"PHoss is a sniffer. A normal sniffer software is designed to find problems in data communication on the network. PHoss is designed to know some protocols which use (or may use) clear text passwords. Many protocols are designed to use secure authentication. For fallback they define a lowest level of authentication using clear text. Many companies use this lowest fallback definition as standard setting to make the product working in many environments." read more...
Social engineering is a nontechnical method of breaking into a system or network. It's the process of deceiving users of a system and convincing them to perform acts useful to the hacker, such as giving out information that can be used to defeat or bypass security mechanisms. Social engineering is important to understand because hackers can use it to attack the human element of a system and circumvent technical security measures. This method can be used to gather information before or during an attack.
A social engineer commonly uses the telephone or Internet to trick people into revealing sensitive information or to get them to do something that is against the security policies of the organization. By this method, social engineers exploit the natural tendency of a person to trust their word, rather than exploiting computer security holes. It's generally agreed that users are the weak link in security; this principle is what makes social engineering possible.
The most dangerous part of social engineering is that companies with authentication processes, firewalls, virtual private networks, and network monitoring software are still wide open to attacks, because social engineering doesn't assault the security measures directly. Instead, a social-engineering attack bypasses the security measures and goes after the human element in an organization.
Types of Social Engineering-Attacks
There are two types of Social Engineering attacks
Human-Based
Human-based social engineering refers to person-to-person interaction to retrieve the desired information. An example is calling the help desk and trying to find out a password.
Computer-Based
Computer-based social engineering refers to having computer software that attempts to retrieve the desired information. An example is sending a user an email and asking them to reenter a password in a web page to confirm it. This social-engineering attack is also known as phishing.
Human-Based Social Engineering
Human-Based further categorized as follow:
Impersonating an Employee or Valid User
In this type of social-engineering attack, the hacker pretends to be an employee or valid user on the system. A hacker can gain physical access by pretending to be a janitor, employee, or contractor. Once inside the facility, the hacker gathers information from trashcans, desktops, or computer systems.
Posing as an Important User
In this type of attack, the hacker pretends to be an important user such as an executive or high-level manager who needs immediate assistance to gain access to a computer system or files. The hacker uses intimidation so that a lower-level employee such as a help desk worker will assist them in gaining access to the system. Most low-level employees won't question someone who appears to be in a position of authority.
Using a Third Person
Using the third-person approach, a hacker pretends to have permission from an authorized source to use a system. This attack is especially effective if the supposed authorized source is on vacation or can't be contacted for verification.
Calling Technical Support
Calling tech support for assistance is a classic social-engineering technique. Help desk and technical support personnel are trained to help users, which makes them good prey for social-engineering attacks.
Shoulder Surfing
Shoulder surfing is a technique of gathering passwords by watching over a person's shoulder while they log in to the system. A hacker can watch a valid user log in and then use that password to gain access to the system.
Dumpster Diving
Dumpster diving involves looking in the trash for information written on pieces of paper or computer printouts. The hacker can often find passwords, filenames, or other pieces of confidential information.
Computer-Based Social Engineering
Computer-based social-engineering attacks can include the following:
Email attachments
Fake websites
Pop-up windows
Insider Attacks
If a hacker can't find any other way to hack an organization, the next best option is to infiltrate the organization by getting hired as an employee or finding a disgruntled employee to assist in the attack. Insider attacks can be powerful because employees have physical access and are able to move freely about the organization. An example might be someone posing as a delivery person by wearing a uniform and gaining access to a delivery room or loading dock. Another possibility is someone posing as a member of the cleaning crew who has access to the inside of the building and is usually able to move about the offices. As a last resort, a hacker might bribe or otherwise coerce an employee to participate in the attack by providing information such as passwords.
Identity Theft
A hacker can pose as an employee or steal the employee's identity to perpetrate an attack. Information gathered in dumpster diving or shoulder surfing in combination with creating fake ID badges can gain the hacker entry into an organization. Creating a persona that can enter the building unchallenged is the goal of identity theft.
Phishing Attacks
Phishing involves sending an email, usually posing as a bank, credit card company, or other financial organization. The email requests that the recipient confirm banking information or reset passwords or PINs. The user clicks the link in the email and is redirected to a fake website. The hacker is then able to capture this information and use it for financial gain or to perpetrate other attacks. Emails that claim the senders have a great amount of money but need your help getting it out of the country are examples of phishing attacks. These attacks prey on the common person and are aimed at getting them to provide bank account access codes or other confidential information to the hacker.
Online Scams
Some websites that make free offers or other special deals can lure a victim to enter a username and password that may be the same as those they use to access their work system. The hacker can use this valid username and password once the user enters the information in the website form. Mail attachments can be used to send malicious code to a victim's system, which could automatically execute something like a software keylogger to capture passwords. Viruses, Trojans, and worms can be included in cleverly crafted emails to entice a victim to open the attachment. Mail attachments are considered a computer-based social-engineering attack.
