Category: Hacking

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Beginners guide to PrintNightmare vulnerability

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt about EternalBlue vulnerability. In this article, you will learn about another critical vulnerability called PrintNightmare vulnerability.

What is PrintNightmare vulnerability?

PrintNightmare is a vulnerability that affects the Microsoft’s Windows operating systems. This vulnerability is present in the print spooler service of Microsoft Windows. The printer spooler service is used for printing services and is turned on by default. The versions of Windows vulnerable to PrintNightmare include Windows 7 to Windows 10 and windows Server 2008 to the latest version of Windows Servers.

Proof of Concept (PoC)

The PrintNightmare vulnerability has two variants : one allows unauthorized remote code execution (CVE-2021-34527) and the other allows unauthorized privilege escalation (CVE-2021-1675). In this article, readers will see a proof of concept for exploiting the privilege escalation vulnerability. For this, we will use Windows 10 version 1809 as target system. The PowerShell Script we used in this demo can be downloaded from GitHub.

In this scenario, let’s imagine I already have access to the target machine as a user with low privileges. The first thing we have to do is to confirm if the printer spooler service is running on the target system or not. This can be done using PowerShell command given below.

"Get-Service -Name "spooler""

The print spooler service is running on the target system. As you can see in the images below, I am running as a user with very limited privileges.

Next, I download the PowerShell script and import it using command shown below.

Import-Module .\<script Name>

Once the module is successfully imported, I execute the script with command to create a new user as shown below. 

"Invoke-Nightmare -NewUser "<username to create>" -NewPassword  <password for that new user> DriverName "PrintMe""


This command will create a new user on the target system with administrator privileges.

How to exploit printnightmare

In the image above, you can see that a new user named “hacker” has been created. Now, let’s check the privileges of this user.

As you can see, the new user we created belongs to the local administrators group. You can login as that user.

The PoC is successful.

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Linux post exploitation with Metasploit

Hello aspiring hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt about POST exploitation in detail. In this article, you will learn about Linux post exploitation. Post exploitation activities performed on a linux system is known as Linux post exploitation. Obviously this stage will come after successfully gaining access to the Linux system. It’s a good time to learn about Linux hacking.

In this article, we will learn how to perform linux postex with metasploit. Metasploit has many POST modules that can be used to enumerate the Linux system. After getting a successful meterpreter session on the target Linux system, we background the current session.

You can search for all the Linux post-ex modules using command shown below.

use post/linux/ <tab> </tab>

This will reveal all the post-exploitation modules of Metasploit. The first module we will see is Linux configuration enumeration. The enum_configs module is used to collect information from the configuration files of applications commonly installed in the system. These applications may include Apache, Nginx, Snort, MySQL, Samba, Sendmail, sysctl, cups, lampp and SNMP etc. This POST module searches for a config file in the application’s default path and if the application exists on the target system, the module will download the files and store it.

If the application doesn’t exist or the config file is moved from its default location, this module will display the “file not found” message. After loading the module, set the session id and run the exploit. Here is the enum configs module in action as shown below.

Learn how to perform Windows post exploitation with Metasploit.

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Testing CVE 2018 17456 with Metasploit

Hello aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt how to use Metasploit framework. In this article, you will learn what is CVE-2018-17456 vulnerability and how to test this vulnerability with Metasploit.

What is CVE-2018-17456 vulnerability?

CVE-2018-17456 is a vulnerability affecting submodules of Git. A Git submodule is a repository that is included within another Git repository. The vulnerability arises when a submodule URL which starts with a dash e.g “-u./payload” is passed as an argument to git clone, the file “payload” inside the repository is executed. This vulnerability affects Git versions 2.14.5, 2.15.3, 2.16.5, 2.17.2, 2.18.1, and 2.19.1 and lower.

This Metasploit module creates a fake git repository which contains a submodule containing the payload. The vulnerability is triggered when the submodules are initialized or cloned. (e.g git clone –recurse-submodules URL)

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

Set the options LHOST, git_uri and LPORT options as shown below. The git_uri option sets the URL malicious git submodule. Use command “run” to start our Git HTTP server.

All we need to do now is send the URL of the Git repository we created to target users. This requires social engineering. As the user clones this URL, we will get a command session on the target. Here we are testing this on KaIi Linux 2016 machine which has the vulnerable version of Git installed. Let’s see what happens on the target machine.

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

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

That is how you can test for CVE 2018 17456 vulnerability. Learn about PrintNightmare vulnerability.

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Vulnerability assessment (VA) for beginners

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt about vulnerability scanning. In this article you will learn about vulnerability assessment.

What is vulnerability assessment?

Vulnerability assessment (VA) is sometimes interchangeably used with vulnerability scanning but is entirely different form vulnerability scanning. VA is a systematical review of vulnerabilities or weaknesses in a system or a network or even in an entire company. While vulnerability scanning is just scanning for vulnerabilities, Vulnerability assessment also assigns security levels to the vulnerabilities identified and suggests remediation or mitigation if needed.

