Hacking

Privilege Escalation. Basics On Windows, SYSTEM is the highest privilege possible. Local Administrators can effectively get SYSTEM privileges. On Linux, root (uid=0) is the highest privilege possible. Regular users can escalate to root privileges on demand (i.e. sudo). Techniques Kernel exploits - leverage a flaw in the OS. Vunerabilty is determined by researching kernel version, patch levels. Tend to be patched quickly. High privileged programs - get a program running at a higher privilege to execute your code. Often things are unnessarily run with high privileges for convenience sake. For example, JBoss running on TomCat, running as root. Deploy a WAR to JBoss with an embedded reverse shell. Credential theft - leverage techniques to compromise a user with higher privileges. The primary method of lateral movement within organisations. Dumping of hashes, such as responder, SCF files on writab shares, UNC requests (when a user attempts to \\server an auth request is sent and can be captured), network sniffing. Password reuse. SCF to steal credentials. Insecure configurations - abuse incorrectly services or programs. Service paths with whitespace is a great example e.g. C:\anti-virus\virus definition\bin\update.exe, Windows path probing will attempt to find and run C:\anti-virus\virus.exe. On Linux in the /etc/shadow file, the prefix e.g. $6 indicates the hash function and salt, for example, this entry: ...

Exploitation An exploit is some software which leverages a vunerability to perform an action. Important to differientiate the payload from the exploit. A payload is something executed via an exploit. Finding Exploits Exploit DB Google SearchSploit - a local mirror of exploit-db; useful for local cached copies. For example CVE-2008-4250, maybe assigned different vendor specific labels. In this case MSE08-067, by searching Google and heading to the Microsoft security bullitin: ...

Covers basics starting with enumeration. There is a process to exposing vunerabilities. Not a linear process. Imposter syndrome is huge in this field, due to the complexity of the field, and how many domains it covers. The anatomy of a hack (EEE); Enumeration, Exploitation, Escalation There are multiple ways to do one thing, for example to figure out if the sshd daemon is running you could: Check if port 22 is listening netstat -tlp Check if the sshd process is running Try to ssh connect to the daemon List the running services through systemd Tools Tools to grok: ...

A practical guide about doing secure email the right way with PGP. I did not write this guide. Credits to the author grugq. Original source. In case this guide goes missing in the future, wanted to preserve it for my own future reference. Operational PGP This is a guide on how to email securely. There are many guides on how to install and use PGP to encrypt email. This is not one of them. This is a guide on secure communication using email with PGP encryption. If you are not familiar with PGP, please read another guide first. If you are comfortable using PGP to encrypt and decrypt emails, this guide will raise your security to the next level. ...