unixtcpip/hacking · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 0 1.99k
close(fd[1]);
close(pfile);
wait(NULL);
} else {
close(fd[1]);
dup2(fd[0],0);
close(fd[0]);
execl("/usr/src/EasyAccess/www/cgi-bin/.userLogin",
"userLogin", NULL);
}
}
```

In the case of Hacking Team, they were logging on to the VPN with single-use passwords, so the VPN gave me access only to the network, and from there it took an extra effort to get domain admins on their network. In the other guide I wrote about side passes and privilege escalation in windows domains [1]. In this case, on the other hand, it was the same Windows domain passwords that were used to authenticate against the VPN, so I could get a good user password, including that of the domain admin. Now I had full access to his network, but usually this is the easy part. The most complicated part is to understand how they operate and how to get what you want out of their network.

[1] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41914
[4.3 - Fun facts]
Following the investigation they did about the hacking, I found it interesting to see that, by the same time I did it, the bank could have been compromised by someone else through a targeted phishing email [1]. As the old saying goes, "give a man an exploit and he will have access for a day, teach phishing and he will have access all his life" [2]. The fact that someone else, by chance and at the same time as me, put this small bank in the spotlight (they registered a domain similar to the real domain of the bank to be able to phish from there) suggests that bank hacks occur with much more frequently than is known.

A fun suggestion for you to follow the investigations of your hacks is to have a backup access, one that you won't touch unless you lose normal access. I have a simple script that expects commands once a day, or less, just to maintain long-term access in case they block my regular access. Then I had a powershell empire [3] calling home more frequently to a different IP, and I used empire to launch meterpreter [4] against a third IP, where I did most of my work. When PWC started investigating the hacking, they found my use of empire and meterpreter and cleaned those computers and blocked those IPs, but they didn't detect my backup access. PWC had placed network monitoring devices, in order to analyze the traffic and see if there were still infected computers, so I didn't want to connect much to their network. I only launched mimikatz once to get the new passwords, and from there I could continue my research by reading their emails in the outlook web access.

[1] page 47, Project Pallid Nutmeg.pdf, in torrent
[2] https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/563964286783877121
[3] https://github.com/EmpireProject/Empire
[4] https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework

[5 - Understand Banking Operations]
To understand how the bank operated, and how I could get money, I followed the techniques that I summarized in [1], in section “13.3 - Internal Recognition”. I downloaded a list of all file names, grepped for words like "SWIFT" and "transfer", and downloaded and read all files with interesting names. I also looked for emails from employees, but by far the most useful technique was to use keyloggers and screenshots to see how bank employees worked. I didn't know it at the time, but for this, Windows has a very good monitoring tool [2]. As described in technique no. 5 of section 13.3 in [1], I made a capture of the keys pressed throughout the domain (including window titles), I did a grep in search of SWIFT, and found some employees opening ‘SWIFT Access Service Bureau - Logon’. For those employees, I ran meterpreter as in [3], and used the post/windows/gather/screen_spy module to take screenshots every 5 seconds, to see how they worked. They were using a remote citrix app from the bottomline company [4] to access the SWIFT network, where each payment message SWIFT MT103 had to go through three employees: one to "create" the message, one to "verify" it, and another to "authorize it." Since I already had all their credentials thanks to the keylogger, I could easily perform all three steps myself. And from what I knew after seeing them work, they didn't review the SWIFT messages sent, so I should have enough time to get the money from my bank drops before the bank realized and tried to reverse the transfers.

[1] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41914
[2] https://cyberarms.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/using-problem-steps-recorder-psr-remotely-with-metasploit/
[3] https://www.trustedsec.com/blog/no_psexec_needed/
[4] https://www.bottomline.com/uk/products/bottomline-swift-access-services

********
_______________________________________
/ Whoever robs a thief, gets 100 years \
\ of forgiveness. /
---------------------------------------
\
\ ^__^
(oo)\_______
( (__)\ )\/\
_) / \|\|----w \|
(.)/ \|\| \|\|
`'
********

[6 - Send the money]
I had no idea what I was doing, so I was discovering it along the way. Somehow, the first transfers I sent went well. The next day, I screwed up by sending a transfer to Mexico that ended my fun. This bank sent its international transfers through its correspondent account in Natwest. I had seen that the correspondent account for transfers in pounds sterling (GBP) appeared as NWBKGB2LGPL, while for the others it was NWBKGB2LXXX. The Mexican transfer was in GBP, so I assumed that I had to put NWBKGB2LGPL as a correspondent. If I had prepared it better I would have known that the GPL instead of XXX indicated that the payment would be sent through the UK Fast Payment Service, rather than as an international transfer, which obviously will not work when you are trying of sending money to Mexico. So the bank got an error message. On the same day I also tried to send a payment of £200k to the UK using NWBKGB2LGPL, which was not made because 200k exceeded the shipping limit by fast payments, and would have had to use NWBKGB2LXXX instead. They also received an error message for this. They read the messages, investigated it, and found the rest of my transfers.

[7 - The loot]
From what I write, you can get a complete idea of what my ideals are and to what things I give my support. But I would not like to see anyone in legal trouble for receiving expropriated funds, so not another word of where the money went. I know that journalists are probably going to want to put some number on how many dollars were distributed in this hack and similar ones, but I prefer not to encourage our perverse habit of measuring the actions just by their economic value. Any action is admirable if it comes from love and not from the ego. Unfortunately those above, the rich and powerful, public figures, businessmen, people in "important" positions, those that our society most respects and values, those have been placed where they are based on acting more since the ego than from love. It is in the simple, humble and "invisible" people that we should look at and whom we should admire.

