Hacking Websites through Casper

Note:- Article is just for education purpose only not written by us we just sharing this article here so that you can do security assessments on your stuff

Before you hack a system, you must decide what your goal is. Are you hacking to put the system down, gaining sensitive data, breaking into the system and taking the 'root' access, screwing up the system by formatting everything in it, discovering vulnerabilities & see how you can exploit them, etc ... ? The point is that you have to decide what the goal is first.
The most common goals are:
1. breaking into the system & taking the admin privileges.
2. gaining sensitive data, such as credit cards, identification theft, etc.
You should have all of your tools ready before you start taking the steps of hacking. There is a Unix version called backtrack. It is an Operating System that comes with various sets of security tools that will help you hack systems (penetration tests).
You should set the steps (methodology) that you plan to take in your journey before you do anything else. There is a common methodology followed
by hackers, i will mention it below. However, you can create your own methodology if you know what you are doing.
Common steps to be taken for hacking a system:
1. Reconnaissance (footprinting).
2. Scanning.
3. Ports & Services Enumeration.
4. Vulnerability Assessment.
5. Vulnerability Exploitation.
6. Penetration and Access.
7. Privilege Escalation & owning the box.
8. Erase tracks.
9. Maintaining access.
The above methodology can change based on your goals. Feel free m8!
Before you break into a system, you have to collect as much info as you can on the system and target. You have to study your target well before you hack. This step is called Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance is achieved by using techniques & tools that are undetectable by the target. You are gathering your target's info that is publicly published, e.g. browse your target's website & if they are looking for an SQL employee and Windows server admin, then you get a hint that they are running Windows Server & do SQL's, this is called a "passive" action. Lets see an example of active action! Example of active action: call the company to obtain some info, visit the company, email employees to get some info, go to the target's website & read its source code. In other words, passive action means you gather info in a non-intrusive manner. Active action is a step further, such as talking to the company as if you are a customer, things like that. It is not really important to know what action is passive & what is active, the main goal here to gather info! Simple huh? Good, let me go deeper little bit.
In passive reconnaissance, there is a 0% chance of getting caught ;-), as you only target publicly available info to give you the feel on what your target looks like. The type of info you can gather through Passive Recon. are, names, phones numbers, location addresses, partner networks, and much more. This can aid you when you want to do some social engineering! Hence, sometimes you can get some non-public info that's revealed when you do passive reconnaissance. There are several tools helps you to do passive reconnaissance, such as whois (who is). Whois helps you obtain extensive info, such as names, domains of the target, etc. Other great tools are, Sam Spade, domaintools, and google(can reveal lots of target subdomians & many more).
Active reconnaissance goes beyond the passive nature, such as communicating with the target without being caught, such as scanning. Anything not discovered in IDS(Intrusion Detection System) is considered active. You have to think of ways to extract info of the company in a normal way, public by going a little bit deeper than passive recon. e.g. you can go to the physical location, do some social engineering, email staff, communicate with employees based on the info you've gotten on your passive recons. Things like that!
Example of some techniques for active reconnaissance, such as banner grabbing, view company's public website source code and directory structure, social engineering, shoulder surfing, etc.
What the heck is banner grabbing?
You let the server send you a block of information that tells you OS version of your target system & various association with it
Banner tells OS version and various association. Anything listening on a "port" can determine the operating system (OS) "the port" is running on, this called fingerprinting. In other words, fingerprinting is the process of determining the operating system (OS) or applications used by a remote target.
Can you give a brief example of Social Engineering?
For example, you try to find out where IT admin goes after business hours, then start to go to the place he goes & build a relationship , start making a friend relationship to extract more info slowly but surely, things like that! you know what i mean.
What is shoulder surfing?
Simply, stand behind a person's shoulder and see what the guy is doing & typing on the keyboard. This can happen in a wireless network area where everyone is using a laptop in public areas.
