Defcon CTF Prequals

Short post today to share with you my happiness as tonight start the Defcon prequals to gain access to the Las Vegas event!

I'm playing with some Spanish mates in a very small team (we are three and usually Top 10 teams are 10+ players) with a lot of illusion to enjoy at least the same as the last year.

They usually do cracking, reversing, web, exploiting, forensic, etc. challenges and we will do our best to solve them. Even if you don't complete a challenge you always learn something new in the process.

I'll make next week a resume about how we did in the prequals and how to solve some of the challenges we manage to complete (if we can complete at least one...)

Ahh!! I almost forget!! You can still register in the competition!!

HOWTO: Using MBSA remotely

When it comes to performing a security assessment of Windows servers (SQL, ISA, IIS etc), the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) tool provides a good idea of the key security settings implemented on the Windows server being audited. 

 MBSA v2.1

One drawback though is MBSA v2.1 needs admin privileges on the remote Window server and offers no way of specifying alternate admin credentials in its GUI...what if you're MBSA client isn't even in the same domain??........

Using the "runas" command from Windows Command Prompt, its possible to specify the remote servers admin credentials for use with the MBSA executable:

'runas' command with custom credentials and mbsa.exe

In this screenshot, we used the local admin account on 'WIN2K3TESTSVR' rather than a domain account.

NOTE:  The '/netonly' switch is a must, this tells your client to use these credentials when making a remote connection.  If you dont use this switch, when you hit Enter, wWndows will try and verify these credentials which will most likely fail.

When MBSA starts, specify the IP address of the remote server 'WIN2K3TESTSVR' and click 'Scan'.  MBSA will now use the credentials you specified on the command line.

NOTE:  If you are scanning IIS servers, you will need to have the IIS Common Files installed on your MBSA machine so that a number of the IIS scripts will run correctly.  MBSA will soon let you know that a scan was incomplete because it could run the necessary IIS checks.

New version of Wfuzz!

I don't like automatic tools. Full stop. Well... not full... I like some semi-automatic tools.

One of these tools is wfuzz. I love this python script to perform a quick look over all the directories in a website and sometimes to test against some basic authorization bypass fuzzing a numeric parameter.

The use of this tool is very easy and I'm not going to explain here, you can read the README file from the package but I'm going to explain you some of the changes in this new version.

First of all if you want to download it you will need a subversion client as they are starting to use Google Code to distribute wfuzz and they don't offer any zip file right now.

Then you can test it as I show in the screenshot:

python wfuzz.py -z file -f wordlist/general/common.txt --hc 404 -c -t 1 http://test.acunetix.com/FUZZ

If you are a wfuzz user you already notice the inclusion of the chars column in the result output. This can be useful when either lines and words are the same in a specific page. First new feature!! You can filter using the number of chars with the --hh parameter

Other of the differences in this new version is the inclusion of more dictionaries. Now they add more and split them into categories:

pedro@pedro:~/wfuzz$ tree wordlist/
wordlist/
|-- general
|   |-- admin-panels.txt
|   |-- big.txt
|   |-- catala.txt
|   |-- common.txt
|   |-- euskera.txt
|   |-- extensions_common.txt
|   |-- medium.txt
|   |-- megabeast.txt
|   |-- mutations_common.txt
|   |-- spanish.txt
|   `-- test.txt
|-- Injections
|   |-- All_attack.txt
|   |-- bad_chars.txt
|   |-- SQL.txt
|   |-- Traversal.txt
|   |-- XML.txt
|   `-- XSS.txt
|-- others
|   |-- common_pass.txt
|   `-- names.txt
|-- stress
|   |-- alphanum_case_extra.txt
|   |-- alphanum_case.txt
|   |-- char.txt
|   |-- doble_uri_hex.txt
|   |-- test_ext.txt
|   `-- uri_hex.txt
|-- vulns
|   |-- apache.txt
|   |-- cgis.txt
|   |-- coldfusion.txt
|   |-- dirTraversal-nix.txt
|   |-- dirTraversal.txt
|   |-- dirTraversal-win.txt
|   |-- domino.txt
|   |-- fatwire_pagenames.txt
|   |-- fatwire.txt
|   |-- frontpage.txt
|   |-- iis.txt
|   |-- iplanet.txt
|   |-- jrun.txt
|   |-- netware.txt
|   |-- oracle9i.txt
|   |-- sharepoint.txt
|   |-- sql_inj.txt
|   |-- sunas.txt
|   |-- tests.txt
|   |-- tomcat.txt
|   |-- vignette.txt
|   |-- weblogic.txt
|   `-- websphere.txt
`-- webservicces
    |-- ws-dirs.txt
    `-- ws-files.txt

They also add three points to the changelog:

• Added hexa-rand payload (Thanks to Alice Kaerast)
• Fixed encoding problems (Thanks to Osama Elnaggar)
• Fixed problems in the headers parsing (Thanks to Osama Elnaggar) 

I just update my tools folder with this new version and now we can keep our version update using svn :) Nice work guys!!

