Author: kanishka10

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Nmap – Target Specification

Nmap is a popular port scanner. Today we are going to see target specification in nmap. In Nmap target can be specified in six different ways. We are going to look at each one of them. For this, I am using Kali Linux connected internally with IP address 10.10.10.2.

1. nmap -iL <input filename>

This option reads targets from a specific file. Let’s create a file named alpha with a few   newline separated or tab-limited or space separated IP addresses using vi on Desktop.

Then, move to Desktop directory and type the command “nmap -iL alpha” as shown below. It scans the four IP addresses listed in our file.

2. nmap -iR <number of hosts>

This option is used to specify random hosts to scan. Nmap generates its own targets to scan. The <number of hosts> argument tells nmap the number of IP’s to generate. Let’s type command “nmap -iR 5″. We can see that nmap generated five random targets to scan. The scan failed to determine route to the generated IP addresses because my system is not connected to Internet. Why didn’t it generate any internal IP addresses? Because in this scan private, multicast and unallocated address ranges are automatically skipped.

3. nmap <IP address/dir>

This option is used to scan the entire subnet.  Assuming you know CIDR let’s type the command nmap 10.10.10.1/29 to scan eight IP addresses from 10.10.10.1 to 10.10.10.8 and see the result below.

4. nmap [targets] -exclude[targets]

This option specifies a comma separated list of targets to be excluded from the scan even if they are part of overall network range we specify. For example, in our previous scan we saw that one host 10.10.10.2( which is the system I am working on) is alive. Now I decided to exclude that host and another host from the scan. So I type the command “nmap 10.10.10.0/29 -exclude 10.10.10.2,10.10.10.7″ and press “Enter”. We can see that nmap has only scanned six IP addresses.

5. nmap [targets] -excludefile[file name]

Now what if the subnet was very big and there are more number of hosts to be excluded from the scan. The above option helps us to achieve this. Remember the file “alpha”( with four IP addresses) we created. Now let’s specify nmap to quit scanning the hosts listed in the file. Type command “nmap 10.10.10.0/29 -excludefile alpha”. We can see that nmap scanned only four hosts in the subnet.

6. nmap [target1 target2  target3]

This option specifies nmap to scan multiple targets separated by space. Type the command  “nmap 10.10.10.1 10.10.10.2″. We can see the result below.

Hope this was helpful.

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Phishing Tutorial for Absolute Beginners

Phishing is one of the unique method of hacking that involves social engineering. What exactly is phishing? Phishing is an act of presenting a fake page resembling the original webpage you intend to visit with the sole intention of stealing your credentials. This post  demonstrates phishing tutorial for beginners. Although we make a phishing page of Facebook in this tutorial, it can be used to make a phishing page of any website.  So now let’s phish.

Open your browser,  go to the Facebook website, Right click on the webpage and click on “view page source”.

The source of the web page is displayed in the browser. Right click on the page and click on “Save As”. Save the page as “index.html” on your computer.

Now open index.html using notepad and hit “CTRL+F”.In the Find box opened, type “action” and  click on “Find Next”. Look at the value of action. This “action” specifies the website what to do after users enter credentials and submit those. 

Now change the value of action to “phish.php”. We are doing this so when the user enters his credentials the page that loads will be “phish.php” and not the usual page Facebook loads.

Now let’s create the page phish.php. Open Notepad and type the following script into it and save it as “phish.php”. What this script does is it logs the user credentials and saves it to a file named “pass.txt”.

Now our files are ready. Next step is to upload these files to any free web hosting site available on the internet. Google for free web hosting sites, select any one of them(I selected bytehost7), create an account with username as close to Facebook as possible and delete the index.html file available in the htdocs folder. Then using Online File Management upload your own index.html and phish.php files to the htdocs folder. Your htdocs folder will look like below.

 Let’s check if our phishing page is ready by typing the address of our site. If the page is like below, then our phishing page is working.

The next thing we have to do is to send address of our fake website to the victim. We will do this through sending him an email but in order for the victim not to smell something fishy, we will obfuscate the URL of the fake page we are about to send him. The sending email address should be as convincingly close to Facebook as possible.

 When the victim clicks on the obfuscated URL, it will bring him to our fake site.

 If the victim is not cautious enough as to observing the URL and enters  his username and password, our attempt is a success. To show this, I will enter random values in both username field and password field and hit Enter.

Now a txt file with name pass.txt will be created in the htdocs folder containing both the username and the password.

 Click on the file. We can see both the email and the password i have entered. The email is “don’t get hacked” and the password is “like me”. 

Find it difficult? See how to do phishing with Weeman HTTP server

 Counter Point:

If you don’t want to fall victim to phishing, you can take a few precautions . If you want to open a site type the address directly in the URL and don’t open any redirected links. Don’t click on any mails which look malicious like asking for your login credentials.

That was our phishing tutorial for beginners. If you want to learn how Phishing Attacks work in Real World Hacking Attacks, you need to have a look at our May 2021 Issue. If you want to learn Ethical Hacking in Real World Scenarios, Subscribe to our Digital Magazine.