In summary, reconnaissance is one of the most important steps in hacking. The main concept is to gather all the info that is publicly available or easily obtainable. Info that we gather will help us in social engineering and research purposes which will lead you to very critical info about the system. It starts by obtaining names, phones, emails, IP range, domain structure, and so on.
let me show you how banner grabbing is done, telnet into your target server on port 80 as the following, go to command line or terminal and type
telnet xx.xxx.xxx.xxx 80
Now the connection is established, that stupid server thinks you are a web browser connected to it, it waits you to enter commands so the server can you give you info about your request. In this situation, you have to write a command that says "Hey you web server, give me content of such and such website". However, we do not really want to visit the website through telnet, do you? You can just go to web browser & request the website from there. Our purpose here is to freak the server out enough, so it spits back a code that says, hey! this doesn't work but here is some info that might help you do some trouble shooting. This technique allows you to fingerprint various components of the target system.
Note: instead of telnet xxx.xx.xxx.xx 80, you can do nc xxx.xx.xxx.xxx 80! It's the same thing ... nc stands for netcat ... xx.xxx.xx.xxx represents the IP address of the target system.
After you do telnet xxx.xx.xxx.xxx 80, the remote sever will wait you to enter a command. Type this:
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
Then you will get a reply looks similar to:-
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 02:53:29 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux)
Last-Modified: Wed, 07 Oct 1998 11:18:14 GMT
ETag: "1813-49b-361b4df6"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1179
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
So the header response brought back some important info that says, the server runs: Apache/1.3.23 in UNIX OS for Red Hat distribution of Linux.
OR you might get header that looks similar to the following:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Expires: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 01:41:33 GMT
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 01:41:33 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Wed, 28 May 2003 15:32:21 GMT
ETag: "b0aac0542e25c31:89d"
Content-Length: 7369
It means, the server runs: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 in Win 2000 or Win 2003 (we don't the Windows version yet).
OR you might get header that looks similar to the following:
Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:18:46 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) PHP/4.4.8 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8b
Last-Modified: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:34:28 GMT
ETag: "c9865b-d91-48769c84"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 3473
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
It means, the server runs: Apache/1.3.41 in UNIX box, running PHP/4.4.8
Ok, you get it now?
lets say our target got the following version: the server runs: Apache/1.3.41 in UNIX box, running PHP/4.4.8
At this point if you know any vulnerabilities for this particular OS or this particular Apache or PHP. You can start the exploitation process ;-) ...
Another example, use program called sam-spade which gives you alot of info about your target. The target does not know actually what we are doing against their server, since they haven't seen anything been triggered by IDS or Firewall.
*What is the difference between IDS & Firewall?
An IDS (Intrusion Detection System) may only detect and warn you of a violation of your privacy. Although most block major attacks, some probes or other attacks may just be noted and allowed through. There's also an evolution of the IDS called an IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) that watches for the same things an IDS does, but instead of just alerting, it blocks the traffic.
A good firewall will block almost all attacks unless specified otherwise or designed otherwise. The only problem is, the firewall might not warn you of the attacks and may just block them.
It may be a good idea to have both an IDS and a Firewall, because the IDS will warn you and then the firewall will block the attack. Over the years, firewalls gottten more complex and added more features. One of these features is actually IDS - today you can have a firewall that already has IDS(Firewall/IDS's are combined into one internet security program).
Note: the book in amazon is just an example for you to give you an idea of what kind of book you should be looking for - if you are interested.
Alright, now you at least have an idea of what reconnaissance is! lets talk about scanning...
When you scan your target's network, you actually start touching the system. Scanning a network determines what's in there, scanning network gives you the feel of how your target's network is laid out, if there are multiple subnets, which hosts are alive, check ports, see if system is alive, discover available hosts & get info about the discovered hosts. There are thousands of tools can be used to scan networks! Scanning a network can easily get picked up by IDS. Anyhow, no one will pay attention except if you do it over and over because scans happens on such a regular basis on the internet. Therefore, people who read the logs, i means the webmaster won't really pay attention to every single scan that occurs, so you don't have to worry alot. There are ways to avoid being picked up by IDS :-). After you finish scanning, you will gain a list of network nodes that exists there.
"Node" is an active electronic device that is attached to a network, and is capable of sending, receiving, or forwarding information over a communications channel. If you want to learn more, google it or visit [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]) ...
Ok now we want to discover live hosts via scanning. This is the first action taken against your target's network. Depending on what method of scanning you use, you can be detected by IDS. Most admins will ignore detections because it happens alot unless something abnormal happens.
EDIT: TEMPORARY STOPPING POINT OF GRAMMATICAL EDITING
There are various scanner tools, e.g. nmap, superscan, and many more. There are various scan methods, some are stealthy, others are not.
