Hacker web exploitation uncovered pdf

This campaign operated at a scale we had not previously detected in our research into targeted intrusion operations versus generic phishing operations. Often, the email address of the target was included in the URL. Figure 5 shows a sample of the output from one shortener during a single collection period. The domain, emailserver[. The malicious links we discovered during our tracking each led to credential phishing sites, i.

In addition, Dark Basin operators had created phishing websites which copied the look and feel of specific web services used or operated by the target or their organization Figure In several cases, Dark Basin left the source code of their phishing kit openly accessible. The source code included references to log files, which were also publicly accessible. The log files recorded every interaction with the credential phishing website, including testing activity carried out by Dark Basin operators.

These details were both emailed to a Gmail address controlled by Dark Basin and recorded in one or more log files on the web server itself. In reviewing log files left openly available on several of the active phishing servers, we observed Dark Basin operators testing their phishing links and credential theft kits. The IP addresses which were logged by the phishing kit for these test entries were typically from anonymizing VPN services, but sometimes the logs showed that the test had been conducted using an IP address associated with an Indian broadband provider.

Figures 7 and 8 show log excerpts from a pair of tests found in the log files from hostsecuremail[. It is clear that Dark Basin operators were successful with at least some of their phishing campaigns. In cases observed by targets, Dark Basin was observed using commodity VPNs to access accounts using stolen credentials. We also found that logs from some phishing kits were publicly accessible. Some failure to recognize attempted phishing is to be expected when an entire organization or network of individuals working together on a shared advocacy goal is targeted by such a persistent adversary.

Perhaps most important however was the additional visibility provided by working closely with the targeted individuals and organizations. This view into the persistent attempts to compromise the targets greatly amplified our ability to follow breadcrumbs left by Dark Basin operators.

Further, while many of the targets whom we contacted had a sense they were being phished in a targeted operation, many others did not share this awareness. These targets either concluded that they were being phished for an unknown reason, or simply did not notice the targeting against the background of unrelated phishing messages and spam.

We believe there is an important role for major online platforms who have the capacity to track and monitor groups like Dark Basin. We hope Google and others will continue to track and report such hack-for-hire operations. We also encourage online platforms to be proactive in notifying users that have been targeted by such groups, such as providing detailed warnings beyond generic notifications to help enable targets to recognize the seriousness of the threat and take appropriate action.

Hack-for-hire groups enable companies to outsource activities like those described in this report, which muddies the waters and can hamper legal investigations. Previous court cases indicate that similar operations to BellTroX have contracted through a murky set of contractual, payment, and information sharing layers that may include law firms and private investigators and which allow clients a degree of deniability and distance.

Further, the growth of private intelligence firms, and the ubiquity of technology, may also be fueling an increasing demand for the types of services offered by BellTroX. At the same time, the growth of the private investigations industry may be contributing to making such cyber services more widely available and perceived as acceptable. The rise of large-scale, commercialized hacking threatens civil society.

As this report shows, it can be used as a tool of the powerful to target organizations that may not have sophisticated cybersecurity resources and consequently are vulnerable to such attacks. Citizen Lab has also previously researched and documented the harms of phishing campaigns against civil society around the globe. We believe it is especially urgent that all parties involved in these phishing campaigns are held fully accountable. We thank the many targets that have helped us during the past three years.

Without your diligence and effort this investigation would not have been possible. We have special gratitude for the journalists and media outlets for their patience. We also personally thank several targets in particular for incredible efforts to help us identify malicious messages and investigate this case: Matthew Earl of ShadowFall, Kert Davies of the Climate Investigations Center, and Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund.

We thank our colleagues at NortonLifeLock for their hard work. We begin by exploring advanced techniques and attacks to which all modern-day complex applications may be vulnerable. We'll learn about new web frameworks and web backends, then explore encryption as it relates to web applications, digging deep into practical cryptography used by the web, including techniques to identify the type of encryption in use within the application and methods for exploiting or abusing it.

The last section of the course, before the Capture-the-Flag competition, will focus on how to identify and bypass web application firewalls, filtering, and other protection techniques.