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Classification of ports by Nmap

Scanning plays a very important role in hacking a system. Scanning is a phase in which we  find out the ports which are open and the services listening on those ports. Nmap is the most popular port scanner being used security guys nowadays. However it is very important to understand classification of ports by Nmap while scanning. Nmap classifies ports into six states. They are, open, closed, filtered, unfiltered, open | filtered and closed | filtered. Let us find out when Nmap classifies ports into specific states. For this, I use two virtual machines,

1. Kali Linux as attacker (with IP 10.10.10.2)

2. XP as victim (with IP 10.10.10.3)

On the victim machine, Telnet server is running and an exception is provided for it in windows firewall.

1. Open

Nmap classifies a port as open if an application is actively accepting TCP connections, UDP datagrams or SCTP associations on this port.

When I perform a default Nmap scan from the attacker of port 23 of the victim,

Nmap  –p 23 10.10.10.3

The result I get is open. This is because the Telnet server is actively accepting connections.

2. Closed

Nmap classifies a port as closed when the port is accessible but there is no application listening on it.  On our victim machine, let’s stop the the telnet service as shown below.

Now when we perform the above scan again, the port is shown as closed because although the port is accessible we don’t have any application listening on it.(i.e telnet is stopped)

3. filtered

Nmap classifies a port as filtered when it can’t determine whether the port is open or closed because packet filtering prevents its probes from reaching the port. On our victim machine, let’s  select ‘Don’t Allow Exceptions’ option in the firewall settings.

When we perform the above scan once again, the port is classified as filtered because firewall filtering blocks the probes of Nmap. When Nmap classifies a port as filtered, it is most likely that a firewall is blocking our probes.

4. Unfiltered.

Nmap classifies a port as unfiltered when a port is accessible but it can’t determine whether it is open or closed. A port is classified as unfiltered only with the ACK scan.

Let’s start the telnet service again on our victim machine and allow an exception for telnet in the firewall.

Then let us perform the ACK scan.

nmap  -sA –p 23 10.10.10.3

The scan couldn’t determine whether the port is open or closed.

5. open | filtered

A port is classified as open | filtered when Nmap is unable to determine whether a port is open or filtered. This happens for scan types in which open ports give no response. The UDP,IP protocol, FIN, NULL and XMAS scans classify ports this way. Let’s go to our machine and once again block telnet using firewall.

And then perform FIN scan and NULL scan respectively.

The port is classified as open | filtered in both cases because Nmap can’t determine whether the port is open or filtered.

6. closed | filtered

Nmap can’t find out whether a port is closed or filtered. A port is classified this way only for IP IDLE scan. Now what is IDLE scan? Idle scan is a scan in which we use a zombie host to scan the victim. In our example, we use another host with IP 10.10.10.3 as a zombie to perform IDL scan on our victim.

In our victim, firewall is still blocking telnet. Let’s perform a IP IDLE scan.

nmap –sI  10.10.10.1 –p 23 10.10.10.3

The scan shows result as closed | filtered because it couldn’t determine whether a port is closed or filtered.

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Password cracking with Brutus

Hi everybody, today I’m gonna show you remote password cracking with Brutus. For the newbies, script kiddie is a person with little knowledge  of hacking or any programming languages and instead searches for automatic tools to hack the computers. In this scenario, script kiddie is using a Windows XP machine and two tools Zenmap and Brutus available for free to download. As you will see, Zenmap is used for scanning for any open ports of  live machines and Brutus is a password cracker.

Imagine I am the script kiddie, I  first find out my own computer’s  ip address by typing the command “ipconfig” in the command line.

The ip address of my system happens to be 10.10.10.1. I decide to scan the following range of ip addresses to look for any live hosts. In the target option, I specify IP address as 10.10.10.2-10 and I choose profile as intense scan to get maximum information about the target. After performing the scan, the results show that only one system 10.10.10.3 is alive.

The scan  also shows that the victim machine which is LIVE is running a ftp server and its operating system is Windows XP.

I decide to use Brutus to crack the remote FTP password. Brutus has both dictionary and brute force attack options. I decide to choose dictionary attack since it is faster than brute forcing. Brutus comes with a built in username(users.txt) and password list(pass.txt).As the victim machine is running Windows XP which comes with a default administrator account, I decide to  add “administrator” to the users.txt file.

I choose type as FTP since I am about to crack a FTP server.

Then I select the file pass.txt containing some common passwords and just hope to crack the password.

Then after starting the cracker, Brutus runs and gives one positive authentication result.

Username : administrator

Password: 123456

Then I try to log into the FTP server of the remote machine using CMD with the authentication result achieved above.

I successfully logged into the FTP server. Once I am into the remote machine I try some FTP commands but before that I change my local directory to Desktop.

Then I use DIR command to list the directories in the FTP server.

There are four directories in the FTP server:Detroit, Images:lena and users. I  go to the users directory using command cd users and then list the files in the directory by using command ls. There is one text file named users.txt in the directory.

I decide to download the file users.txt to my machine using the command get users.txt. Since I had set my local directory to desktop it will be downloaded to Desktop.

Let’s see the contents of the users.txt file just downloaded. It contains some usernames and passwords.

In the same way, I enter into another directory of interest to me “Images” and download the only image present in it to my desktop.

In this way, I can download any number of files from the remote server to my local machine. That’s all for in password cracking with Brutus.