INTRODUTION TO HACKING

 Introduction to Hacking

There are many definitions for “hacker.” Ask this question from a phalanx and you’ll get a new

answer every time because “more mouths will have more talks” and this is the reason behind

the different definitions of hackers which in my opinion is quite justified for everyone has a

right to think differently.

In the early 1990s, the word “hacker” was used to describe a great programmer, someone who

was able to build complex logics. Unfortunately, over time the word gained negative hype, and the

media started referring to a hacker as someone who discovers new ways of hacking into a system,

be it a computer system or a programmable logic controller, someone who is capable of hacking

into banks, stealing credit card information, etc. This is the picture that is created by the media

and this is untrue because everything has a positive and a negative aspect to it. What the media has

been highlighting is only the negative aspect; the people that have been protecting organizations

by responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities are not highlighted.

However, if you look at the media’s definition of a hacker in the 1990s, you would find a few

common characteristics, such as creativity, the ability to solve complex problems, and new ways of

compromising targets. Therefore, the term has been broken down into three types:

TYPE OF HACKER:-

1. White hat hacker—This kind of hacker is often referred to as a security professional or security

researcher. Such hackers are employed by an organization and are permitted to attack

an organization to find vulnerabilities that an attacker might be able to exploit.

2. Black hat hacker—Also known as a cracker, this kind of hacker is referred to as a bad guy,

who uses his or her knowledge for negative purposes. They are often referred to by the media

as hackers.

3. Gray hat hacker—This kind of hacker is an intermediate between a white hat and a black

hat hacker. For instance, a gray hat hacker would work as a security professional for an

organization and responsibly disclose everything to them; however, he or she might leave a

backdoor to access it later and might also sell the confidential information, obtained after

the compromise of a company’s target server, to competitors.

Similarly, we have categories of hackers about whom you might hear oftentimes. Some of them

are as follows:

1 Script kiddie—Also known as skid, this kind of hacker is someone who lacks knowledge on how

an exploit works and relies upon using exploits that someone else created. A script kiddie

may be able to compromise a target but certainly cannot debug or modify an exploit in case

it does not work.

(From http://cdn.kaskus.com and http://the-gist.org.)

2 Elite hacker—An elite hacker, also referred to as l33t or 1337, is someone who has deep knowledge

on how an exploit works; he or she is able to create exploits, but also modify codes that

someone else wrote. He or she is someone with elite skills of hacking.

3 Hacktivist—Hacktivists are defined as group of hackers that hack into computer systems for a

cause or purpose. The purpose may be political gain, freedom of speech, human rights, and

so on.

4 Ethical hacker—An ethical hacker is as a person who is hired and permitted by an organization

to attack its systems for the purpose of identifying vulnerabilities, which an attacker might

take advantage of. The sole difference between the terms “hacking” and “ethical hacking”

is the permission.

Important Terminologies

Let’s now briefly discuss some of the important terminologies that I will be using throughout this

session.

Asset

An asset is any data, device, or other component of the environment that supports information related

activities that should be protected from anyone besides the people that are allowed to view

or manipulate the data/information.

Vulnerability

Vulnerability is defined as a flaw or a weakness inside the asset that could be used to gain unauthorized

access to it. The successful compromise of a vulnerability may result in data manipulation,

privilege elevation, etc.

Threat

A threat represents a possible danger to the computer system. It represents something that an organization

doesn’t want to happen. A successful exploitation of vulnerability is a threat. A threat may

be a malicious hacker who is trying to gain unauthorized access to an asset.

Exploit

An exploit is something that takes advantage of vulnerability in an asset to cause unintended or

unanticipated behavior in a target system, which would allow an attacker to gain access to data

or information.

Risk

A risk is defined as the impact (damage) resulting from the successful compromise of an asset. For

example, an organization running a vulnerable apache tomcat server poses a threat to an organization

and the damage/loss that is caused to the asset is defined as a risk.

Normally, a risk can be calculated by using the following equation:

Risk = Threat * vulnerabilities * impact

What Is a Penetration Test?

A penetration test is a subclass of ethical hacking; it comprises a set of methods and procedures

that aim at testing/protecting an organization’s security. The penetration tests prove helpful in

finding vulnerabilities in an organization and check whether an attacker will be able to exploit

them to gain unauthorized access to an asset.

Vulnerability Assessments versus Penetration Test

Oftentimes, a vulnerability assessment is confused with a penetration test; however, these terms

have completely different meanings. In a vulnerability assessment, our goal is to figure out all the

vulnerabilities in an asset and document them accordingly.

