Tag: hacking

WriteUp: GamingServer

Once again, we will walk through an easy ctf challenge from the site TryHackMe. This challenge is free so if you have an account on the site, definitely give this challenge a try!

Let’s get to it!

First things first, deploy the machine and run an nmap scan for open ports.
nmap -sS -sV <ip_address>

From the scan, we get two ports we can play with: SSH and HTML. Since we can’t do anything about ssh yet, time to go hunting for more information.

Navigate to the ip address in a web browser. We are greeted with a webpage for Draagan which I can only imagine is a MMORPG in this scenario. The page itself doesn’t look to have any useful information but let’s check the source page.

Interesting. Looks like we may have a username and proof that lorem ipsum does not make for a good website. Save the name to your notes for later.

But we still need more information.

At this point, it is not a bad idea to run a directory search on the url. I will use gobuster for this writeup.
gobuster dir -u <url> -w <wordlist> -t 64

There are a couple of places we can check. We will check the uploads folder first. Three files are present there. The first file looks like a list of passwords. Useful. We can copy that to our computer using wget.
wget <url_path>

The second and third files are more of a misdirect though personally I enjoyed reading the second file.

We are done in this folder so let’s go to the secret folder where we find a very interesting file. A private ssh key! Simply download that file using the wget command.

Now, we have a possible username and a private ssh key. Let’s see if we can log into the target server.
ssh -i <private_key> <username>@<ip_address>

Uh-oh! We need the private key’s passphrase or the user’s password! Fortunately, we have a list of passwords from the webserver! We can check with Hydra if any of theses passwords belong to our user.
hydra -l <username> -P <password_file> ssh://<ip_address>

Nothing.

We still have another option though. Let’s try cracking the private key’s passphrase. We will be using the JohnTheRipper suite for this.

I won’t go into to much detail but if your computer does not have JohnTheRipper (JTR) installed, you will have to install it manually and either setup an alias to the program or change your “.profile” in your home directory to include the path to the program in your “PATH” variable. Generally the path will be “/usr/sbin/”. Else the next steps will have to be performed from the folder the programs are installed.

In addition to having JTR, you will need a program called ssh2john. For whatever reason, this is not included with the suite. I had to download the program and move it over to where my JTR install is. It is a pain, but worth it.

Once you have JTR and ss2john installed and accessible, run ssh2john on the private key and save the output hash as a file.
ssh2john <private_key> > <output_file>

Great, we have the hash! We can use john to crack the hash and get a passphrase if it exists.
john -wordlist=<password_list> <hash_file>

We got a passphrase so let’s try logging in again using the private key through ssh. When asked for the passphrase, we type in our passphrase and we are granted access to the machine!

Getting the first flag is perhaps the easiest part of this whole challenge. Use the ls and cat commands.

First flag done! One more to go!

Getting the next flag is not straightforward and I did a little digging to find it. If you run the groups command, our user is part of the “sudo” group but that is useless to us. We don’t know the user’s password which sudo requires. If you check the system crontab and the user’s crontab, there is nothing we can exploit.

This isn’t looking good. Let’s look back at the groups our user is a part of.

Notice that our user is part of a group called “lxd”. This let’s us know that this computer can use linux system containers . If you go to GTFOBins, you won’t find an entry for lxd or lxc, the command used to interact with lxd.

Try googling “privilege escalation with lxd” instead. There are a few articles that explain how to exploit lxd to gain root privileges. The easiest way to exploit lxd would be to create a container from an image stored on the internet from the target machine. However, this will not work for us because our target machine cannot reach out to the internet.

Back on your machine in a separate terminal, you will need to build an image server that will be uploaded into your target machine and then imported by lxc. From there, you can mount the root of the target machine to the lxc container. Once that is done, you can get a shell to the container and navigate to the final flag.

Sounds complicated?

I agree and my explanation probably does not do it justice but I recommend following this blog by HackTricks for the exploit setup. When ready to upload your files to the target machine, use the scp command.
scp -i <private_key> <source_file> <user@ip_address:destination>

Once the files have been uploaded, go back to the target machine to import the image, create a container, and gaining access to the container. You should be root inside the container.

