Security Testing for Beginners

Recently, I authored an article at TestingCircus e-magazine and I like to publish the same on my blog so that I can reach out to my readers who are not subscribed to testingcircus or couldn’t read due to whatsoever reason(s).

Thanks to Mr. Santhosh Tuppad for encouraging me to write this article and Mr. Ajoy Singha for providing me an opportunity to write for TestingCircus and I am looking forward to continue my contribution to TestingCircus e-magazine by writing, you can find my article in the following link  http://www.testingcircus.com/testing-circus-2013-september-edition/

Without much ado, here I present you with my article.

---

There is no wrong way to start hacking, everything is right way and I have my own way. Whatever your style of hacking is, make sure it’s consistent. If you are starting out today you can be benefited based on your skill sets. Don’t learn to hack, hack to learn.

Well, coming to the point how did I start hacking or how did I land up here, It was in the year 2008. I was in my 2^nd year diploma where one of my friends was trying to download videos by searching on Google. In 2008, getting a video to your local machine was one of the biggest achievements for people of my age. My friend showed me how to get the videos from Google, by extracting only videos from the vast search results. He asked me to enter some string along with the search query.

Filetype: avi <Search Query>

He didn’t know what it was, and he told that he came to know about it through his senior. Ok!! As I am very much interested in computer technologies, I tried to find out what they are. I referred to many articles and found that they are called as GOOGLE DORKS. I even came across some of the terminologies like White, Black and Grey hat hackers. During this phase, I got a common response from whoever I asked about hacking, which was “Hacking is very difficult and I don’t know anything on it except that it is illegal”.

But, it is not illegal as I told you before. There are 3 categories of hackers:

• Black Hat Hackers
• White Hat Hackers
• Grey Hat Hackers

Black Hat hackers are those who perform undercover hacking for malicious reasons and also with intent to harm others, such people can also be referred to as ‘crackers’.

White Hat hackers are those who perform hacking for legitimate reasons and use their skills and knowledge for good, e.g. IT Security technicians testing their systems and researchers testing the limitations of any software.

Grey hat hacker is a combination of a black hat and a white hat hacker. A grey hat hacker may surf the internet and hack into a computer system for the sole purpose of notifying the administrator that their system has a security defect.

According to a survey the most common technique of hacking a website is SQL Injection. SQL Injection is a technique in which hacker insert SQL codes into web form to get Sensitive Information like (User Name, Passwords) to access the site and deface it. The traditional SQL injection method is quite difficult, but nowadays there are many tools available online through which any script kiddie can use SQL Injection to deface a website. Because of these tools, websites have become more vulnerable to these types of attacks. Some of the tools used for SQL Injection are mentioned in this article. However, as I know nothing is bug free and there will be exploits every minute/hour.

Some of the tools which help in finding the vulnerabilities are discussed below:

1.      Wireshark is also known as Etherea. It is one of the most powerful tools in a network security, as a network packet analyzer on any network. It is used to capture each packet sent to or from your system to the router. If you’re capturing on a wireless interface and have promiscuous mode (Admin/super user) enabled in your capture options, you’ll also see other packets on the network sent from different nodes. This also includes filters ex: DNS, TCP, UDP, ip.addr etc), color-coding, capturing packets and other features that let you dig deep into network traffic. Wireshark is an extremely powerful tool; this is just scratching the surface of what you can do with it. Professionals use it to debug network protocol implementations, examine security problems and inspect network protocol internals. To get this position, it takes a fair amount of practice. It takes practice to know how and where to capture right data, filters to use, and how to interpret the data.

People willing to learn can use this link to get sample captures on Wireshark to get experience hands on this http://wiki.wireshark.org/SampleCaptures

2.      Fiddler is an open source web debugging tool which captures all the traffic between your computer and the internet, it also acts as proxy between the browser or any application on the local machine and the internet say, all the traffic flows through the fiddler and the requests can be altered and the altered request is been sent to the server. In simple words fiddler sits between HTTP client that is the browser and the HTTP server.

Normally it would be configured with all the browsers being used on a particular machine or you may have to manually configure the browser to capture all the traffic in/out of our machine.