In a penetration test, however, we need to simulate as an attacker to see if we are actually able

to exploit a vulnerability and document the vulnerabilities that were exploited and the ones that

turned out to be false-positive.

Preengagement

Before you start doing a penetration test, there is whole lot of things you need to discuss with

clients. This is the phase where both the customer and a representative from your company would

sit down and discuss about the legal requirements and the “rules of engagement.”

Rules of Engagement

Every penetration test you do would comprise of a rules of engagement, which basically defines

how a penetration test would be laid out, what methodology would be used, the start and end dates,

the milestones, the goals of the penetration test, the liabilities and responsibilities, etc. All of them

have to be mutually agreed upon by both the customer and the representative before the penetration

test is started. Following are important requirements that are present in almost every ROE:

◾◾ A proper “permission to hack” and a “nondisclosure” agreement should be signed by both

the parties.

◾◾ The scope of the engagement and what part of the organization must be tested.

◾◾ The project duration including both the start and the end date.

◾◾ The methodology to be used for conducting a penetration test.

◾◾ The goals of a penetration test.

◾◾ The allowed and disallowed techniques, whether denial-of-service testing should be performed

or not.

◾◾ The liabilities and responsibilities, which are decided ahead of time. As a penetration tester

you might break into something that should not be accessible, causing a denial of service;

also, you might access sensitive information such as credit cards. Therefore, the liabilities

should be defined prior to the engagement.

If you need a more thorough documentation, refer to the “PTES Pre-engagement” document

(http://www.pentest-standard.org/index.php/Pre-engagement)

Milestones

Before starting a penetration test, it’s good practice to set up milestones so that your project is

delivered as per the dates given in the rules of engagement.

You can use either a GANTT chart or a website like Basecamp that helps you set up milestones

to keep track of your progress. The following is a chart that defines the milestones followed by the

date they should be accomplished.

Penetration Testing Methodologies

In every penetration test, methodology and the reporting are the most important steps. Let’s first

talk about the methodology. There are several different types of penetration testing methodologies

that address how a penetration test should be performed. Some of them are discussed in brief next.

OSSTMM

An open-source security testing methodology manual (OSSTMM) basically includes almost all

the steps involved in a penetration test. The methodology employed for penetration test is concise

yet it’s a cumbersome process which makes it difficult to implement it in our everyday life.

Penetration tests, despite being tedious, demands a great deal of money out of company’s budgets

for their completion which often are not met by a large number of organizations.

NIST

Planning Discovery

Reporting

Additional discovery

Attack

NIST, on the other hand, is more comprehensive than OSSTMM, and it’s something that you

would be able to apply on a daily basis and in short engagements. The screenshot indicates the four

steps of the methodology, namely, planning, discovery, attack, and reporting.

The testing starts with the planning phase, where how the engagement is going to be performed

is decided upon. This is followed by the discovery phase, which is divided into two parts—the first

part includes information gathering, network scanning, service identification, and OS detection,

and the second part involves vulnerability assessment.

After the discovery phase comes the attack phase, which is the heart of every penetration test. If

you are able to compromise a target and a new host is discovered, in case the system is dual-homed

or is connected with multiple interfaces, you would go back to step 2, that is, discovery, and repeat it

until no targets are left. The indicating arrows in the block phase and the attack phase to the reporting

phase indicate that you plan something and you report it—you attack a target and report the results.

The organization also has a more detailed version of the chart discussed earlier, which actually

explains more about the attack phase. It consists of things such as “gaining access,” “escalating

privileges,” “system browsing,” and “install additional tools.” 

OWASP

As you might have noticed, both the methodologies focused more on performing a network penetration

test rather than something specifically built for testing web applications. The OWASP

testing methodology is what we follow for all “application penetration tests” we do here at the

RHA InfoSEC. The OWASP testing guide basically contains almost everything that you would

test a web application for. The methodology is comprehensive and is designed by some of the best

web application security researchers.

Categories of Penetration Test

When the scope of the penetration test is defined, the category/type of the penetration test engagement

is also defined along with it. The entire penetration test can be Black Box, White Box, or

Gray Box depending upon what the organization wants to test and how it wants the security

paradigm to be tested.

Black Box

A black box penetration test is where little or no information is provided about the specified target.

In the case of a network penetration test this means that the target’s DMZ, target operating system,

server version, etc., will not be provided; the only thing that will be provided is the IP ranges

that you would test. In the case of a web application penetration test, the source code of the web

application will not be provided. This is a very common scenario that you will encounter when

performing an external penetration test.

