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Nmap is a free utility tool for network discovery, port scanning and security auditing, even though we can use it for more than that but in this article we will learn how to do these three things with nmap.

The original author of nmap is Gordon Lyon (Fyodor). Nmap is licensed under GPL v2 and has available ports in many different languages. Nmap is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. You can download your copy of nmap from their website.

Lets get started with nmap.

When performing pentests we always look for networks we are going to attack. We need to identify live hosts on the network so that we can attack them. There are plenty of tools available for finding live hosts on a network but nmap is one of the best tools for doing this job.

Lets start with simple host (target) discovery scans i,e scans that will tell us which ip address is up on our target network. Those ip addresses which are up on our target network are the ones that are assigned to a device connected on our target network. Every device on the network is going to have a unique ip address.
To perform a simple host discovery scan we use the following command

nmap -v -sn 10.10.10.0/24

flags we used in the above command are
-v for verbose output
-sn to disable port scan (we don't want to scan for ports right now)

Following the flags is the ip address of the target network on which we want to look for live hosts. The /24 at the end of the ip address is the CIDR that specifies the subnet of the network on which we are looking for live hosts.

After running the above command you should get a list of live hosts on your target network.
If you just want to know the list of ip addresses your command is going to scan, you can use the -sL flag of the nmap like this.

nmap -sL 10.10.10.0/24

this command will simply output the list of ip addresses to scan.

We sometimes want to do dns resolution (resolving ip addresses to domain names) when performing our network scans and sometimes we don't want dns resolution. While performing a host discovery scan with nmap if we want to perform dns resolution we use -R flag in our command like this:

nmap -v -sn -R 10.10.10.0/24

And if we don't want to perform dns resolution of hosts during our scan we add the -n flag to our command like this:

nmap -v -sn -n 10.10.10.0/24

After we have discovered the hosts that are up on our target network, we usually put the ip addresses of these hosts into a file for further enumeration.

Next step in our enumeration would be to detect which operating system and which ports are running on these live hosts, for that we run this command:

nmap -O -v 10.10.10.119

here we use -O (capital o not zero) for operating system detection and by default nmap performs SYN Scan for port discovery. However nmap scans for 1000 ports only by default of a particular host.

To make nmap go over a list of ip addresses in a file we use -iL flag like this:

nmap -O -v -iL targetlist

where targetlist is the name of the file which contains ip addresses that we want to perform port scan on.

To make nmap scan all the ports of a target we use the -p flag like this:

nmap -p- -v 10.10.10.121

We can also specify a range of ports using the -p flag like this:

nmap -p1-500 -v 10.10.10.121

here 1-500 means scan all the ports from 1 to 500.

We can use a number of scan techniques to discover open ports on our network but I will only discuss some of them for brevity.

We can perform a TCP SYN scan using nmap with -sS flag like this:

nmap -sS -v 10.10.10.150

We have also flags for TCP connect and ACK scans which are -sT -sA

nmap -sT -v 10.10.10.150

nmap -sA -v 10.10.10.150

We can also perform UDP scan as well instead of TCP scan using -sU flag

nmap -sU -v 10.10.10.150

We can perform TCP Null, FIN, and Xmas scans using the flags -sN, -sF, -sX

nmap -sN -v 10.10.10.150

nmap -sF -v 10.10.10.150

nmap -sX -v 10.10.10.150

If you don't know what these scans are then please visit Port Scanning Techniques and Algorithms for explanation.

After discovering the open ports on our target host, we want to enumerate what services are running on those open ports. To enumerate services and versions information on open ports we use the -sV flag like this:

nmap -sV -v 10.10.10.118

This should give us information about what services are running on what ports and what versions of those services are running on the target host.

nmap has an interesting feature called NSE nmap scripting engine. It allows users to write their own scripts, using the Lua programming language, to automate a wide variety of networking tasks. nmap ships with a diverse set of scripts which are very helpful to enumerate a target. To use the nmap default set of scripts while enumerating the target, we use the -sC flag like this:

nmap -sC -sV -v 10.10.10.118

We can also save the results of our nmap scans to a file using the -o flag like this

nmap -sC -sV -v -oA defaultscan 10.10.10.119

here -oA tells the nmap to output results in the three major formats at once and defaultscan is the name of the file that will be prepended to all the three output files.

This is the end of this short tutorial see you next time.

References:
https://nmap.org/book/scan-methods-null-fin-xmas-scan.html

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In the last article Learning Web Pentesting With DVWA Part 1: Installation, you were given a glimpse of SQL injection when we installed the DVWA app. In this article we will explain what we did at the end of that article and much more.