Notice something weird in the above screenshot? Running the pwd tells us that we are in “/root” but nothing is here! That is because we are in the container’s “/root”. We mounted our target machine’s root folder under the container’s “/mnt” folder. Navigate there and you will see a folder called “root”. Dive deeper to find the root flag.

And there you have it! This is a rather long and involved ctf to complete for an easy level challenge but it is worth taking time to go through as it introduces other mini-challenges (JTR) along the way. Hope this guide helps.

Until next time!

WriteUp: Tartarus

This relatively easy ctf challenge can be found on the site TryHackMe.

This challenge did take me a little while to figure due to overlooking a key step but it is definitely a good hacking challenge for beginners. Let’s dive in.

Part 1

Once you join the room and deploy the machine, scan it for any open ports. In this example, I use nmap.
nmap -sS -sV <ip_address>

FTP, SSH, and HTTP are open for us. We will check FTP first to see if we can login anonymously. When asked for a password, simply press the ENTER key.

And we got in! Now for a little snooping. Using the ls command shows us one file call “test.txt”. Reading it gives us nothing. Using ls -a on the other hand reveals a weird directory. Enter that directory and rerun ls -a. Another weird directory. Keep going until you run into an actual file. After downloading the file, read it and make note of the path you see.

Before going to our newfound path, let’s explore our HTML port. If we go to the default webpage, we’re greeted with the default test page from Apache. Checking source code reveals nothing new. We will use a directory enumeration tool to find if any other files or folders exist. In this example, I use dirsearch.
python3 dirsearch -u <url> -e html
(In the screenshot, I am using an alias to run the command.)

The search gives us a status code 200 for “robots.txt”. Visit that page and you’ll see another path we can explore. Navigate to that path. There are two files available. One looks like a bunch of passwords and the other has possible usernames. Copy the files manually or with wget.
wget <url>

After copying those two files to your computer, you can try exploring more from our current angle but there is nothing else. So, let’s go to that path we found in the FTP file.

You’re greeted with a login page. We can attempt to guess the credentials but there is a tool for that. We will use Hydra to check for credentials using the two files we just copied over to our computer. Hydra should come default with Kali Linux but if you are an intrepid soul using a different Linux flavor, you can install it from here.

To use Hydra against a webpage login, you need three things: usernames, passwords, and a login error message. Get the login error message by entering a bogus credential on the webpage.

We will get the error message “Incorrect username!”. Now we try our attack.
hydra -L <username_file> -P <password_file> <domain/ip> http-form-post "<login page>:username=^USER^&password=^PASS^:Incorrect username!"

There are a lot of results for just one user! We need to narrow it down.

Try one of the combinations on the login page. More than likely, you’ll get a new error message, “Incorrect password!”. Let’s rerun Hydra but with a couple of changes.
hydra -l <username> -P <password_file> <domain/ip> http-form-post "<login page>:username=^USER^&password=^PASS^:Incorrect password!"

Bingo! We have valid credentials! Login in and there is an upload page ready to be exploited. But what to upload?

Ultimately, we want to get on the target machine to get those flags so let’s upload something that will give us a reverse shell. Pentestmonkey has an excellent file called “php-reverse-shell.php” that will do just that! Download it and edit it so that it uses your computer’s ip address and the port you want to listen to.

Upload the edited version. You’ll see that the upload was successful but trying to navigate to your uploaded file gives you an error. What gives?!

We assume the file is definitely uploaded so we will run our directory searching tool again to look for other folders.

In doing so, we discover an “images” folder. This path holds our uploaded content. Before opening the file, go back to a terminal and prepare your end of the reverse shell connection using netcat.
nc -nlvp <port>

Now go to your uploaded file from the browser and you should have a shell prompt on the terminal.

Part 2

It takes a while to get to this part but if you have been keeping notes of previous findings, getting back here is very simple. Now let’s get some flags!

Find out who are are logged in as with whoami and which directory you are in with pwd. Then use the find command to look for the first flag. Of course, you can skip figuring out who and where you are but it’s good to get a lay of the land first.
find / -name "user.txt" 2>/dev/null

First flag found! Let’s see about getting the root flag.

