The 5 Hacking NewsLetter 3

Hi, I’m very happy to present you this week’s five items! They each taught me something that I’ve started using or added to my pentest/bug bounty checklist.

1. Scanners benchmark

Scanners benchmark

I enjoyed reading this Web Application Vulneability Scanners Benchmark for its precision and the number of open source tools mentioned.
Currently, I’m only using Burp Pro and none of the free open source scanners. But after reading this benchmark, I think I’m going to start playing with some of the open source tools too. ZAP and Arachni in particular seem to complement Burp Pro for all the vulnerability classes tested.

Vulnerability databases of commercial scanners

Sometimes when I am on a penetration test, I need confirmation for a vulnerability’s risk score, consequences (meaning real-life exploitation scenarios) or fix recommendations.

This happens mostly when vulnerabilities are not easily exploitable or have a low impact but, as a penetration tester, I must still report them and explain to clients why they should fix them. Examples of such vulnerabilities are the TRACE method being enabled, default Apache pages being accessible, etc.

When that happens, I check for the vulnerability class in question in one of these 4 sites:

The 5 Hacking NewsLetter 2

Hi, this is the second edition of The 5 Hacking NewsLetter. It’s a few days late but better late than never, right?
Grab a nice cup of coffee (or herbal tea if you’re an old soul like me) and enjoy!

Also, don’t forget to subscribe if you prefer receiving this on your inbox.

1. Tool of the week

CTFR by Sheila A. Berta

This is a great tool that I’ve just added to my testing arsenal. It gets subdomains of an HTTPS website in a few seconds by abusing certificate transparency logs.

Tricks learned from the Vulnhub Drunk admin VM

Here are some pentest tips & tricks that I got from solving the Vulnhub Drunk admin challenge. You’ll find my detailed walkthrough here.

• File upload quick reference:
  • First, analyze the normal behavior
    • Upload different file types
    • Is the filename you supply changed by the server?
    • If yes, try uploading the file a second time. Does the server attribute a different filename this time?
    • If the new name is always the same but seems random, identify if it is a hash with hash-identifier. The new name given by the server might be the (MD5, SHA1…) encoded value of your filename (with or without its extension)
    • Where are the uploaded files located? Can you access them?
  • If only images are allowed and you want to upload and execute PHP files:

Vulnhub DeRKnStiNK walkthrough

The DeRKnStiNK VM is a great Web challenge with a lot of twists. I loved it because several techniques are involved to get all the flags. It was a nice occasion to practice my skills and improve my testing methodogy. Thanks a lot to @securekomodo for the fun time!

Let’s dive into it!