Infosec'10 metadata (I)

Wops! A long time without writing here... A lot of work and not too much time to write. But I'm going to try to fix it shortly!

Two weeks ago was the Infosec event at London. Our company had a very nice stand and I spent a good time Wednesday talking with some people about what we do and, more specifically, what I do as application tester at Pentura. But I can not stop thinking about security in any moment...

Others companies in the event were giving some CDs with documentation and programs. As I know that sometimes people don't take care about what they copy into the CDs when they make the copies so I took some of them to analyze :) They had been burning in my backpack for two weeks!! But today, when I inserted the first one, it makes my day.

The CD is from (ISC)2 and they call it Green disc. They have a lot of docs I'll analyze some point this week but I discovered something very funny. They are using WS_FTP. How I know it? They left the WS_FTP.LOG files in some of the folders. Take a look:

This file contains the local path of the file (you can get the user name), the remote path of the upload (you get the path) and the IP of the remote server (need I say more?) You can found a lot of WS_FTP.LOG files at Google or, if you got the CD from the (ISC)2, have a quick look to these files ;)

Cheers!!

P.D. Maybe is not a (ISC)2 IP but still funny (and not very secure...), isn't it? :)

Shorty Authentication Bypass

(This post was posted originally at my personal own blog and also featured in the exploit-db.com website)

Today, reading some stuff at internet I have found an article about 7 PHP scripts to generate shorts URLs. This kind of links are very common today with a lot of controversy about the security risk that they implied. I’m not here (now) to discuss about shorting URL’s services but to talk about a stupid bug that I have found in the first (!!!) software that WebResourcesDepot recommend today.

Shorty is a script very old… From 2006. Why are they recommending it in the first place? Second: Did they try to install it? A lot of errors appears when you try a fresh install and some pain until you can fix it. Buggy from the scratch.

I then decided to read some source code. I have found that in functions.php is some bug that we can use to bypass the login form. Let's go to read some php code:

function authenticate(){
    $cookie = @$_COOKIE['snickerdoodle'];
    if($cookie == "polarbears"){
        //
    } else {
        exit("Not logged in.");
    }
}

function verify(){
    if(@$_COOKIE['snickerdoodle']){
        $cookie = $_COOKIE['snickerdoodle'];
    } else {
        $cookie = '';
    }
    if($cookie == "polarbears"){
        return 1;
    } else {
        return 0;
    }
}

As you can read this code generates a cookie with the name “snickerdoodle” and the value “polarbears” to determine if you are authenticated or not. Its very easy to create a new cookie into your browser with this data with some Firefox extension. If you are using a browser without extensions like Google Chrome you can try to write the next javascript sentence into your URL:

javascript:document.cookie=”snickerdoodle=polerbears”;

If you don’t want to install Shorty (and mess around with all the hacks you have to do use it) you can always use the search intitle:”Shorty (Beta)” to found some places to test it.

Have fun!

The danger of the default files

(This post was originally posted in my own personal blog)

During my current research I have found some default files that some web frameworks includes into their installations that can compromise the security of a website. It also can allow an attacker to determine which framework a web page is using.

The first of these files is from the symfony framework. They offer to the developers a useful script called frontend_dev.php which show internal information about the current install and the server. As you can see in the following screenshot the information can be very useful…



It’s deactivated by default and can be activated changing the “lib\config\config\settings.yml” file:

# Logging and debugging settings

web_debug: false # Enable the web debug toolbar

By default the framework is configure not to show the toolbar, but a lot of web pages (indexed by Google) have activate it and allow to any user to read the private data of their websites.



Moreover another default files that I found researching into the default Zend Server installation are the alias /server-info and /server-status. These are part of the mod_info module and, hopefully, in Zend Server, are configured to be access only from localhost:

<Location>
SetHandler server-info
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Location>

<Location>
SetHandler server-status
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Location>

This is a secure default configuration that other domains using this Apache module should adopt for the security of their web pages. This is a problem discussed sometimes ago with the revelation of the /server-status file in twitter.com. It’s also known that other servers like Apache.org are offering his status and his info, but you can also found a lot of websites sharing their server-status and server-info pages.

I have found that these default files are not include in the wordlist of wfuzz or even Wikto. I don’t know why are they ignoring these files, but I’m going to add these to my default dictionaries files :)

Cheers!

Pentura is Delicious!!!

Well... maybe I did the easy joke, but I couldn't resists!!!

I had never use any kind of bookmarks, even local ones. I try to remember the links or at least the keywords of the article or post to be able to localize it later using Bing or Google. But today I change something in my life... well, at least in my working life :P I'm starting to use bookmarks!

I added a small box in the right of the blog showing the RSS of the new delicious account I created for Pentura to store all these links about security I consider interesting around the web. Some of them will be in Spanish (I'm sorry...) but you can easily translate them using online translators :)

I also added my personal twitter account, where you can follow my public timeline with funny security jokes, thoughts about how stupid can be sometimes the bugs I found and maybe personal stuff between friends around the world. Again I'll try to keep it in English, but sometimes replies goes in Spanish.

Bye!