If you run sudo -l, you’ll see we can execute /var/www/gdb as the user thirtytwo. So we will exploit this to gain a shell as that user.
sudo -u thirtytwo /var/www/gdb -nx -ex '!sh' -ex quit

GTFOBins is a great site for figuring out if a command can be exploited or not. I highly recommend taking a look there.

For the next part, we need to get an interactive shell.
python -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'

Then we can run sudo -l and see that thirtytwo can run /usr/bin/git as the user d4rckh. We will exploit that with this command.
sudo -u d4rckh /usr/bin/git help config

Once you get a prompt, use !/bin/sh to get a new shell.

Now we are d4rckh! We found our first flag in this user’s home folder so we will navigate there first. Run ls -la and we see there is a file called “cleanup.py” owned by root that we can write to.

Reading the file, we notice we can have this script execute system commands with os.system(). Before we write anything, we need to see how to get the command to run as root. Our user is not part of the sudo group and if we run sudo -l, we are asked for a password. (Don’t press CTRL+C! You’ll have to start all over!)

Check out /etc/crontab.

The script we can abuse runs every two minutes as root. Perfect! Let’s carefully edit that script with a command to get us the root flag.
echo "os.system('cat /root/root.txt > /home/flag; chmod 444 /home/flag')" >> /home/d4rckh/cleanup.py

I say carefully because entering bad code means we have to type it all over again! No one wants that pain.

In about two minutes, we can check to see if we got our root flag.

Part 3

If you’re like me and entered the wrong command to get the root flag, it definitely feels like game over.

The best thing to do is to terminate the remote machine and redeploy. This means you have to re-upload the reverse shell script. Hope you took notes.

Once that is done and you’re logged back into the machine, you can skip the lateral escalations and go straight for the root escalation. Remember, anyone can write to “cleanup.py” and cron will run it as root!

Cautiously edit the script with your command, wait two minutes, and viola!

So why go through all the trouble if we can just do this? Sometimes, it takes a lot of jumping around to get the right permissions to get the exploit. Imagine if the cleanup script was in a subfolder that only d4rckh could read and write to. Suddenly our quick solution is invalid and we would have to jump to a different user to try to get permission to edit the script!

With that said, I’m glad this quick solution exists. No tab complete, cursor navigation, or up arrow for previous commands make this an irksome task to complete.

WriteUp: Gotta Catch’em All

Another fun and relatively easy CTF from the website TryHackMe! I swear, this is by far my favorite site for learning pentesting techniques and getting some practical experience!

This CTF is about Pokemon and though you can probably guess the answer to “Find the Grass-Type Pokemon”, you probably won’t know how to present that answer. Good fun!

Deploy the machine and let’s get started!

First things first. We need some information about the machine. Run a basic nmap command for any open ports we may be able to leverage.
nmap -sS -sV <ip_address>

We got http and ssh open. Can’t do much with ssh so let’s take a look at the website. One thing I like to do before navigating to the site is having something like gobuster searching for directories.
gobuster dir -u <ip/domain> -w <wordlist>

When you go to the webpage of the ip address, you’re greeted with an adorable Apache2 default welcome page. Sorry, no Pikachu here. But maybe gobuster found something?

A bunch of 403s won’t do us any good. All we get is that default page…or do we?

At the very bottom of the webpage, there is something that looks out of place. A colon, all alone. To find out why it’s there, let’s look at the page source.

The source page has the typical css, javascript, and html trio. If you want, you can take some time with the javascript but it is not a clue. Believe me, I’ve tried. Instead look towards the bottom and there are two tags that doesn’t look like html.

I’ll admit this took me a while to get and I face palmed myself once I realized what I was looking at. Right there in plain sight, ssh credentials! Now that we have those, we can leave the browser and ssh into the machine.
ssh <user>@<ip_address>

Once we’re in, run the groups command. Our user is a part of many groups but not sudo. If we try sudo -l, we get a message that the user may not run sudo as root. Taking a look at the file permissions of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow does not give us any kind of leverage we can use. And there’s nothing special in /etc/crontab. Looks like we won’t be escalating privileges yet so we’ll explore a little.