[8 - Cryptocurrencies]
Redistributing expropriated money to Chilean projects seeking positive social change would be easier and safer if those projects accepted anonymous donations via cryptocurrencies such as monero, zcash, or at least bitcoin. It is understood that many of these projects have an aversion to cryptocurrencies, as they resemble some strange hypercapitalist dystopia rather than the social economy we dream of. I share their skepticism, but I think they are useful to allow donations and anonymous transactions, by limiting government surveillance and control. Same as cash, whose use many countries are trying to limit for the same reason.

[9 - Powershell]
In this operation, as in [1], I used a lot of powershell. Then, powershell was super cool, you could do almost anything you wanted, without antivirus detection and with very little forensic footprint. It happens that with the introduction of AMSI [2], offensive powershell is retiring. Today offensive C# is what is on the rise, with tools like [3][4][5][6]. AMSI is going to get to .NET for 4.8, so the tools in C# probably still have a couple of years left before they get dated. And then we will use C or C++ again, or maybe Delphi will become fashionable again. The specific tools and techniques change every few years, but basically it is not so much what changes, today hacking is essentially the same thing it was in the 90s. In fact, all the powershell scripts used in this guide and in the previous one are still perfectly usable today, after a little obfuscation of your own.

[1] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41914
[2] https://medium.com/@byte_St0rm/adventures-in-the-wonderful-world-of-amsi-25d235eb749c
[3] https://cobbr.io/SharpSploit.html
[4] https://github.com/tevora-threat/SharpView
[5] https://www.harmj0y.net/blog/redteaming/ghostpack/
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20191114034546/https://rastamouse.me/2019/08/covenant-donut-tikitorch/

********
___________________________
/ Fo Sostyn, Fo Ordaag \
\ Financial Sector Fuck Off /
---------------------------
\
\ ^__^
(oo)\_______
( (__)\ )\/\
_) / \|\|----w \|
(.)/ \|\| \|\|
`'
********

[10 - Torrent]
Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful.

Offshore banking provides executives, politicians and millionaires with privacy from of their own government. Exposing them may sound hypocritical on my part, since I am generally in favor of privacy and against government oversight. But the law was already written by and for the rich: it protects its system of exploitation, with some limits (such as taxes) so that society can function and the system does not collapse under the weight of its own greed. So no, privacy is not the same for the powerful, when it allows them to evade the limits of a system designed to give them privileges; and privacy for the weak, whom it protects from a system designed to exploit them.

Even journalists with the best intentions find it impossible to study such a huge amount of material and know what will be relevant for people in different parts of the world. When I leaked the Hacking Team files, I gave The Intercept a copy of the emails one month in advance. They found a couple of the 0days that Hacking Team was using, previously reported them to MS and Adobe and published a few stories once the leak was made public. There is no point of comparison with the enormous amount of articles and research that came after the complete leak to the public. Seeing it this way, and also considering the (not) editorialized publication [1] of the Panama papers, I think that a public and complete leak of this material is the right choice.

[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-media-gatekeepers-protect-western-1-from-panama-leak/

Psychologists found that those who are lower in the hierarchies tend to understand and empathize with those at the top, but vice versa is less common. This explains why, in this sexist world, many men joke about their inability to understand women, as if it were an irresolvable mystery. Explains why the rich, if they stop to think about those who live in poverty, give advice and "solutions" so alien to reality that we want to laugh. Explain why we revere executives as brave who take risks. What do they risk, beyond their privilege? If all their ventures fail, they will have to live and work like the rest of us. It also explains why there will be many who accuse me of being irresponsible and dangerous by leaking this without redaction. They feel the "danger" around an offshore bank and its customers much more intensely than they feel the misery of those dispossessed by this unfair and unequal system. And this leak of their finances, is it a danger to them, or perhaps only to their position at the top of a hierarchy that should not even exist?

[[ IMAGE REMOVED: ASCII ART OF PIRATE SAYING QUOTE IN SPANISH ]]
Translation: “They vilify us, these infamous people; When the only difference is that they steal from the poor, protected by the law, heaven knows, and we get the rich under the sole protection of our own courage. Don't you have to prefer to be one of us, rather than indulge those villains in search of a job? - Captain Bellamy”

[11 - Learn to hack]
You don't start hacking well. You start hacking shit, thinking it's good, and then gradually you get better. That is why I always say that one of the most valuable virtues is persistence.
- Octavia Butler's advice for the APT candidate

The best way to learn to hack is by hacking. Put together a laboratory with virtual machines and start testing things, taking a break to investigate anything you don't understand. At the very least you will want a windows server as a domain controller, another normal Windows vm attached to the domain, and a development machine with visual studio to compile and modify tools. Try to make an office document with macros that launch meterpreter or another RAT, and try meterpreter, mimikatz, bloodhound, kerberoasting, smb relaying, psexec and other lateral movement techniques[1]; as well as the other scripts, tools and techniques mentioned in this guide and in the previous one[2]. At first you can disable windows defender, but then try it all by having it activated [3][4] (but deactivating the automatic sending of samples). Once you're comfortable with all that, you'll be ready to hack 99% of companies. There are a couple of things that at some point will be very useful in your learning, such as getting comfortable with bash and cmd.exe, a basic domain of powershell, python and javascript, having knowledge of kerberos [5][6] and active directory [7][8][9][10], and fluent English. A good introductory book is The Hacker Playbook.

close(fd[1]);

close(pfile);

wait(NULL);

} else {

close(fd[1]);

dup2(fd[0],0);

close(fd[0]);

execl("/usr/src/EasyAccess/www/cgi-bin/.userLogin",

"userLogin", NULL);

}