Lets start by defining what SQL injection is, OWASP defines it as: "A SQL injection attack consists of insertion or "injection" of a SQL query via the input data from the client to the application. A successful SQL injection exploit can read sensitive data from the database, modify database data (Insert/Update/Delete), execute administration operations on the database (such as shutdown the DBMS), recover the content of a given file present on the DBMS file system and in some cases issue commands to the operating system. SQL injection attacks are a type of injection attack, in which SQL commands are injected into data-plane input in order to effect the execution of predefined SQL commands."

Which basically means that we can use a simple (vulnerable) input field in our web application to get information from the database of the server which hosts the web application. We can command and control (at certain times) the database of the web application or even the server.

In this article we are going to perform SQL injection attack on DVWA, so let's jump in. On the DVWA welcome page click on SQL Injection navigation link. We are presented with a page with an input field for User ID.

Now lets try to input a value like 1 in the input field. We can see a response from server telling us the firstname and surname of the user associated with User ID 1.

If we try to enter a user id which doesn't exist, we get no data back from the server. To determine whether an input field is vulnerable to SQL injection, we first start by sending a single quote (') as input. Which returns an SQL error.

We saw this in the previous article and we also talked about injection point in it. Before diving deeper into how this vulnerability can be exploited lets try to understand how this error might have occurred. Lets try to build the SQL query that the server might be trying to execute. Say the query looks something like this:

SELECT first_name, sur_name FROM users WHERE user_id = '1';

The 1 in this query is the value supplied by the user in the User ID input field. When we input a single quote in the User ID input field, the query looks like this:

SELECT first_name, sur_name FROM users WHERE user_id = ''';

The quotes around the input provided in the User ID input field are from the server side application code. The error is due to the extra single quote present in the query. Now if we specify a comment after the single quote like this:
'-- -
or
'#
we should get no error. Now our crafted query looks like this:

SELECT first_name, sur_name FROM users WHERE user_id = ''-- -';

or

SELECT first_name, sur_name FROM users WHERE user_id = ''#';

since everything after the # or -- - are commented out, the query will ignore the extra single quote added by the server side app and whatever comes after it and will not generate any error. However the query returns nothing because we specified nothing ('') as the user_id.

After knowing how things might be working on the server side, we will start to attack the application.
First of all we will try to determine the number of columns that the query outputs because if we try a query which will output the number of columns greater or smaller than what the original query outputs then our query is going to get an error. So we will first figure out the exact number of columns that the query outputs and we will do that with the help of order by sql statement like this:

' order by 1-- -

This MySQL server might execute the query as:

SELECT first_name, sur_name FROM users WHERE user_id = '' order by 1-- -';

you get the idea now.
if we don't get any error message, we will increase the number to 2 like this:

' order by 2-- -

still no error message, lets add another:

' order by 3-- -

and there we go we have an error message. Which tells us the number of columns that the server query selects is 2 because it erred out at 3.

Now lets use the union select SQL statement to get information about the database itself.

' union select null, version()-- -

You should first understand what a union select statement does and only then can you understand what we are doing here. You can read about it here.
We have used null as one column since we need to match the number of columns from the server query which is two. null will act as a dummy column here which will give no output and the second column which in our case here is the version() command will output the database version. Notice the output from the application, nothing is shown for First name since we specified null for it and the maria db version will be displayed in Surname.
Now lets check who the database user is using the user() function of mariadb:

' union select null, user()-- -

After clicking the submit button you should be able to see the user of the database in surname.

Now lets get some information about the databases in the database.
Lets determine the names of databases from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA by entering following input in the User ID field:

' union select null, SCHEMA_NAME from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA-- -

This lists two databases dvwa and information_schema. information_schema is the built in database. Lets look at the dvwa database.
Get table names for dvwa database from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES

' union select null, TABLE_NAME from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES-- -

It gives a huge number of tables that are present in dvwa database. But what we are really interested in is the users table as it is most likely to contain user passwords. But first we need to determine columns of that table and we will do that by querying INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS like this:

' union select null, COLUMN_NAME from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'users'-- -

We can see the password column in the output now lets get those passwords:

' union select user, password from users-- -

Of-course those are the hashes and not plain text passwords. You need to crack them.
Hope you learned something about SQL injection in this article. See you next time.

References:

1. SQL Injection: https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/SQL_Injection
2. MySQL UNION: https://www.mysqltutorial.org/sql-union-mysql.aspx
3. Chapter 25 INFORMATION_SCHEMA Tables: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/information-schema.html

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Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Nmap: Getting Started Guide

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Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Learning Web Pentesting With DVWA Part 2: SQL Injection

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