Hackercool Magazine November 2023

By the time you finish reading this article. you will learn about two important concepts of Black hat Hacking. They are 1) Port forwarding and 2) Lateral Movement or pivoting. But before that make sure you have read and understood the Part-1 of this article in our previous Issue. Let’s begin with. Port Forwarding While reading the Part-1 of this article, did you get any doubt as to how when we placed our target system behind a Network Firewall, it’s port 445 was exposed to the internet? Well, it’s because of port forwarding. What is port forwarding? Port Forwarding or Port mapping is a technique using which we can allow ports in our internal network to connect over internet. Let me give you an example. You have a Desktop in…

Fiona Carroll Reader in Human Computer Interaction, Cardiff Metropolitan University Do you know what the padlock symbol in your internet browser’s address bar means? If not, you’re not alone. New research by my colleagues and I shows that only 5% of UK adults understand the padlock’s significance. This is a threat to our online safety. The padlock symbol on a web browser simply means that the data being sent between the web server and the user’s computer is encrypted and cannot be read by others. But when we asked people what they thought it meant, we received an array of incorrect answers. In our study, we asked a cross section of 528 web users, aged between 18 and 86 years of age, a number of questions about the internet. Some…

After a long time, welcome back to Metasploit This Month. Let us learn about the latest exploit modules of Metasploit and how they fare in our tests. Apache Airflow RCE Module TARGET: Apache Airflow <1.10.11 MODULE : Exploit TYPE: Remote ANTI-MALWARE : NA CVE-ID: CVE-2020-11978 + CVE-2020-13927 Apache Airflow is an open-source tool that is used for orchestration of data pipelines or workflows. Workflows and data pipelines are useful in creating visualizations of sales numbers of the previous day for example. It is used by Adobe, Adgen, Snapp etc. The above-mentioned versions of Apache Airflow software have an unauthenticated command injection vulnerability. This vulnerability is a result of two critical vulnerabilities. The first one is CVE-2020-1 1 978 which is an authenticated command injection vulnerability in the “example_trigger_target_dag”. The second…

David Tuffley Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University A serious cyberattack has disrupted operations at several of Australia’s largest ports, causing delays and congestion. Late on Friday, port operator DP World detected an IT breach that affected critical systems used to coordinate shipping activity. DP World is one of Australia’s largest port operators, handling approximately 40% of the nation ’s container trade across terminals in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle. DP World reacted quickly to contain the breach, including shutting down access to their port networks on land, to prevent further unauthorised access. This means they essentially “pulled the plug” on their internet connection to limit possible further harm. DP World senior director Blake Tierney said it is still possible to unload containers from ships, but the…

Till now, in our Exploit writing tutorials, you have learnt how to gather information about operating system, how to perform various file operations and how to execute external commands from inside the exploit. In Part3, you will learn how to download files using your exploit. Most of the exploits download various types of payloads in Real World. So, this is high time you learn how to download various files from the exploit code. In Python, there are various modules that implement the download function. Let’s see all of them. For downloading purpose, I have chosen a zip archive of netcat (download information is given in our Downloads section) hosted on an external website although, you can use any file of your choice. Just make sure to copy the URL correctly…

Thembekile Olivia Mayayise Senior Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand Recently, one of my acquaintances, Frank, received an email late on a Monday afternoon with the subject line, “Are you still in the office?” It appeared to come from his manager, who claimed to be stuck in a long meeting without the means to urgently purchase online gift vouchers for clients. He asked for help and shared a link to an online platform, from which Frank bought R6,000 (about US$325) worth of gift vouchers. Once he’d sent the codes he received a second email from the “boss” requesting one more voucher. At that point, Frank reached out to his boss through WhatsApp and discovered he’d been duped. Frank had fallen prey to a phishing scam. This is just one example of…