```

In the case of Hacking Team, they were logging on to the VPN with single-use passwords, so the VPN gave me access only to the network, and from there it took an extra effort to get domain admins on their network. In the other guide I wrote about side passes and privilege escalation in windows domains [1]. In this case, on the other hand, it was the same Windows domain passwords that were used to authenticate against the VPN, so I could get a good user password, including that of the domain admin. Now I had full access to his network, but usually this is the easy part. The most complicated part is to understand how they operate and how to get what you want out of their network.

[1] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41914

[4.3 - Fun facts]

Following the investigation they did about the hacking, I found it interesting to see that, by the same time I did it, the bank could have been compromised by someone else through a targeted phishing email [1]. As the old saying goes, "give a man an exploit and he will have access for a day, teach phishing and he will have access all his life" [2]. The fact that someone else, by chance and at the same time as me, put this small bank in the spotlight (they registered a domain similar to the real domain of the bank to be able to phish from there) suggests that bank hacks occur with much more frequently than is known.

A fun suggestion for you to follow the investigations of your hacks is to have a backup access, one that you won't touch unless you lose normal access. I have a simple script that expects commands once a day, or less, just to maintain long-term access in case they block my regular access. Then I had a powershell empire [3] calling home more frequently to a different IP, and I used empire to launch meterpreter [4] against a third IP, where I did most of my work. When PWC started investigating the hacking, they found my use of empire and meterpreter and cleaned those computers and blocked those IPs, but they didn't detect my backup access. PWC had placed network monitoring devices, in order to analyze the traffic and see if there were still infected computers, so I didn't want to connect much to their network. I only launched mimikatz once to get the new passwords, and from there I could continue my research by reading their emails in the outlook web access.