Types of vulnerability assessments

As vulnerability assessment has a larger scope, there are different types of vulnerability assessments. They are,

1. Host assessment:

When a single host or a system (which can include server or client) is assessed for vulnerabilities, it is called host assessment.

2. Network assessment:

When vulnerabilities in an entire network are assessed, it is known as network VA. This can include all the devices, gateways and servers in the entire network.

3. Database assessment:

When vulnerabilities of a database are assessed, it is known as a database assessment.

Stages of a vulnerability assessment

VA primarily consists of four stages. They are,

1. Vulnerability identification:

The first stage of the VA is to identify the vulnerabilities in a host network or any other resources. This involves scanning for vulnerabilities using automated tools.

2. Vulnerability analysis:

The second stage is to analyze the vulnerability identified. This includes identifying the source of and cause of the vulnerabilities.

3. Risk assessment:

The third stage in VA includes assessing the risk of the vulnerability. In this stage, a rank or security level is given to each vulnerability detected. This rank depends on the severity of the vulnerability, how simple it is to exploit this vulnerability, ease of access, and what a hacker can get if he is successful in exploiting it.

4. Remediation:

The final step of VA is to fix or remediate the vulnerability. This stage can include developers, operation teams and cybersecurity professionals.

Some of the tools that can be used to perform vulnerability assessment are Nessus, OpenVAS, Burp suite, Nikto, Wireshark etc.

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Beginners guide to UAC bypass

Hello, aspiring ethical hackers. In our previous blogpost, you learnt about various techniques used for Windows privilege escalation. In this blogpost, you will learn about UAC bypass, one of the techniques used for privilege escalation in Windows. To understand UAC bypass, you need to first understand what is UAC.

What is UAC?

User Account Control (UAC) is a mandatory access control feature of Windows operating system that helps in improving the security of the operating system. It was introduced in Window Vista and Windows Server 2008 and has ben improved since then. User Account Control works by limiting a software or program to run with standard user privileges (low privileges) until and unless a user with administrator privileges authorizes it by giving permission. This way, only applications trusted by the user can be run on the system. This helps to prevent malware infection as malware and virus need administrator privileges to infect the system wholly.

How can UAC be bypassed?

Now, you have a question. How can UAC be bypassed. There are various UAC bypass methods. They are,

1. Registry key manipulation:

This technique works by hijacking the normal execution flow of an auto elevated application. What are auto-elevated applications? In Microsoft windows, if a binary is trusted (i.e. it has been signed with a MS certificate or the binary is in a trusted directory), the UAC prompt will not be presented. This can be exploited using a registry key.

The fodhelper privilege escalation method is an example of this.  Fodhelper.exe is a trusted binary in Windows operating systems that is used to manage features in Windows settings. We can exploit this binary by hijacking a special key in the Registry under the current user hive and inserting a custom command that will get invoked when the Windows fodhelper.exe application is launched.

Once the UAC flag is turned off, we will spawn a second shell with SYSTEM privileges. Metasploit has a module for this. Let’s see it practically using Metasploit. Imagine we have a scenario where we have gained access to a Windows system using any Windows hacking technique.

To use the fodhelper module to elevate privileges, we need to background the current session.

Search for fodhelper module using the search command.

Image explaining about Windows privilege escalation with fodhelper module

Load the module and set the session ID as shown below.

Run the module as shown below.

As you can see, we successfully got a meterpreter session. When I check privileges, its still user privileges but when I run “getsystem” command, I get system privileges on the target Windows system.

2. DLL hijacking:

In this method, the execution of an elevated program is hijacked using DLL Search order hijacking, DLL loading, redirection or other DLL vulnerability.

3. Elevated COM interface method:

COM stands for Component Object Model. It acts as a binary interface between various processes of different programming languages. In Windows, is is the basis for several other Microsoft technologies like OLE, OLE Automation, Browser Helper Object, ActiveX, COM+, DCOM, Windows shell, DirectX and Windows runtime. In this method, the COM handler is bypassed while it references registry when a high integrity process is being loaded. These DLLs contain the payloads that result in elevated sessions.

Let’s demonstrate this using Metasploit. As for every privilege escalation exploit, we need to already have a meterpreter session on target. This can be achieved using one of the Windows hacking techniques. Once we have it, search for the bypassuac_comhijack module as shown below.

Load the bypassuac_comhijack module and check its options by using the “show options” command as shown below.

Set the session id and execute the exploit using “run” command as shown below. If everything went right, we will have another meterpreter session as shown below.

Check the privileges using the “getuid” command. If you still don’t have system privileges, run command “getsystem” and even if it results in an error, check your privileges once again using command “getuid“. You should definitely have system privileges by now.