White Box

A white box penetration test is where almost all the information about the target is provided. In

the case of a network penetration test, information on the application running, the corresponding

versions, operating system, etc., are provided. In the case of a web application penetration test

the application’s source code is provided, enabling us to perform the static/dynamic “source code

analysis.” This scenario is very common in internal/onsite penetration tests, since organizations are

concerned about leakage of information.

Gray Box

In a gray box test, some information is provided and some hidden. In the case of a network penetration

test, the organization provides the names of the application running behind an IP; however,

it doesn’t disclose the exact version of the services running. In the case of a web application

penetration test, some extra information, such as test accounts, back end server, and databases, is

provided.

Types of Penetration Tests

There are several types of penetration tests; however, the following are the ones most commonly

performed:

Network Penetration Test

In a network penetration test, you would be testing a network environment for potential security

vulnerabilities and threats. This test is divided into two categories: external and internal penetration

tests.

An external penetration test would involve testing the public IP addresses, whereas in an internal

test, you can become part of an internal network and test that network. You may be provided

VPN access to the network or would have to physically go to the work environment for the penetration

test depending upon the engagement rules that were defined prior to conducting the test.

Web Application Penetration Test

Web application penetration test is very common nowadays, since your application hosts critical

data such as credit card numbers, usernames, and passwords; therefore this type of penetration test

has become more common than the network penetration test.

Mobile Application Penetration Test

The mobile application penetration test is the newest type of penetration test that has become

common since almost every organization uses Android- and iOS-based mobile applications to

provide services to its customers. Therefore, organizations want to make sure that their mobile

applications are secure enough for users to rely on when providing personal information when

using such applications.

Social Engineering Penetration Test

A social engineering penetration test can be part of a network penetration test. In a social engineering

penetration test the organization may ask you to attack its users. This is where you use

speared phishing attacks and browser exploits to trick a user into doing things they did not intend

to do.

Physical Penetration Test

A physical penetration test is what you would rarely be doing in your career as a penetration tester.

In a physical penetration test, you would be asked to walk into the organization’s building physically

and test physical security controls such as locks and RFID mechanisms.

Report Writing

In any penetration test, the report is the most crucial part. Writing a good report is key to successful

penetration testing. The following are the key factors to a good report:

◾◾ Your report should be simple, clear, and understandable.

◾◾ Presentation of the report is also important. Headers, footers, appropriate fonts, well-spaced

margins, etc., should be created/selected properly and with great care. For example, if you

are using a red font for the heading, every heading in the document should be in that style.

◾◾ The report should be well organized.

◾◾ Correct spelling and grammar is important too. A misspelled word leaves a very negative

impact upon the person who is reading your report. So, you should make sure that you

proofread your report and perform spell-checks before submitting it to the client.

◾◾ Always make sure that you use a consistent voice and style in writing a report. Changing

the voice would create confusion in the reader; so you should choose one voice and style and

stick to it throughout your report.

◾◾ Make sure you spend time on eliminating false-positives (vulnerabilities that are actually not

present), because false-negatives will always be there no matter what you do. Eliminating the

false-positives would enhance the credibility of the report.

◾◾ Perform a detailed analysis of the vulnerability to find out its root cause. A screenshot of a

RAW http request or the screenshot that demonstrates the evidence of the finding would

give a clear picture to the developer of the status.

Understanding the Audience

Understanding the audience that would be reading your penetration testing report is a very crucial

part of the penetration test. We can divide the audience into three different categories:

1. Executive class

2. Management class

3. Technical class

While writing a report, you must understand which audience would read which part of your

report; for example, the company’s CEO would not be interested in what exploit you used to gain

access to a particular machine, but on the flip side, your developers will probably not be interested

in the overall risks and potential losses to the company; instead, they would be interested in fixing

the code and therefore in reading about detailed findings. Let’s briefly talk about the three classes.

Executive Class

This category includes the CEOs of the company. Since they have a very tedious schedule and

most of the times have less technical knowledge, they would end up reading a very small portion

of the report, specifically the executive summary, remediation report, etc., which we will discuss

later in this chapter.

Management Class

Next, we have the management class, which includes the CISOs and CISSPs of the company.

Since they are the ones who are responsible for implementing the security policy of the company,

they would probably be a bit more interested in reading about overall strengths and weaknesses,

the remediation report, the vulnerability assessment report, etc.

Technical Class

This class includes the security manager and developers, who would be interested in reading your

report thoroughly. They would investigate your report as they are responsible for patching the

weaknesses found and for making sure that the necessary patches are implemented