In this blog series we will analyze blockchain vulnerabilities and exploit them ourselves in various lab and development environments. If you would like to stay up to date on new posts follow and subscribe to the following: Twitter: @ficti0n
As of late I have been un-naturally obsessed with blockchains and crypto currency. With that obsession comes the normal curiosity of "How do I hack this and steal all the monies?"
However, as usual I could not find any actual walk thorough or solid examples of actually exploiting real code live. Just theory and half way explained examples.
That question with labs is exactly what we are going to cover in this series, starting with the topic title above of Re-Entrancy attacks which allow an attacker to siphon out all of the money held within a smart contract, far beyond that of their own contribution to the contract.
This will be a lab based series and I will show you how to use demo the code within various test environments and local environments in order to perform and re-create each attacks for yourself.
Note: As usual this is live ongoing research and info will be released as it is coded and exploited.
If you are bored of reading already and just want to watch videos for this info or are only here for the demos and labs check out the first set of videos in the series at the link below and skip to the relevant parts for you, otherwise lets get into it:
Background Info:
This is a bit of a harder topic to write about considering most of my audience are hackers not Ethereum developers or blockchain architects. So you may not know what a smart contract is nor how it is situated within the blockchain development model. So I am going to cover a little bit of context to help with understanding.I will cover the bare minimum needed as an attacker.
A Standard Application Model:
In client server we generally have the following:
Front End - what the user sees (HTML Etc)
Server Side - code that handles business logic
Back End - Your database for example MySQL
A Decentralized Application Model:
Now with a Decentralized applications (DAPP) on the blockchain you have similar front end server side technology however
Smart contracts are your access into the blockchain.
Your smart contract is kind of like an API
Essentially DAPPs are Ethereum enabled applications using smart contracts as an API to the blockchain data ledger
DAPPs can be banking applications, wallets, video games etc.
A blockchain is a trust-less peer to peer decentralized database or ledger
The back-end is distributed across thousands of nodes in its entirety on each node. Meaning every single node has a Full "database" of information called a ledger.The second difference is that this ledger is immutable, meaning once data goes in, data cannot be changed. This will come into play later in this discussion about smart contracts.
Consensus:
The blockchain of these decentralized ledgers is synchronized by a consensus mechanism you may be familiar with called "mining" or more accurately, proof of work or optionally Proof of stake.
Proof of stake is simply staking large sums of coins which are at risk of loss if one were to perform a malicious action while helping to perform consensus of data.
Much like proof of stake, proof of work(mining) validates hashing calculations to come to a consensus but instead of loss of coins there is a loss of energy, which costs money, without reward if malicious actions were to take place.
Each block contains transactions from the transaction pool combined with a nonce that meets the difficulty requirements.Once a block is found and accepted it places them on the blockchain in which more then half of the network must reach a consensus on.
The point is that no central authority controls the nodes or can shut them down. Instead there is consensus from all nodes using either proof of work or proof of stake. They are spread across the whole world leaving a single centralized jurisdiction as an impossibility.
Things to Note:
First Note: Immutability
So, the thing to note is that our smart contracts are located on the blockchain
And the blockchain is immutable
This means an Agile development model is not going to work once a contract is deployed.
This means that updates to contracts is next to impossible
All you can really do is createa kill-switch or fail safe functions to disable and execute some actions if something goes wrong before going permanently dormant.
If you don't include a kill switch the contract is open and available and you can't remove it
Second Note:Code Is Open Source
Smart Contracts are generally open source
Which means people like ourselves are manually bug hunting smart contracts and running static analysis tools against smart contract code looking for bugs.
When issues are found the only course of action is:
Kill the current contract which stays on the blockchain
Then deploy a whole new version.
If there is no killSwitch the contract will be available forever.
Now I know what you're thinking, these things are ripe for exploitation.
And you would be correct based on the 3rd note
Third Note: Security in the development process is lacking
Many contracts and projects do not even think about and SDLC.
They rarely add penetration testing and vulnerability testing in the development stages if at all
At best there is a bug bounty before the release of their main-nets
Which usually get hacked to hell and delayed because of it.
Things are getting better but they are still behind the curve, as the technology is new and blockchain mostly developers and marketers.Not hackers or security testers.
Forth Note:Potential Data Exposure via Future Broken Crypto
If sensitive data is placed on the blockchain it is there forever
Which means that if a cryptographic algorithm is broken anything which is encrypted with that algorithm is now accessible
We all know that algorithms are eventually broken!
So its always advisable to keep sensitive data hashed for integrity on the blockchain but not actually stored on the blockchain directly
Exploitation of Re-Entrancy Vulnerabilities:
With a bit of the background out of the way let's get into the first attack in this series.
Re-Entrancy attacks allow an attacker to create a re-cursive loop within a contract by having the contract call the target function rather than a single request from auser. Instead the request comes from the attackers contract which does not let the target contracts execution complete until the tasks intended by the attacker are complete. Usually this task will be draining the money out of the contract until all of the money for every user is in the attackers account.
Example Scenario:
Let's say that you are using a bank and you have deposited 100 dollars into your bank account.Now when you withdraw your money from your bank account the bank account first sends you 100 dollars before updating your account balance.