Running ls and ls -a on the home directory of our user does not yield anything interesting. If we look in the Desktop folder…

There is a zip file. Unzip it using the unzip command and we’ll see that our first flag is now available! There is a catch though. The flag is encoded. It is up to you figure out the encoding. Once you do, you’ll have the grass-type flag!

Going back to our home directory, we can list the contents of the other folders which gives nothing back except for one folder. The “Videos” folder has a folder called “Gotta”. Interesting. Navigate to that folder and the sub-folders that follow. There is a file at the end of the folder path that ends in “.cplusplus”. Run cat on this file.

We got credentials for another user! Before we use these credentials, let’s see if we can find any other flags as the user we currently are.

At this point, we still need the water and fire type flags. Good thing we can search based on keywords from the flags. We will use the find command to see if we can get the other two flags.
find / -name "water-type*" 2>/dev/null

This shows us that there is a file called “water-type.txt” under /var/www/html. Run the cat command on the file and you’re presented with something resembling the flag. This flag needs to be decrypted and once again, I leave that up to the reader to figure out but as a hint, the ancient romans would be proud.

To find the fire-type flag, we will run the find command again but changing out the word “water” for “fire”.
find / -name "fire-type*" 2>/dev/null

Once again, we get a path to a file called “fire-type.txt”. Run cat on the file and you’ll get the third flag…encrypted. And as before, it’s up to you to figure out what the encryption is. All I can say is all your blank are belong to us.

What about root’s favorite pokemon?

Personally, I think it’s Psyduck but we got another set of credentials we can try out. Login to the other user’s account with the following command.
su <new_username>
After logging in, run the groups command. You’ll see that this user is a part of sudo!

One thing you may notice quickly is that this user doesn’t have a home folder to go to. Check out the “/home/” folder with sudo ls -l.

Although it’s redacted, we can see that our new user’s home directory is owned by root however we can read the “roots-pokemon.txt” file. Read it with the cat command to get the final flag! No tricks!

And that’s it! Congratulations on completing the CTF!



Side Note

When I originally did this challenge, I did not use the above steps after the initial ssh login. Instead, I was able to cat the .bash_history of the user and saw all of the commands taken to create the files for the flag and the additional user. I copied that to a temporary file in /tmp and used it as my guide to hunt the flags.

While writing this writeup, I found out that the .bash_history is now completely empty. This was certainly a surprise as I had thought that was the way to do the challenge. I now like to think I hacked the hacking challenge…or got really lucky that the bash history wasn’t cleared out.

Thank the hacking gods that there is a find command.

WriteUp: Bounty Hacker

This is another guide for a free CTF challenge on the website TryHackMe. I personally really like this site and if you’re interested in pentesting, this site is another great resource!

On to the challenge!

Not only is this challenge relatively easy, it is Cowboy Bebop themed! So double the fun for me!

After deploying the machine, we need to find all of the open ports. We can do this using nmap.
nmap -sS -sV -Pn <ip address>

We got 3 ports open: FTP, SSH, and HTTP.

If we take a quick look at the IP through the browser, we get our mission objective where upon success, we are rewarded with Jet’s famous bell pepper and beef dish! Beyond that, there is nothing worth noting but it is not a bad habit to run a dirbuster or dirsearch on the IP address or checking the source code.

Let’s see if we can use an anonymous login on FTP. Connecting to the IP address through FTP and sign in with the username “anonymous” and no password.

Awesome! Use the ls command and see that there are two files. Download them to your machine with the get command. Exit out of the FTP session and take a look at the task.txt file.

Now we know who wrote the task list!
The file locks.txt looks like a bunch of possible passwords. One could say it looks like a wordlist. Perfect for trying to brute force our way into the machine using hydra!
hydra -l <username> -P locks.txt <ip_address> -t 4 <protocol>

Because the next few commands include flags, there’s going to be a lot of masking. However, if you know which port your trying to brute force, you’ll get the password and you can login.