[1] page 47, Project Pallid Nutmeg.pdf, in torrent

[2] https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/563964286783877121

[3] https://github.com/EmpireProject/Empire

[4] https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework

[5 - Understand Banking Operations]

To understand how the bank operated, and how I could get money, I followed the techniques that I summarized in [1], in section “13.3 - Internal Recognition”. I downloaded a list of all file names, grepped for words like "SWIFT" and "transfer", and downloaded and read all files with interesting names. I also looked for emails from employees, but by far the most useful technique was to use keyloggers and screenshots to see how bank employees worked. I didn't know it at the time, but for this, Windows has a very good monitoring tool [2]. As described in technique no. 5 of section 13.3 in [1], I made a capture of the keys pressed throughout the domain (including window titles), I did a grep in search of SWIFT, and found some employees opening ‘SWIFT Access Service Bureau - Logon’. For those employees, I ran meterpreter as in [3], and used the post/windows/gather/screen_spy module to take screenshots every 5 seconds, to see how they worked. They were using a remote citrix app from the bottomline company [4] to access the SWIFT network, where each payment message SWIFT MT103 had to go through three employees: one to "create" the message, one to "verify" it, and another to "authorize it." Since I already had all their credentials thanks to the keylogger, I could easily perform all three steps myself. And from what I knew after seeing them work, they didn't review the SWIFT messages sent, so I should have enough time to get the money from my bank drops before the bank realized and tried to reverse the transfers.

[1] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41914

[2] https://cyberarms.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/using-problem-steps-recorder-psr-remotely-with-metasploit/

[3] https://www.trustedsec.com/blog/no_psexec_needed/

[4] https://www.bottomline.com/uk/products/bottomline-swift-access-services

********

_______________________________________

/ Whoever robs a thief, gets 100 years \

\ of forgiveness. /

---------------------------------------

\

\ ^__^

(oo)\_______

( (__)\ )\/\

_) / ||----w |

(.)/ || ||

`'

********

[6 - Send the money]

I had no idea what I was doing, so I was discovering it along the way. Somehow, the first transfers I sent went well. The next day, I screwed up by sending a transfer to Mexico that ended my fun. This bank sent its international transfers through its correspondent account in Natwest. I had seen that the correspondent account for transfers in pounds sterling (GBP) appeared as NWBKGB2LGPL, while for the others it was NWBKGB2LXXX. The Mexican transfer was in GBP, so I assumed that I had to put NWBKGB2LGPL as a correspondent. If I had prepared it better I would have known that the GPL instead of XXX indicated that the payment would be sent through the UK Fast Payment Service, rather than as an international transfer, which obviously will not work when you are trying of sending money to Mexico. So the bank got an error message. On the same day I also tried to send a payment of £200k to the UK using NWBKGB2LGPL, which was not made because 200k exceeded the shipping limit by fast payments, and would have had to use NWBKGB2LXXX instead. They also received an error message for this. They read the messages, investigated it, and found the rest of my transfers.

[7 - The loot]

From what I write, you can get a complete idea of what my ideals are and to what things I give my support. But I would not like to see anyone in legal trouble for receiving expropriated funds, so not another word of where the money went. I know that journalists are probably going to want to put some number on how many dollars were distributed in this hack and similar ones, but I prefer not to encourage our perverse habit of measuring the actions just by their economic value. Any action is admirable if it comes from love and not from the ego. Unfortunately those above, the rich and powerful, public figures, businessmen, people in "important" positions, those that our society most respects and values, those have been placed where they are based on acting more since the ego than from love. It is in the simple, humble and "invisible" people that we should look at and whom we should admire.

[8 - Cryptocurrencies]

Redistributing expropriated money to Chilean projects seeking positive social change would be easier and safer if those projects accepted anonymous donations via cryptocurrencies such as monero, zcash, or at least bitcoin. It is understood that many of these projects have an aversion to cryptocurrencies, as they resemble some strange hypercapitalist dystopia rather than the social economy we dream of. I share their skepticism, but I think they are useful to allow donations and anonymous transactions, by limiting government surveillance and control. Same as cash, whose use many countries are trying to limit for the same reason.

[9 - Powershell]

In this operation, as in [1], I used a lot of powershell. Then, powershell was super cool, you could do almost anything you wanted, without antivirus detection and with very little forensic footprint. It happens that with the introduction of AMSI [2], offensive powershell is retiring. Today offensive C# is what is on the rise, with tools like [3][4][5][6]. AMSI is going to get to .NET for 4.8, so the tools in C# probably still have a couple of years left before they get dated. And then we will use C or C++ again, or maybe Delphi will become fashionable again. The specific tools and techniques change every few years, but basically it is not so much what changes, today hacking is essentially the same thing it was in the 90s. In fact, all the powershell scripts used in this guide and in the previous one are still perfectly usable today, after a little obfuscation of your own.

