly discuss specialized Linux distributions used by pentesters and ethical hackers. The most popular such distribution is Kali, but we want to bring to your attention several other Linux systems – not only no less efficient, but even…
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Kung Fu pivoting. Post-exploitation to the maximum
Pivoting is an important stage of any pentesting research: the attacker establishes a foothold in the compromised system to use it as a bridgehead for further penetration. This article examines the basic pivoting techniques used nowadays.
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Obliterating traces: How to make Windows 10 forget everything
Cookies, browsing history, saved passwords, and data from the Windows Registry – all this information can be easily retrieved by a person who gets physical access to your PC. That’s why every hacker must know how to delete logs, caches, and other cookies to protect…
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Divination by IPsec logs: A practical guide to IKE protocol
IPsec was designed as a universal protocol stack for VPN – the ultimate solution rendering all alternative protocols unnecessary. However, the existence of OpenVPN, WireGuard, and many other protocols clearly indicates that the developers of IPsec failed to achieve their goal.
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Chum Bucket. How I hacked a 20-billion corporation using a…
As you are likely aware, data breaches occur on a regular basis in this wild world. Each such incident is preceded by painstaking work: information collection and analysis, identification of security holes, selection of attack tools, etc. Today, I will reveal to our readers…
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Attacks on clouds. Azure and AWS hacking guide
The migration of IT infrastructure to clouds is not just a tribute to fashion: this approach allows to save on technical support, backup, and administration. In addition, cloud-based infrastructure is believed to be more resistant to failures and external attacks. But the bitter truth is that even the most popular hybrid cloud services,…
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Malware under surveillance. Sandboxes and how to detect them
Boris Razor & Alex Mess One of the ways to detect malware is to run it in a sandbox, i.e. in an isolated environment where you can monitor the program’s behavior. In this article, we will explain how sandboxes work and examine techniques allowing malicious…
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Security hole in BIG-IP. Exploiting a new vulnerability in F5…
In July 2020, a severe vulnerability was identified in the F5 product line. The bug affects inter alia BIG-IP, an application delivery controller used by many major companies, including banks and mobile operators. The vulnerability received the highest severity index because it allows unprivileged…
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How to reinstall Windows remotely
Remote work is the main trend of this year. It suddenly turned out that many things can be done more efficiently from home than sitting in the office. In my humble opinion, such a standard operation as OS reinstallation can be performed remotely as…
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Holes in the hole. Vulnerabilities in Pi-hole allow to seize…
Three severe vulnerabilities have been recently discovered in Pi-hole, a popular app that blocks advertisement and unwanted scripts. Two of these vulnerabilities result in remote command execution, while the third one allows to escalate your privileges to root. Let’s examine the origin of these bugs and concurrently find…
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Ultimate guide to Metasploit: how to use the renowned pentesting…
As you are likely aware, Metasploit is the most acclaimed exploitation and post-exploitation framework in the world. Even if you don’t use it, you had definitely encountered numerous references to Metasploit in our materials. In this article, I will give a brief overview of this framework,…
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Ultimate guide to PowerShell Empire: from installation to persistence in…
Empire is a popular post-exploitation tool for Windows, Linux, and macOS. This article addresses all key aspects of this framework, including its most frequently used functions. Even if you are a seasoned pentester, you will likely find something new and useful in this material.
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Useless Crap? No, not nearly! Advance your binary exploitation skills…
PWN challenges are my favorite tasks at CTF contests. Such tasks effectively train you in real-life code analysis, while their write-ups usually describe all fine details, even those already addressed by other authors. Today, I will explain how to solve…
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Spying penguin. Windows post-exploitation with a Linux-based VM
Windows-based systems are significantly more resistant against MITM attacks in comparison with Linux-based ones. The reason is simple: Windows does not include a handy mechanism to forward transit packets. Today, I will explain how to use a minimalist Linux system running on a virtual machine…
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Android SSL Pinning
Introduction Modern requirements to mobile data processing apps designed for work with personal and financial data include secure data transfer over the Internet. SSL pinning is a mechanism used to satisfy this requirement: it enables the user…
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Seizing subdomains. How I took over Microsoft subdomains and how…
A few years ago, I managed to take over subdomains on Microsoft websites and got access to the mail and files of Outlook and OneDrive users, as well as user profile data on Xbox.com. Today, I am…
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Stratosphere flight. How to crack Struts using an Action app…
Today, I will show how to conquer the stratosphere - i.e. gain root access on the Stratosphere VM available on [Hack The Box](https://www.hackthebox.eu/) CTF grounds. To capture the root flag, I will have to overcome the Apache…
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The PWN realm. Modern techniques for stack overflow exploitation
The buffer overflow vulnerability is an extremely popular topic on hackers' forums. In this article, I will provide a universal and practically-oriented 'introduction' for enthusiasts studying the basics of low-level exploitation. Using stack overflow as an example,…
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