Well what if when you received your 100 dollars, it was sent to malicious code that called the withdraw function again not lettingthe initial target deduct your balance ?
With this scenario you could then request 100 dollars, then request 100 again and you now have 200 dollars sent to you from the bank. But 50% of that money is not yours. It's from the whole collection of money that the bank is tasked to maintain for its accounts.
Ok that's pretty cool, but what if that was in a re-cursive loop that did not BREAK until all accounts at the bank were empty?
That is Re-Entrancy in a nutshell.So let's look at some code.
Example Target Code:
function withdraw(uint withdrawAmount) public returns (uint) {
Line 1: Checks that you are only withdrawing the amount you have in your account or sends back an error.
Line 2: Sends your requested amount to the address the requested that withdrawal.
Line 3: Deducts the amount you withdrew from your account from your total balance.
Line 4. Simply returns your current balance.
Ok this all seems logical.. however the issue is in Line 2 - Line 3.The balance is being sent back to you before the balance is deducted. So if you were to call this from a piece of code which just accepts anything which is sent to it, but then re-calls the withdraw function you have a problem as it never gets to Line 3 which deducts the balance from your total. This means that Line 1 will always have enough money to keep withdrawing.
Let's take a look at how we would do that:
Example Attacking Code:
function attack() public payable {
1.bankAddress.withdraw(amount);
}
2.function () public payable {
3.if (address(bankAddress).balance >= amount) {
4.bankAddress.withdraw(amount);
}
}
Line 1: This function is calling the banks withdraw function with an amount less than the total in your account
Line 2: This second function is something called a fallback function. This function is used to accept payments that come into the contract when no function is specified. You will notice this function does not have a name but is set to payable.
Line 3:This line is checking that the target accounts balance is greater than the amount being withdrawn.
Line 4:Then again calling the withdraw function to continue the loop which will in turn be sent back to the fallback function and repeat lines over and over until the target contracts balance is less than the amount being requested.
Review the diagram above which shows the code paths between the target and attacking code. During this whole process the first code example from the withdraw function is only ever getting to lines 1-2 until the bank is drained of money. It never actually deducts your requested amount until the end when the full contract balance is lower then your withdraw amount. At this point it's too late and there is no money left in the contract.
Setting up a Lab Environment and coding your Attack:
Hopefully that all made sense. If you watch the videos associated with this blog you will see it all in action.We will now analyze code of a simple smart contract banking application. We will interface with this contract via our own smart contract we code manually and turn into an exploit to take advantage of the vulnerability.
Then lets open up an online ethereum development platform at the following link where we will begin analyzing and exploiting smart contracts in real time in the video below:
Coding your Exploit and Interfacing with a Contract Programmatically:
The rest of this blog will continue in the video below where we will manually code an interface to a full smart contract and write an exploit to take advantage of a Re-Entrency Vulnerability:
Conclusion:
In this smart contract exploit writing intro we showed a vulnerability that allowed for re entry to a contract in a recursive loop. We then manually created an exploit to take advantage of the vulnerability. This is just the beginning, as this series progresses you will see other types of vulnerabilities and have the ability to code and exploit them yourself. On this journey through the decentralized world you will learn how to code and craft exploits in solidity using various development environments and test nets.
Are you tired of reading endless news stories about ethical hacking and not really knowing what that means? Let's change that!
This Post is for the people that:
Have No Experience With Cybersecurity (Ethical Hacking)
Have Limited Experience.
Those That Just Can't Get A Break
OK, let's dive into the post and suggest some ways that you can get ahead in Cybersecurity.
I receive many messages on how to become a hacker. "I'm a beginner in hacking, how should I start?" or "I want to be able to hack my friend's Facebook account" are some of the more frequent queries. Hacking is a skill. And you must remember that if you want to learn hacking solely for the fun of hacking into your friend's Facebook account or email, things will not work out for you. You should decide to learn hacking because of your fascination for technology and your desire to be an expert in computer systems. Its time to change the color of your hat 😀
I've had my good share of Hats. Black, white or sometimes a blackish shade of grey. The darker it gets, the more fun you have.
If you have no experience don't worry. We ALL had to start somewhere, and we ALL needed help to get where we are today. No one is an island and no one is born with all the necessary skills. Period.OK, so you have zero experience and limited skills…my advice in this instance is that you teach yourself some absolute fundamentals.
Let's get this party started.
What is hacking?
Hacking is identifying weakness and vulnerabilities of some system and gaining access with it.
Hacker gets unauthorized access by targeting system while ethical hacker have an official permission in a lawful and legitimate manner to assess the security posture of a target system(s)
There's some types of hackers, a bit of "terminology". White hat — ethical hacker. Black hat — classical hacker, get unauthorized access. Grey hat — person who gets unauthorized access but reveals the weaknesses to the company. Script kiddie — person with no technical skills just used pre-made tools. Hacktivist — person who hacks for some idea and leaves some messages. For example strike against copyright.