[1] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41914

[2] https://medium.com/@byte_St0rm/adventures-in-the-wonderful-world-of-amsi-25d235eb749c

[3] https://cobbr.io/SharpSploit.html

[4] https://github.com/tevora-threat/SharpView

[5] https://www.harmj0y.net/blog/redteaming/ghostpack/

[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20191114034546/https://rastamouse.me/2019/08/covenant-donut-tikitorch/

********

___________________________

/ Fo Sostyn, Fo Ordaag \

\ Financial Sector Fuck Off /

---------------------------

\

\ ^__^

(oo)\_______

( (__)\ )\/\

_) / ||----w |

(.)/ || ||

`'

********

[10 - Torrent]

Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful.

Offshore banking provides executives, politicians and millionaires with privacy from of their own government. Exposing them may sound hypocritical on my part, since I am generally in favor of privacy and against government oversight. But the law was already written by and for the rich: it protects its system of exploitation, with some limits (such as taxes) so that society can function and the system does not collapse under the weight of its own greed. So no, privacy is not the same for the powerful, when it allows them to evade the limits of a system designed to give them privileges; and privacy for the weak, whom it protects from a system designed to exploit them.

Even journalists with the best intentions find it impossible to study such a huge amount of material and know what will be relevant for people in different parts of the world. When I leaked the Hacking Team files, I gave The Intercept a copy of the emails one month in advance. They found a couple of the 0days that Hacking Team was using, previously reported them to MS and Adobe and published a few stories once the leak was made public. There is no point of comparison with the enormous amount of articles and research that came after the complete leak to the public. Seeing it this way, and also considering the (not) editorialized publication [1] of the Panama papers, I think that a public and complete leak of this material is the right choice.

[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-media-gatekeepers-protect-western-1-from-panama-leak/

Psychologists found that those who are lower in the hierarchies tend to understand and empathize with those at the top, but vice versa is less common. This explains why, in this sexist world, many men joke about their inability to understand women, as if it were an irresolvable mystery. Explains why the rich, if they stop to think about those who live in poverty, give advice and "solutions" so alien to reality that we want to laugh. Explain why we revere executives as brave who take risks. What do they risk, beyond their privilege? If all their ventures fail, they will have to live and work like the rest of us. It also explains why there will be many who accuse me of being irresponsible and dangerous by leaking this without redaction. They feel the "danger" around an offshore bank and its customers much more intensely than they feel the misery of those dispossessed by this unfair and unequal system. And this leak of their finances, is it a danger to them, or perhaps only to their position at the top of a hierarchy that should not even exist?

[[ IMAGE REMOVED: ASCII ART OF PIRATE SAYING QUOTE IN SPANISH ]]

Translation: “They vilify us, these infamous people; When the only difference is that they steal from the poor, protected by the law, heaven knows, and we get the rich under the sole protection of our own courage. Don't you have to prefer to be one of us, rather than indulge those villains in search of a job? - Captain Bellamy”

[11 - Learn to hack]

You don't start hacking well. You start hacking shit, thinking it's good, and then gradually you get better. That is why I always say that one of the most valuable virtues is persistence.

- Octavia Butler's advice for the APT candidate

The best way to learn to hack is by hacking. Put together a laboratory with virtual machines and start testing things, taking a break to investigate anything you don't understand. At the very least you will want a windows server as a domain controller, another normal Windows vm attached to the domain, and a development machine with visual studio to compile and modify tools. Try to make an office document with macros that launch meterpreter or another RAT, and try meterpreter, mimikatz, bloodhound, kerberoasting, smb relaying, psexec and other lateral movement techniques[1]; as well as the other scripts, tools and techniques mentioned in this guide and in the previous one[2]. At first you can disable windows defender, but then try it all by having it activated [3][4] (but deactivating the automatic sending of samples). Once you're comfortable with all that, you'll be ready to hack 99% of companies. There are a couple of things that at some point will be very useful in your learning, such as getting comfortable with bash and cmd.exe, a basic domain of powershell, python and javascript, having knowledge of kerberos [5][6] and active directory [7][8][9][10], and fluent English. A good introductory book is The Hacker Playbook.