Fiddler can also be used to find the statistics, inspect the request or the response and can even act as an auto responder and is capable of sending request from the fiddler wit out any browser. Fiddler is designed in such a way that it capability to run API’s through composer functionality and can even right some scripts which can be helpful for check automation and has the capability to decrypt HTTPS traffic.

3.      Nessus, the first public release was in 1998. Nessus was an open source vulnerability scanner, recently nessus turned into a paid tool. This tool is used for scanning both web application and network, Network can be either internal or external IP/Network. Nessus is designed to automate the testing and discovery of known security problems. Allowing system administrators to correct problems before they are exploited.

Nessus uses a client server design that allows the user to set up one server that has multiple nessus clients that can attach and initiate vulnerability scans, where servers can be placed at various strategic points on a network allowing tests to be conducted from various points of view.

Nessus security checks vulnerabilities and database is updated on a daily basis which could be retrieved to cross check the database with the command “nessus-update-plug-ins”.

4.      IBM Rational AppScan is an automated web vulnerability scanner which helps in finding the vulnerabilities quickly and effectively, even a svan (semi technical person) can also use the tool and find vulnerabilities.  Using IBM app scan, we can decrease the risks in web application attacks and data breaches. It helps in testing the web application either on production site or on any staging sites which can ensure that it checks for web attacks.

Basically in IBM AppScan once you add a web app to test for its security the initial step is to crawl all the pages/links on that application which are allowed to be crawled based on robots.txt

Basic functionalities of IBM AppScan are

1. Gives the larger coverage of test report
2. It mainly concentrates on top 10 OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) web application vulnerabilities.
3. Accurate and advanced scanning algorithms used hence less false positives
4. Recommendations, Which I personally like here, It gives us description of each vulnerability found and the risk involved in not fixing it.

As we all know automated scanning is not perfect all the time and is not advisable to completely depend on automated scanner, hence they have provided a manual scanning for any vulnerability found to give the perfect solution without false positives.

IBM app scan is a paid tool and it has a trial version as well if you are interested in exploring the application.

5.      Nmap, also known as “network mapper”, it is an open source application which helps in quickly scanning different ranges of devices such as desktops/laptops or any mobile devices and provide valuable information about the devices which are connected to a particular network. Nmap is available for all the platforms where it can be operated in 2 ways, command mode and GUI mode but most people prefer command mode for its advanced features but requires technical knowledge.

Nmap uses raw IP packets to determine what hosts are available on the network (Host Detection), the services that are enabled, the operating system and version, using TCP SYN or a TCP Connect ping to gather active hosts. Nmap is used by security researchers and hackers who want to find the weakness and exploit them.

Nmap can provide different types of scans, where some are more aggressive and some are simple, designed to be stealthy and scan undetected. Depending on the type of scan performed, different information can be discovered; some of the scans are Ping, SYN Stealth, UDP Scan, IP Protocol Scan, ACK Scan, RPC Scan, List Scan etc.

6.      Havij is an automated SQL Injection tool that helps hackers or security researchers to find and exploit SQL Injection vulnerabilities on a web page on a vulnerable web application, using Havij user can access database, retrieve DBMS users and  password, dump tables and columns, fetching data from the database, running SQL  statements and  executing commands on the  operating system.

Hackers use Havij along with vulnerability scanners such as IBM AppScan or Web Inspect, vulnerability scanners find vulnerabilities but not help you in actual exploitation and that’s where Havij showcases its functionality.  In other words, vulnerability scanners will help you in finding list of vulnerable webpage’s whereas; Havij helps you with the access to the database for entire exploitation.

Once URL is feed to the Havij, it comes up with a list of databases being used, version, and db-name’s. Later selecting a particular database we can drill down to tables, and then to columns and even to the actual data. Passwords would hashed usually, there are set of de-crypter’s  associated with the tool which help user to decrypt the hashed password, it is also associated with an algorithm which helps users to find the admin page of a particular web application. In simple words it’s more useful for hackers than security researchers.

7.      SQLMap is one of the most popular and powerful open source SQL injection automation tool, which is built on python and can run on any platform if python is installed in it.

Giving a vulnerable URL, SQLMap can exploit the database and provides with sensitive information like extracting database names, tables, columns, all the data in the tables etc. It can even read and write files on the remote file system under certain conditions.

We can run this application only on command mode and doesn’t have an interface, and has simple commands to extract information from the database.