Now we got the user flag! Time to get the coveted root flag!
Unfortunately, the user we login as is not in the sudo group. So let’s try sudo -l and see if our user is in the sudoers file at all.

Ignoring all of the masking, we see that our user can use the tar command as root! But how can we use this command to get our flag?

A website that is great for helping us figure out how to exploit the tar command is GTFOBins. This site has an extensive list of linux commands that can be used to escalate privileges and if we search for tar, we see we can get access to a shell. Let’s modify the command a little to skip the shell and go straight to that root flag.

sudo tar -cf /dev/null /dev/null --checkpoint=1 --checkpoint-action=exec="/bin/cat /root/root.txt"

And there we have it! Turn in the root flag and go enjoy some of that bell pepper and beef!

Enjoy!

WriteUp: Brooklyn Nine Nine

In a previous post, I mentioned that a great place to learn hacking techniques is a site called TryHackMe. Since joining the site myself, I have learned a lot of techniques. Some of which I use in my role for a cyber security company. And to show off the culmination of everything I am learning, I am going to walk through the steps to retrieve the flags from the room Brooklyn Nine Nine on TryHackMe. This is a free room to join and a relatively easy CTF.

Let’s begin!

There are two way to get the flags from this box but first things first. We run the box’s IP address through nmap.
nmap -sS -sV <ip_addr>

Method 1

Notice from the scan that port 21 is open. This is the default port for FTP which means we may be able to do an anonymous login.
ftp <ip_addr>
Type in anonymous as the username and enter a blank password.

Now that we are here, let’s see what we can find. Run the ls command and see that there is a file we can download with the get command. Once the file is on our computer, cat it to revel this message.

Now we know that Jake is using a weak password. The questions are: Password to what? How do we get it?
Recall from the nmap scan that port 22 is open which is the default port for SSH. We could run the ssh command over and over again trying to guess the password but who has time for that? Let’s use Hydra instead!
Hydra is great for cracking weak passwords for SSH logins. In the command below, we give it a username, a wordlist, an ip address, and the protocol.
hydra -l jake -P rockyou.txt 10.10.5.193 ssh

Jake’s password is now ours! If you need the “rockyou.txt” wordlist, you can download it from here.
Let’s try our newfound password for Jake in SSH.

Let’s find some flags!
The first one is the “user” flag. Normally, we can run ls and see that the user flag is in our home directory. But it’s not this time! We can look for the user flag using the find command.
find / -type f -name "user.txt" -exec ls -l {} \; 2>/dev/null

We found the file so let’s read it with cat to get that first delicious flag!

The second flag requires us to become root to read “/root/root.txt”. Let’s see if Jake is in the sudo group. Running groups shows us that Jake is not to be trusted with that much power but he still might have some privileges. Run sudo -l.

Jake is able to use less as root. We can use this command to read files instead of cat.
sudo less /root/root.txt

And with that, we have escalated our privileges and got that pesky root flag! Submit to TryHackMe and enjoy your new badge!

Method 2

There is a port from the nmap scan that wasn’t used in method 1. Port 80. Visiting the ip address in a browser takes us to this rather simple webpage.

Besides this lovely picture and text, not much to see here. If we take a look at the page’s source code though, there is a comment asking us if we have heard of steganography. If you have, then you can guess that the picture is protecting more than just the big city. If not, do a quick Google search.
Save the picture to your computer. Next, we will use a tool call steghide to extract any hidden data from the picture, if it exists. You can download steghide through the apt repository if you are using a Debian based machine. Run the following command to extract any hidden data from the picture.
steghide extract -sf brooklyn99.jpg

I will admit, I was a little baffled here. I was hoping for a password not being needed in order to extract any hidden data. If you run dirsearch or dirbuster on the ip address, you will find there is not much more to explore via the browser. All seems lost but fear now! There is a tool to crack steganography passwords!

