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Phreaking

Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a subculture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, like equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term "phreak" is derived from the words "phone" and "freak". It may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. "Phreak", "phreaker", or "phone phreak" are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking. Additionally, it is often associated with computer hacking. This is sometimes called the H/P culture (with H standing for Hacking and P standing for Phreaking). information on this site is for educational purposes only! Wyretap Network ©2007 - 2010

Disclaimer: The information on this site is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended to encourage or teach you to break the law, that's what TV is for, albeit in a very flawed manner. The owner(s) of this website will not be held liable for anything you choose to do with the information contained on this site. If you want to learn how to rape, murder, loot, and commit acts of terror on a monumental scale, well, you won't find it here. Instead, tune-in to your nightly news and take a lesson from your 'elected' 'leaders'.

Social engineering techniques and terms

All social engineering techniques are based on specific attributes of human decision-making known as cognitive biases.[1] These biases, sometimes called "bugs in the human hardware," are exploited in various combinations to create attack techniques, some of which are listed here:
Pretexting
Pretexting is the act of creating and using an invented scenario (the pretext) to persuade a targeted victim to release information or perform an action and is typically done over the telephone. It is more than a simple lie as it most often involves some prior research or set up and the use of pieces of known information (e.g. for impersonation: date of birth, Social Security Number, last bill amount) to establish legitimacy in the mind of the target. [2]
This technique is often used to trick a business into disclosing customer information, and is used by private investigators to obtain telephone records, utility records, banking records and other information directly from junior company service representatives. The information can then be used to establish even greater legitimacy under tougher questioning with a manager (e.g., to make account changes, get specific balances, etc).
As most U.S. companies still authenticate a client by asking only for a Social Security Number, date of birth, or mother's maiden name, the method is effective in many situations and will likely continue to be a security problem in the future.
Pretexting can also be used to impersonate co-workers, police, bank, tax authorities, or insurance investigators — or any other individual who could have perceived authority or right-to-know in the mind of the targeted victim. The pretexter must simply prepare answers to questions that might be asked by the victim. In some cases all that is needed is a voice that sounds authoritative, an earnest tone, and an ability to think on one's feet.
Phishing
Main article: Phishing
Phishing is a technique of fraudulently obtaining private information. Typically, the phisher sends an e-mail that appears to come from a legitimate business—a bank, or credit card company—requesting "verification" of information and warning of some dire consequence if it is not provided. The e-mail usually contains a link to a fraudulent web page that seems legitimate—with company logos and content—and has a form requesting everything from a home address to an ATM card's PIN.
For example, 2003 saw the proliferation of a phishing scam in which users received e-mails supposedly from eBay claiming that the user’s account was about to be suspended unless a link provided was clicked to update a credit card (information that the genuine eBay already had). Because it is relatively simple to make a Web site resemble a legitimate organization's site by mimicking the HTML code, the scam counted on people being tricked into thinking they were being contacted by eBay and subsequently, were going to eBay’s site to update their account information. By spamming large groups of people, the “phisher” counted on the e-mail being read by a percentage of people who already had listed credit card numbers with eBay legitimately, who might respond.
IVR or phone phishing
This technique uses a rogue Interactive voice response (IVR) system to recreate a legitimate sounding copy of a bank or other institution's IVR system. The victim is prompted (typically via a phishing e-mail) to call in to the "bank" via a (ideally toll free) number provided in order to "verify" information. A typical system will reject log-ins continually, ensuring the victim enters PINs or passwords multiple times, often disclosing several different passwords. More advanced systems transfer the victim to the attacker posing as a customer service agent for further questioning.
One could even record the typical commands ("Press one to change your password, press two to speak to customer service" ...) and play back the direction manually in real time, giving the appearance of being an IVR without the expense.
The technical name for phone phishing, is vishing.
Baiting
Baiting is like the real-world Trojan Horse that uses physical media and relies on the curiosity or greed of the victim.[3]
In this attack, the attacker leaves a malware infected floppy disk, CD ROM, or USB flash drive in a location sure to be found (bathroom, elevator, sidewalk, parking lot), gives it a legitimate looking and curiosity-piquing label, and simply waits for the victim to use the device.
For example, an attacker might create a disk featuring a corporate logo, readily available off the target's web site, and write "Executive Salary Summary Q2 2009" on the front. The attacker would then leave the disk on the floor of an elevator or somewhere in the lobby of the targeted company. An unknowing employee might find it and subsequently insert the disk into a computer to satisfy their curiosity, or a good samaritan might find it and turn it in to the company.
In either case as a consequence of merely inserting the disk into a computer to see the contents, the user would unknowingly install malware on it, likely giving an attacker unfettered access to the victim's PC and perhaps, the targeted company's internal computer network.
Unless computer controls block the infection, PCs set to "auto-run" inserted media may be compromised as soon as a rogue disk is inserted.
Quid pro quo
Quid pro quo means something for something:
An attacker calls random numbers at a company claiming to be calling back from technical support. Eventually they will hit someone with a legitimate problem, grateful that someone is calling back to help them. The attacker will "help" solve the problem and in the process have the user type commands that give the attacker access or launch malware.
In a 2003 information security survey, 90% of office workers gave researchers what they claimed was their password in answer to a survey question in exchange for a cheap pen.[4] Similar surveys in later years obtained similar results using chocolates and other cheap lures, although they made no attempt to validate the passwords.[5]
Other types
Common confidence tricksters or fraudsters also could be considered "social engineers" in the wider sense, in that they deliberately deceive and manipulate people, exploiting human weaknesses to obtain personal benefit. They may, for example, use social engineering techniques as part of an IT fraud.
The latest type of social engineering techniques include spoofing or hacking IDs of people having popular e-mail IDs such as Yahoo!, GMail, Hotmail, etc. Among the many motivations for deception are:
Phishing credit-card account numbers and their passwords.
Hacking private e-mails and chat histories, and manipulating them by using common editing techniques before using them to extort money and creating distrust among individuals.
Hacking websites of companies or organizations and destroying their reputation.