Before i talk about various scanning methods, let me explain to you about TCP connections basics. When you scan your target using TCP communication, there are six TCP flags can be utilized during packet transmission(packets get transmitted during scanning process). A flag will indicate whether the sent packets are syn, ack, fin, urg, psh, or rst packets. These packets sets you in a position on how you want to communicate with the remote host. You can get different info depending on the flag you choose for the scanning.
TCP establishes three handshakes, syn, syn-ack, ack. What are they?
When you scan your target using TCP communication, you send a syn packet(syn request), and then target sends you back an ack packet with syn packet. Now, you send an ack packet to the target. So now both machines establish the connection well, like they have made a well established tunnel for a proper guaranteed communication without losing any packets during communicating with each other. A hacker can get caught easily if he uses this method to hack other systems illegally.
Hackers use non-standard combination of these six flags, which gives them info that are not normally available to the public.
Have you heard about syn flood?
syn flood is done by utilizing three handshake by sending "syn" request to the target, so the target receives a syn request and send an a syn-ack back to the originator(you). You ignore the target syn-ack request - when you ignore it, then the three handshakes is not completed, this is called half open TCP connection - In theory, when the target sends you syn-ack, the target allocates some RAM on its machine.
The amount of RAM on the target machine must be open until it gets response (ack packet) back from you because till now only two handshake has been made,so the TCP connection process is not completed yet. However, there is always a time limit for the RAM to be opened, so if 30 secs passed by & the target did not get the ack from you, the connection will abort(failed TCP handshake - timeout) & RAM will be deallocated.
The idea here is to send hell alot of packets in few secs so in 30 secs, you can send 40 million packets(lets say one packet size is 1kb) which is heavy on the RAM since the RAM might not have enough memory to carry 40 million packets. Therefore, you force the target to make half open TCP connection attempts, so definitely the target machine will stop responding to legitimate request. In other words, if you send 40 million syn requests to that remote host, it's going to allocate a hell of a lot of ram for those requests. After a while, it's going to eat up all of the ram. Thus, target system goes down. This is called syn flood attack.
In short, syn flood attack makes the system (i.e. the IP stack or kernel) chokes on the memory allocations (or simply runs out of memory) or the target application (i.e. web server) chokes on the processing load. You got it? Or not yet?! Syn flood is an old technique i just mentioned it here for illustration purposes.
General Information: these days, SYN floods are used to make systems inaccessible. They have a limited number of half open connections, you use them all, and they can't accept any more SYNs. But again, modern software throws away old SYNs once the limit is reached. Note that different systems will behave differently.
Lets talk about the most common TCP Scan types. There are full scan, half open scan, stealth scan, Xmas scan, and ack scan.
full scan: this completes 3 way TCP. it is the most effective & gives more accurate results. However, it is not safe and easily traced and detected.
half open scan: it is the second most effective scanning method, only uses first part of the handshake to get syn-ack but does not send 3rd part (ack) back to the remote host. The idea here is if the remote replies back to you after you have sent syn request, this means the port - we sent the syn to - must be open.
stealth scan: the idea here is to scan ports randomly(not in sequential order) & reduce the speed of scanning. If you scan all port from 1 to 65536 in sequence, your more visible to be detected, and usually scanning happens so fast, which is unusual since regular program does not connect to port that fast, so this can make it easier to be detected. Therefore you have to scan ports randomly & reduce the speed of scanning. To avoid IDS, you should not use full connection scan with stealth scan, you can use half-open scan(syn). syn is considered a stealth scan. In fact, syn scan is called syn-stealth scan, or you can use Xmas scan with stealth scan which helps you to evade detection, things like that! you get my point i guess.
Xmas scan: uses fin, urg, and push flags which are used to bypass some firewalls. Xmas scan works with UNIX system, it does not work with Windows system.
ack scan: this helps you evading IDS not to get you detected. You send only an ack packet to your target, your target won't know how to deal with it since there was no handshake. Thus, ack scan causes open ports in your target machine to return a reset packet(rst), rst packet gives you a hint that the port or service is not filtered between point A and point B, which usually firewal resides in between! Since the port replied you with rst packet this means there is no firewall between A(your machine) & B(port or service on the target machine) and rst packet also gives you an insight that the target port is open ;-). If there is a firewall, your ack packet would not reach to the target port & because of that you won't get any rst packet. In addition, rst packet helps you indentify what system is running on the remote host.