As applications and their vulnerabilities become more complex, penetration testers have to be able to handle advanced targets. After discovering the flaws, we will work through various ways to exploit these flaws beyond the typical methods used these days.

These advanced techniques will help penetration testers find ways to demonstrate these vulnerabilities to their organization through advanced and custom exploitation. Cryptographic weaknesses are a major area of web application vulnerabilities, yet very few penetration testers have the skill to investigate, attack, and exploit these flaws. When we investigate web application crypto attacks, we typically target the implementation and use of cryptography in modern web applications.

Many popular web programming languages or development frameworks make encryption services available to the developer. However, they often do not protect encrypted data from being attacked, or they enable the developer to use cryptography only weakly. These implementation mistakes are going to be our focus in this section, as opposed to the exploitation of deficiencies in the cryptographic algorithms themselves.

We will also explore the various ways applications use encryption and hashing insecurely. Students will learn techniques ranging from identifying types of encryption to exploiting various flaws within encryption or hashing techniques. Web applications are no longer limited to the traditional HTML-based interfaces. Web services and mobile applications have become more common and are regularly being used to attack clients and organizations.

As such, it has become very important that penetration testers understand how to evaluate the security of these systems. We will explore various techniques to discover flaws within the applications and backend systems. These techniques will make use of tools such as Burp Suite and other automated toolsets.

In this section we start exploring the underlying infrastructure of our frameworks and languages. It all begins with an exploration of the architecture of popular frameworks. There is coverage on architectural vulnerabilities found in frameworks even today, such as Mass Assignment. Newer frameworks such as server-side JavaScript frameworks with NodeJS show us some different exploitation options. Students will explore how to abuse vulnerabilities to append our JavaScript code blocks within these frameworks, leading to full system takeover.

Next, we'll explore Modern PHP, and while it is a much-maligned language, it is still hugely popular. Our exploration of Modern PHP takes us into types-inference bugs and how these issues can be abused and lead to system manipulation or bypassing controls.

We'll then turn to PHP deserialization bugs. Students will get to discover and build custom PHP deserialization payloads. We end the section with a lab that walks the student through building a PHAR payload that causes deserialization to occur, allowing us to exploit the underlying system.

This course section continues the topics of the previous section with web frameworks. Developers can improperly set up the Rack-based applications, and as part of that misconfiguration, we explore the abuse of the middleware layer using Ruby deserialization techniques. Next we'll look at the Java Language and all its complexity. Subhajit Das rated it liked it Nov 30, Palakorn Thippawan rated it it was amazing Feb 02, Geoplanarian added it Sep 05, Carl Sampson marked it as to-read May 05, Marc marked it as to-read Dec 11, Xphaqtor marked it as to-read Nov 13, Ahmad Muhardian marked it as to-read Jan 09, Aniii marked it as to-read Jan 11, Naveen Nagineni marked it as to-read Feb 09, Josep-Angel Herrero Bajo marked it as to-read May 16, Sergio marked it as to-read Jun 14, Abhishek marked it as to-read Jun 27, Rahul marked it as to-read Sep 09, Enigma marked it as to-read Jun 01, Jeff marked it as to-read Feb 19, Yasser Gersy marked it as to-read May 18, Penetration Testing and Network Defense Pages Hacking Exposed - Malware and Rootkits Pages Malware Analyst's Cookbook Pages Mobile Malware - Attacks and Defense Pages Java 2 Network Security Pages A Bug Hunter's Diary Pages Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook Pages Releases No releases published.

Packages 0 No packages published. You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session. You signed out in another tab or window. Advanced Penetration Testing. The Basics of Web Hacking. The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing. The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick. Metasploit - The Penetration Tester's Guide. Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Guide.

Network Attacks and Exploitation - A Framework. Python Web Penetration Testing Cookbook. Wireshark for Security Professionals. Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing. The Shellcoder's Handbook. The Web Application Hacker's Handbook. Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures. Reversing - Secrets of Reverse Engineering. Network Security Bible. Hacking Web Applications - Hacking Exposed. Hacking for Dummies. Hacking Wireless Network for Dummies. Professional Penetration Testing. Hack Attacks Testing.