Stegcracker can crack our steganography password and can be found here. If you have pip3, the install is simple!
pip3 install stegcracker

Now let’s see if we can crack a password. Run stegcracker on the picture using a wordlist.
stegcracker brooklyn99.jpg rockyou.txt

We will use this password in steghide. Run the steghide extract command again and use the password. You should get a message telling you the file “note.txt” was extracted. Open the file and we now have Holt’s password!

Let’s try this password out on ssh. SSH into the box as holt and enter his password. We get in with no problem! Now to find those scrumptious flags!
To find the user flag, run ls. Immediately, we see the file “user.txt”. Read that and get the user flag.

Now to find the root flag.
As always, let’s see if we belong to the sudo group by using the groups command. This does not look promising but there is still sudo -l.

Holt can use the nano editor as root. Let’s open up nano using sudo nano. It will take us to a blank page with some options listed at the bottom. One option that catches our interest is the “Read File” option. Hit CTRL+R and then CTRL+T to bring up a filesystem. We can use this to navigate to a file we want to read. Since we are running nano as root, we can go straight to “/root/root.txt” and get our flag!

Conclusion

This box is pretty easy to get into with the assumption that you have decent linux command line skills, good researching skills, and some basic knowledge of pentesting. And if this wasn’t easy, no problem! TryHackMe is chock full of rooms that teach the basics. If may seem difficult at first but if you stick to it, you’ll be crafting your own writeup helping others one day too!

Happy Hunting!

Another Place To Hack Legally

First things first.

Since Covid19 has been declared a pandemic, we should do everything we can to help limit the spread of the virus. The CDC has great information on how to do so.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/index.html

And please. Don’t buy up all the toilet paper and face masks!
************************************************************************

With Covid19 spreading in the US, a lot of companies are changing they way they continue business. Cybersecurity businesses are no different. I’m going into my 3rd week of remote work and there are company memos about what is being done to accommodate people and what our state is doing to combat the spread. Since I live near Seattle, you can imagine that daily life has been impacted greatly.

However, it is my belief that if you’re in the cybersecurity industry, you continue to find ways to improve your skills or to take time to mentor others. There are many ways to accomplish this. For me, I like learning about pentesting methodologies to help with my network traffic investigations. To that end, I want to share a new website I recently ran across via Reddit.

The site is called tryhackme.com and I have been addicted. Cutting myself off from the general public most days due to the virus doesn’t help with the addiction either. The easiest way to describe the site is something of a cross between HackThis, Cybrary, and HackTheBox in all the good ways! Since I have started playing on the site, I have improved my nmap and metasploit skills as well as being introduced to new tools and concepts. Even got to do my very first privilege escalation! It is one of those things you always hear about but never quite sure how it is done. And that is what I love about this site!

The main feature of TryHackMe is the different “rooms” you can join to learn. Each room has an overall objective and, like Cybrary, there are steps on how to complete the objective. Each step has some kind of confirmation that you completed it. Sometimes it is as simple as clicking the “completed” button. Other times, you need to submit the correct answer. One thing I like about these steps is that it does not feel like it is holding your hand through every little step. When I used Cybrary’s virtual machines for learning (roughly $100/month), I got annoyed when the steps told me how to logon to a machine with a username and password. This wasn’t through something like SSH or RDP. I was already interacting with the virtual machine and had the username/password on hand. Yet, I often would find tutorials instructing me how to login. Or how to open Windows command line…I digress.

Like HackTheBox, in each room you can deploy a virtual machine and connect to it through an OpenVPN tunnel, but unlike HackTheBox, you are not completely alone when trying to hack into the machine. The steps are usually well written and easy to follow that even a novice, oh say like me, can get that sweet forbidden access to the machine. If you get stuck, there is sometimes a “hint” button to point you in the right direction. Similar to HackThis. Another similarity to is that TryHackMe has something for absolute beginners to more advanced users. Plus, no need to hack the site to get access! (I’m looking at you, HackTheBox.)

Although you can use the site for free, I would recommend the subscription plan if you can. It is about $10 a month and gets you access to all of the content including the “learning paths”. I’m currently on the OSCP path which has got me thinking I should take the exam one day. And some of the subscription rooms have been a real joy to work in!

If you have an interest in pentesting or just want to see hacking concepts in action, I highly recommend giving the site a try!