These are the most common method of scans, there are hundreds of scanning methods! nmap allows you to set your own custom scan type e.g. instead of sending ack flags only, you can send ack flag and rst flag together and see what you get back from target ...
OK! we have talked about how TCP scanning works in general. Now, i will be talking about UDP & ICMP Scanning ... UDP and ICMP connections most of the times are blocked at the firewall level & even at the host level in some cases. We are going to scan on hosts & ports that respond via UDP. When you scan your target via UDP, there are many problem will occur during that process e.g. you can scan over the ports via UDP, assume you scanned port 1, and port 1 is closed, then host will send ICMP unreachable back to you, which gives an insight that port is closed because you didn't get any UDP response back from target! Making sense,right? Unfortunately, we will never get a response back from target to ensure you that port is open!
Thats how UDP call works, send the packet & forget it. Lets say we come across port 21, and 21 is open, then port 21 on target machine will not reply back to you because UDP does not give you the guarantee the delivery packets during communication process, it just send the packet and forget, unlike TCP which guarantees the delivery of packets with no loss or corruption. Since we didn't get reply back, then we can assume the port 21 is open *OR* maybe port 21 is closed and ICMP reply got lost somewhere so we didn't get it! A general rule, when you don't get a reply you assume port is open.
Some high professionals security person purposely configure ports to not to respond a UDP scanning. ICMP scanning is as same as UDP. ICMP scanning is noisy & can be picked by IDS very easily because ICMP sends random several pings to the network instead of a single host(ICMP scanning does a 'ping scanning' - sends ICMP packets - to the whole network instead of a single host). After you finish ICMP scanning, based on the replies you get back from the live hosts, then you can determine that your target network is listening for ICMP traffic and you might to do some exploit based on that. Unfortunately, there aren't alot of ICMP exploits going around, so you are just going to use ICMP for network enumeration, you just do it to see what hosts are up, host A is up , host B is up & host C is up, they are replying for my ICMP. Thus, this let us know these 3 hosts are running on the targeted network and potentially can be a target for us. IDS's are always listening for network scans & alot of network scanners provide a support for ICMP scanning, but do not have a way to make it stealthy! Therefore, ICMP can turn on the IDS alert which tells the security person there is somebody scans your whole network.
nmap is a great tool that is very popular, it is usually used to scan networks, hosts, ports, and does alot of other stuff. It is very intrusive tool and considered a hacking tool. Using nmap against systems you dont own or dont have permission to scan can be considered illegal. Lets see examples of some scanning method!
Example of ICMP Scanning(-sP) - this is called ping scan
nmap -v -sP xx.xxx.xxx.xx > filename
nmap: represents the program we are running which nmap.
-v: for increased verbosity, which means bring me extra details of the targeted system. (Optional - as far as i know)
-sP: the flag that determines the scanning method.
x's: target IP address.
> filename: output the results to the newly specified filename. In other words, save results in a file (Optional)
This above command shows you the systems that are up and running, so this shows what available to us on the targeted network. As a result, you will get simple info that shows you there are number of IP addresses that responded to ping request - Note: there could be alot more machines out there that are not responding to ICMP scanning.
Lets see an example of UDP scan, UDP scan not so speed.
nmap -v -sU xx.xxx.xxx.xx
Results of UDP scan(-sU) give more info than ping scan(-sP). Keep in mind there could be hundreds of other ports are listening on the system which simply don't respond to UDP connection.
ALRIGHT, now you have a good basic understanding about scanning! Next, i will be talking about fingerprinting! So keep learning :-)
Now lets get deeper! By now we have determined what nodes are running up on the network. So we are ready to gather large info on those live systems we discovered in the previous steps. Ok! now you need to discover what services (application) are running on your target's host. Every (or at least many) port has a service running on it. For example, web server usually are running on port 80. What we have to do is scan ports, see what kind of services(applications) are running on them, try to grab the versions of the services, this will help you to determine the OS as well. This is called 'Port & Service Enumeration(fingerprinting)'. We have to do this step to understand what potential vulnerabilities your target has & how to exploit them.
