Hackercool Magazine June 2021

Social Engineering is very gravely underestimated. When I learnt about Social Engineering as part of my CEH certification, I Kalyan Chinta, personally thought it as one chapter which could not be any use to me. The reason for this was because it involved convincing users to allow their systems to be hacked. I thought who would allow themselves to be hacked. Why would anyone install malware or click on a suspicious link intentionally. That would be simply foolish of him or her. However, my opinion would change after some years when I took up the role of a cyber security trainer. As part of my training a new batch for CEH certification, one of the students wanted to try the phishing tutorial in Social Engineering Attack practically. He created a…

Q. How did one password allow hackers to disrupt colonial pipelines? A: Hackers gained access to the network of colonial pipeline using a single password. This password belonged to a VPN account of a user who worked with Colonial Pipeline. Virtual private networks are used by employees to connect remotely to the company’s network. The surprising part of this is that the user to whom these credentials belonged to has long left the company. However, the account was still active. It is not known how hackers got this account but it is assumed that the user credentials were part of a different data breach earlier. Maybe, the user reused this password for the company’s VPN. This is all a result of poor cyber security practices. 2. What is the difference…

Nagios XI Scanner Module TARGET: Nagios XI (almost all versions) TYPE: Remote Module: Auxiliary ANTI-Malware: NA This Auxiliary module detects the version of the Nagios XI web applications and suggest matching exploit modules (if any) for the detected version. We have tested this exploit module on Nagios XI 5.6.5 running on Centos 7. We updated Metasploit and loaded the auxiliary/scanner/http/nagios_xi_scanner module. Note that this is a Authenticated module. So I set all the options including credentials as shown below. After all the options are set, I execute the module. As readers can see, the module not only detected the version of Nagios XI but also suggested some exploits for this version. Since our readers have already seen the nagios_xi_mibs_authenticated_rce and nagios_xi_ plugins_check_plugin_authenticated_rce modules in our previous Issues, let’s see some…

Rust is a programming language that began as a personal project in year 2006 by Gradon Hoare, an employee of Mozilla. Named after a family of fungi (we find it odd too), Rust is becoming increasingly popular nowadays. It is termed as an efficient and easy to use language which is considered safe too. It has been Stack Overflow’s most loved language from 2016 to 2020. However, it doesn’t seem these are the features that are making hackers interested in Rust. Its for a different reason altogether. Buer downloader was coded in C since 2019. However, this time it is written in Rust. Rewriting the malware in a new language like Rust enables hackers to better evade Buer detection mechanism. Since Buer was written in C since it began, Anti…

Hi All. I am Mala and today I am gonna show you what’s new in newly released Kali Linux 2021.2. First thing I noticed after booting up Kali Linux 2021.2 is its new Login Background. I logged in (credentials kali:kali) and also see a new Desktop background. Of course you will not see so many Desktop Icons of Windows executables. These are part of our Hacking Labs. These are the default desktop backgrounds. These can be changed by Right Clicking on the Desktop and selecting Desktop Settings option. Normally, the makers of Kali would change the default login and desktop as well as other art work every six months. From this release, they are going to change the defaults at every 20xx.1 release that is at the beginning fof the…

David S. Wall Professor Of Crminology University Of Leeds In their Carbis Bay communique, the G7 announced their intention to work together to tackle ransomware groups. Days later, US president Joe Biden met with Russian president Vladimir Putin, where an extradition process to bring Russian cyber criminals to justice in the US was discussed. Putin reportedly agreed in principle, but insisted that extradition be reciprocal. Time will tell if an extradition treaty can be reached. But if it is, who exactly should be extradited – and what for? “First, there’s the reconnaissance, where criminals identify potential victims and access points to their networks. This is followed by a hacker gaining ’initial access” The problem for law enforcement is that ransom ware – a form of malware used to steal organisation…