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Follina : Explained with POC

Hello aspiring Ethical Hackers. In this article, readers will learn about Follina, the latest Zero-Day vulnerability in Microsoft.

Vulnerability & Impact

Follina is the name given to a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). This vulnerability allows a remote attacker to use a Microsoft Office document template to execute code via MSDT and download a malicious payload from a remote URL. It affects Office 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, Office ProPlus and Office 365.  

What actually is Follina?

Follina is a municipality that is located 60 kms northwest of Venice in Italy. Completely unrelated, the vulnerability has been named Follina as the malicious file was referencing to an executable that was named 0438. This is the area code of Follina, hence the zero-day has been named so.

What is MSDT?

Follina exploits MSDT but what is MSDT? Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) is a service used for gathering diagnostic data about the system.

Proof Of Concept

Let’s see how to exploit Follina practically. For this let’s download a exploit from Github. Navigate into the cloned directory and you will files as shown below.

Two files are important in this directory. The “clickme.docx” is the file that uses MSDT to connect to a remote website and execute the exploit. The exploit is present in the “exploit.html” file. If this POC is successful, the exploit will popup calc.exe.

I tested this exploit on MS Office 2019 running on Windows 10. I hosted the exploit using Wamp server running on localhost.

I opened the clickme.doc and waited. Nothing happened. Then I saved it as clickme.rtf file as shown below.

This time when I clicked on clickme.rtf file, this happened,

And the calculator popped up. The Proof Of Concept Is Successful.

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ms08-067 exploitation to hack Windows XP

Hello aspiring ethical hackers. In this article, we will see how to exploit ms08-067 vulnerability to hack Windows XP. As our readers may already know by now, ms08-067 is a vulnerability in Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.  It is a critical vulnerability that allows remote code execution on the target Windows system by sending a specially crafted RPC request to it.

This vulnerability doesn’t require any authentication or even user interaction on the target side. That’s the reason why it is ubiquitous in any ethical hacking course. We have exploited this vulnerability recently in our February 2021 Issue. But that was done using without Metasploit.

In this article, we will do this with Metasploit. For this, we have chosen our target as Windows XP SP2 and our Attacker system as Kali Linux. Most of the Antivirus ended their support to Windows XP SP2 (Windows XP SP3 is the minimum supported version. Even Real world systems running Windows XP SP2 are running without Anti Virus.)

So Nmap scan revealed a Windows target as shown below.

Start Metasploit and load the ms08_067 module.

Set all the required options and use check command to see if the target is indeed vulnerable.

The target is indeed vulnerable. Now, execute the module as shown below.

As readers can see, we successfully got a meterpreter session with SYSTEM privileges.

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Shellcode Injection with Metasploit

Shellcode Injection Module is a Metasploit module which as its name suggests, injects shellcode into the target Windows system on which we already have access. In our previous article, we have learnt what is shellcode and how it is created. Shellcode is a bit assembly code or machine language and it plays a very important role in cyber security. Typically shellcode is used in offensive penetration testing.

Let’ s see how this module works. Get a meterpreter session on a Windows system. Background the current session and load the post windows shellcode inject module as shown below.

We will use Donut tool to create a shellcode of the mimikatz program. Mimikatz is a tool used to experiment with Windows security. Its known to extract plaintext passwords and kerberos tickets from memory. It can also perform pass-the-hash, pass-the-ticket or build Golden tickets.

Set the SESSION ID and other options given below.

Set the interactive option to TRUE . We need to do this so that we are not taken directly to the mimikatz shell. We also need to set the correct target architecture.

After all the options are set, we need to just execute the module as shown below.

That’s all about the Metasploit Shellcode Injection Module.

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Windows Powershell Enumeration POST Exploit

Hello aspiring hackers. The exploit we will see today is a POST exploitation Metasploit exploit that performs Powershell enumeration in Windows. Windows PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework designed by Microsoft which consists of a command line shell and associated scripting language built on the .NET Framework and .NET Core.

PowerShell provides full access to COM and WMI, enabling administrators to perform administrative tasks on both local and remote Windows systems. Its same as a command line shell but powershell is more powerful than CMD. It is a very helpful tool for network asministrators. If used properly, it can also be used by hackers to the full potential.

But we need to know about the Powershell settings installed on the target system for this. This powershell enumeration module exactly does that for us. Let us see how this module works. Just like any Metasploit POST module, we need to have a valid meterpreter session to run this module. Background the current meterpreter session and load the powershell environment enumeration module as shown below. Type command “info” to view the information about this module as shown below.

Type command “show options” to view the options to be configured. Set the session ID of the meterpreter session we just sent to background and execute the module using command “run”.

As you can see in the image above, our module successfully completed powershell enumeration of the target machine. Powershell version 2.0 is installed on our target system an there are no powershell snap-ins are installed. It seems none of the users have powershell profiles.

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Hack Remote PC with Git Submodule

Hello aspiring hackers. In this howto, we will learn how to hack remote PC with Git Submodule. If you are a developer, cyber security enthusiast or at least a computer user, you should have definitely used (or heard about) Github. Git is an open source version control system developed by none other than the awesome Linus Trovalds (yes the same guy who created Linux).

It is a system designed to keep in touch with constant changes made to the code of software by developers. GitHub is a popular hub where developers store their projects and network with like minded people. Github stores information in a data structure called a repository. The particular module exploits a vulnerability in Git submodule.

Git submodules allow users to attach an external repository inside another repository at a specific path. This vulnerability in the Git submodule can be exploited by an attacker who can change the URL of a sub- module in a repository. This URL in the submodule can be changed to point towards a malicious link.

This module is a local exploit and works on Git versions 2.7.5 and lower. Now let us see how this module works. Start Metasploit and load the exploit as shown below. Type command “show options” to see all the options we need for this module to run.

First, we need to configure the malicious Git server. Set the options : LHOST, git_uri and Iport options as shown below. The git_uri option sets the malicious git submodule. Use command “run” to start our Git server. As the user git clones from our URL, we will get a command session on the target.

Now we need to send this malicious Git url to our intended victims. Probably it should be set as a software to convince the users to clone into their machine. Here we are testing this on KaIi Linux 2016 machine which has the vulnerable version of Git installed. We need to instruct the user to update the submodule just cloned. Let us see what happens on the victim machine.

As this happens in our victim system, we will already get a command shell on our attacker system as shown below.

We can see the active sessions using the command “sessions”.

That is how we hack remote pc with Git Submodule.

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