Assume after we have scanned our target system, we found our target runs "IIS 5.0 Server" on "port 80". Based on the scanning result, you can say the targer server is running IIS 5.0(IIS is set of Internet-based services, IIS is the second most popular web server - IIS is a Microsoft product), it is known IIS 5.0. has too many vulnerabilities & IIS 5.0 runs on Windows 2000, which Windows 2000 by itself has hundreds of vulns.
In other words, lets scan ports and services, and do OS fingerprinting, lets identify services on those live host in our target network. Once we know what services are running and what OS are running then we can start exploiting these services! - 'ping/port/service' scans are frequently run together using the same tool.
NOTE: identifying ports & services is the most critical part in hacking ... PERIOD
OS fingerprinting is used for determining OS type and version, then we exploit vulns. that resides into the OS. When you fingerprint a target, your targets' OS can be known from the TCP/IP stack, so fingerprinting happens on TCP/IP stack. Why? Because each OS has a unique implementation of TCP/IP, so TCP/IP stack is implemented differently from OS to OS, so an exact same query sent to one machine the respond of the result will be different than the other machine. Therefore, based on the response this can help the scanner determines the OS of the target, because every OS has its own unqiue response when you do OS fingerprinting request.
When you do a default install of OS, certain services will be installed by default, services that are needed for that OS to work properly, e.g. ports
137,138,139,and 445 which all combined together to produce Win 2000 OS or above. Another example, a combination of 139 and 445 can determine a certain version of windows such as Win XP or Win 2003, there are lots of ways to determine OS. Another example, if you see a service MS SQL is running on a certain port, you can determine the target OS is not in *nix family, it is in a Win family cause the target is running a Microsoft sql product. Thus, we can say port enumeration or service enumeration can help you in determining OS.

Lets have a closer look at nessus tool, nessus is client/server architecture. The process of setting it up is cumbersome. Nessus have about 9000 plugins, therefore it takes time to peroform the assessment. Results can be reviewed in a report. The report includes the vulnerabilities found on the target machine with a short description about the vulnerability.
Note: you can enable several plug-ins in plugin tab. You can specify range of ports through scan options. To specify the target, you should go to the target tab.
Once we have done the vulnerability assessment, and knew what vulnerabilities exit. We start gathering exploits of the found vulnerabilities to penetrate the system.
Lets talk about penetration and access! After all information we have gathered previously, its the time to break the system with the exploits you have.
Its the time to stop gathering information and start breaking into system. The ultimate goal is to gain the highest level of permissions. Try to use undiscovered techniques and methods. Think out of the box!
Some of exploits that enable penetration are:
*Buffer overflows
*Stack exploits
*Web vulnerabilities
*Services/apps that allow unauthenticated access.
Aside from the standard methods of penetration, lets see an penetration methods, here are some examples:
*SQL Injection - ability to change queries in the application before its sent into database.
*Application Error Handling - this can result DoS. Probably one of the most common vulnerability you can find in corporate arenas.
*Directory Traversal - browse directories you should not be able to do so on.
*Malformed Packets - one of the more difficult methods of penetration, requires very extensive knowledge of how TCP packets are assembled and disassembled. But once you get used to it, its probably the most effective ways of hacking.
*Bypassing Access Controls - password cracking is most common means of accessing systems.
*Social Engineering - i guess you know what it means.
*Sniffers - take passwords right off the wire, alot of protocls and application such as http & ftp communicate passwords over the wire in plain text.
*Session hijacking - it is similar to sniffers, but you don't gain a password because we take off the entire session, hijack the victim's session & act as you are him.
Usually when you get passwords, you get it encrypted, or hashed or hidden in some way or another. Password cracking can be done in several ways, examples:
*Brute Force Attack - Every password, can and will be broken by brute force attack. It is about the time. Depends on the size of the password.
*Dictionary Attack - less effective than brute force, relies on list of words or phrases.
*Hybrid Attack - combination of different tools. It is a combination of effectivence of brute force and dictionary attacks & often using other attack mechanisms, such as cryptanalysis attack (one of the hybird attack).
You should know that when you do sniffing, you often get usernames & passwords in plain text. However, you can get encrypted passwords from sniffing as well. You will need to use of the cracking techniques discussed above. Sometimes cracking an encrypted passwords can take secs, hours, days, months, or even more!!!