Now, to go back and finish the Kenobi room!



Where To Hack?

Five years ago I got my first taste of a real IT job. I was teaching in China for an English boarding school in China and a new firewall needed to be installed. The manual was all in Chinese and the school didn’t want to bring in an outside technician to set it up. So I gave it a try and managed to get ACLs and other rules up and running. Soon after that, I would find myself securing the networks, cleaning USBs and recovering important financial data from a highly corrupted computer that no longer booted!

Needless to say, China got me interested in cyber security as a career field. In the following months after leaving China, I studied the basics and slowly grew my knowledge of security concepts and best practices. I learned a lot. Occasionally this information flowed out of my mouth like a glorious fountain when I did helpdesk and consulting work. Despite all of this knowledge I slowly realized that everything I have learned did not address the must crucial element to defending any point of information. I had absolutely no clue how to hack! Even if I did, I didn’t know where to hack…legally.

Sure I could go home, spin up a VM and try to attack but how would I even begin? I did find tutorials on hacking but there are so many exploits out there. Which ones do I want to try? Can I set up the victim machine properly so that the attack works? What if I wanted to try a different exploit? What will I need to do the configure the victim machine so that would work? Where does it end? I realized I would be spending more time configuring VMs than actually learning penetration techniques. Thus, I walked away…

Only to return a year later. I still wanted to know how to exploit systems. Places like ITProTV and Cybrary are good places to get some hands on training but it costs money which builds up over time. There are training seminars that cost thousands of dollars. Maybe on the job experience or going back to school is a good option to learn? These choices can limit who can get hands on ethical hacking training which seems to be the opposite of what the industry needs.

Fear not! It is not all gloom. If you are willing to self-study, there’s hope!

There are free sites online that offer hacking challenges from absolute newbie (me) to advanced (Hackerman?). I am going to go through some that I found pretty helpful even if some of these sites are already well-known.

Over The Wire

If your Linux skills aren’t great, OTW can help with the Bandit challenges. You’ll learn things like ssh, file traversal, netcat, and general command line usage. It is not hacking per se but knowing some basic Linux is a must for the field. I am sure that Windows or MacOSX are capable of performing hacking techniques. However, a lot of tools are designed for Linux and nine times out of ten a hacking tutorial is designed for a Linux environment. Give it a try!
https://overthewire.org/wargames/

Hack This!

Probably one of my favorite sites, HT! has challenges from webpage exploitation to steganography to cryptography. It is beginner friendly with a hint for almost all of the challenges and a forum where you can ask for help. It is also a great way to improve researching skills as you learn about different security concepts and how they can be exploited. The only downside is that you won’t actually be penetrating any VMs. Regardless, this site is a definite must!
https://www.hackthis.co.uk/

Hack This Site

Similar to HT!, HTS offers challenges from newbie to advanced in a similar categories. It also offers a forum and hints that point you in the direction you should go to learn about a concept. As before, you won’t be hacking into VMs but the experience hacking web apps should not be passed up. Another must!
https://www.hackthissite.org/

Hack The Box

Another favorite is HTB. HTB has different challenges much like before but it also has VMs just waiting to be hacked into! That’s right! Legal hacking! HTB is a step up from HT! and HTS. There are still challenges for newbies though newbie is a bit relative for this site. If you’re like me, I would recommend going through walkthroughs for retired challenges while attempting an active challenge. There is a monthly fee for access to retired challenges but it’s less than $15. The one catch is you have to hack your way into the site. If you feel up to the task, hop on, hack on.
https://www.hackthebox.eu/

Microcorruption

Although it is not hacking in the conventional sense, reverse engineering is a great way for to learn how to pick something apart and exploit it. MC is essentially an online game where you have to trick security locks to open and let in your operatives. The challenge here is that you will be working with assembly language and a simple debugger. It adds an extra twist to analyzing code and understanding what is happening. Relatively speaking, this site is accommodating for beginners.
https://microcorruption.com/login

There are a couple more sites and resources that can be helpful learning hacking with hands on experience that I do not have a lot of experience with but worth looking into.