The Real ID Coming Soon!!!

The Real ID Coming Soon!!!

Monday, August 23, 2010

DLL hijacking vulnerabilities

DLL hijacking vulnerabilities
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Published: 2010-08-23,
Last Updated: 2010-08-23 19:23:24 UTC
by Bojan Zdrnja (Version: 1)
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For the last couple of days there have been a lot of discussions about a vulnerability published by a Slovenian security company ACROS. HD Moore (of Metasploit fame) also independently found hundreds of vulnerable applications and, as he said, the cat is now really out of the bag.

In order to see what is going here we first have to understand how modern applications are built. Modern applications come modularized with multiple DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries). This allows the programmer to use functions available in other DLLs on the system – Windows has hundreds of them. Now, if a DLL is not available on the system, the developer can decide to pack it with the main application’s executable and store it, for example, in the applications directory.

The most important DLLs are specified in the KnownDLLs registry key (HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/KnownDLLs). These are easy – if an application needs to load it, the system knows that they have to be in the directory specified by the DllDirectory registry key, which is usually %SystemRoot%/system32.

However, when another DLL is being loaded, the system dynamically tries to find the DLL. Historically, Microsoft made a mistake by putting the current directory in the first place (some of you Unix oldies might remember when “.” was at the first place in the PATH variable). This has been fixed by Microsoft by introducing the SafeDllSearchMode setting (registry value). This setting specifies the order in which a DLL will be searched for. For example, as specified in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682586%28v=VS.85%29.aspx this is the search order with the SafeDllSearchMode setting enabled:

1. The directory from which the application loaded.
2. The system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory.
3. The 16-bit system directory. There is no function that obtains the path of this directory, but it is searched.
4. The Windows directory. Use the GetWindowsDirectory function to get the path of this directory.
5. The current directory.
6. The directories that are listed in the PATH environment variable. Note that this does not include the per-application path specified by the App Paths registry key. The App Paths key is not used when computing the DLL search path.

If multiple directories hold a DLL with the same name, the first match wins. This setting is enabled by default on Windows XP SP2.

Now, the problem happens when, for example, the application tries to load a DLL that does not exist on the system. You can see one such example in the picture below, where I found out that one of my favorite applications is very much vulnerable. See how it tries to find the DLL in all those directories before if gets to the one on the share? Both names of the application and DLL have been blacked out – no point in serving this on a silver plated dish :(

DLL hijacking

Ok, so what about attack vectors. Any place where the attacker can put both the file to be opened by an application and a malicious DLL can be used as the attack vector. Obviously, as in the example above, the most obvious attack place are Windows shares so I guess we are looking at another vulnerability that uses similar attack vectors such as the LNK vulnerability last month – the difference here is that by just browsing to the directory nothing will happen since the user has to open the file.

In order to protect your networks/system be sure to audit permissions on shares to prevent unauthorized users from putting files where they shouldn’t be. Of course, I expect that by now you already blocked SMB and WebDAV on the perimeter so an external share cannot be used.

What about a fix? This will be a difficult one, especially since we can look at SafeDllSearchMode as a fix. So in most cases, developers of vulnerable applications will have to fix them and judging by the numbers I’ve seen around we are looking at a very difficult period. Hopefully those popular applications (such as the one I successfully exploited above) will get patched quickly so the final risk will be reduced.

We will keep an eye on this and update the diary as we get more information.

--
Bojan
INFIGO IS

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