I’m sure there are other wonderful resources out there that won’t break the budget and still give a bang for your buck. But you get what you don’t pay for. There will be little hand holding and the learning is largely up to you. But if you don’t give up and dedicate the time, the rewards are worth it!

Hacking: Why We Need To Do More Of It

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. I DO NOT condone hacking for malicious purposes that harm innocent people.

Hacking is generally divided into three hats: black, white, and grey. Black hats are generally labeled as the bad guys but that honestly depends on framing. Hacking to shutdown a city for money while denying services for citizens? Bad. Hacking to prove there is unbridled corruption in a questionable government? Could be a good thing though this is still black hat territory.

White hats are almost always good. These are the people who are paid by the target to hack the target. Doing this can expose vulnerabilities in a company or system so that it may be fixed or mitigated. In the long run, a company would be saving money instead of shelling out cash to fix an attack, recover/rebuild lost data, defend their reputation through PR, and possibly pay legal fees.

Grey hats are the people that come in a myriad of flavors. There people who want free stuff. People who do bug bounties. People who want to mod the electronics. People who just like poking around. People who want to tip the game in their favor. People who want to improve a product. The list can go on.

As a society, we typically lump hackers into two categories: good and bad. The good hackers are working for respectable groups and are paid for sanctioned hacks. The bad is anyone else. This binary view of hacking is a detriment to society for it lumps grey hats in with black hats without thought. It discourages people who may be curious about hacking from trying it. Although we now have courses to teach people to become white hats, many people get their start from being a grey hat! Some do go off and do black hat work but many more do white hat work to apply their skills for the benefit of society at large. And the cyber security industry always seem to bemoan that there aren’t enough people to fill in the gaps.

Of course, not every position that needs filling requires hacking skills. A SOC analyst or security engineer isn’t going to fire up a laptop and start furiously hacking away and get paid for it! Though…that would be kind of cool. However, knowing how to hack means that these people will know how to improve security. It means that people can detect and interpret threats better. Learning how to hack introduces new concepts to people and forces them to think outside the box. Malicious hackers are thinking outside the box all the time to find ways to trick the system. The ability to do the very same is a crucial skill needed in the cyber security world.

And hacking isn’t just for hoodie wearing youngsters. Anyone can learn the basics of hacking! You don’t have to be super smart. No offense. Fortunately, security awareness training is a great tool to teach the basics of hacking. Besides knowing about phishy emails, check the urls of links. Look at the email header. See strange text that looks out of place? Report it! Are you entering your personal information to a site without a green padlock next to the url? I wouldn’t unless you really, really know for sure that it’s safe. Think you don’t need to follow all of the security protocols because you are “too low” in the business hierarchy to matter? A hacker doesn’t think that. If fact, a hacker probably views you as their best friend. Often times, it is the least guarded that malicious hackers exploit to get their foot in the door. If it helps, think of malicious hackers as a very hangry bear. You can outrun the bear or not be at the back of the group of runners. The bear doesn’t care who it mauls. It’s happy to catch anything delicious.

In the near future, society has to discard the blind binary view on hacking and judge it in the context of how it is used and to what end. We need to encourage responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities from people who weren’t hired to find it. We need reformed black/grey hats who know all the tricks of the trade. We need tinkerers and explorers of technology who occasionally break things so they can figure out how the technology works. Anyone who has ever used a computer will know that those impish little boxes do weird things just to savor our frustrations and confusion. These explorers strike fear into computers. It’s why a bad computer suddenly behaves when such a person threatens to fix it. I feel confident of this!

Bottom line is that technology is becoming more complex. Complexity introduces chances for exploits. We can’t just sit back and let men in white labcoats…or hats… protect us. We need to be proactive in defending ourselves from cyber attacks. And if I may quote one of my favorite books:

Know the enemy,
Know yourself,
And victory
Is never in doubt,
Not in a hundred battles.

He who knows self
But not the enemy
Will suffer one defeat
For every victory.

He who knows
Neither self
Nor enemy
Will fail
In every battle.

–Sun Tzu, The Art of War