Category Archives: Penetration Test

Information security e-learning

The Internet gives us unlimited opportunities to educate ourselves. Here I want to share with you some free resources, which can help you understand information security concepts better.

1. For those of you who want to familiarize yourself with ISO 27001 standard  I recommend free e-learning course

“The purpose of this course is to enable information security practitioners to successfully implement an ISO 27001 compatible information security management system in their respective organizations. This course is made freely available to interested candidates and is modeled on ISO 27001 Lead Implementer courses.” (c) ISQ

2. Designing and Executing Information Security Strategies course provides you with opportunities to integrate and apply your information security knowledge. Following the case-study approach, you will be introduced to current, real-world cases developed and presented by the practitioner community. You will design and execute information assurance strategies to solve these cases. A term-long capstone project leads you through an actual consulting engagement with a local organisation  adding experience to your resume before you even complete the program.

3. Stanford University provides free online cryptography courses.

– Basic

“This course explains the inner workings of cryptographic primitives and how to correctly use them. Students will learn how to reason about the security of cryptographic constructions and how to apply this knowledge to real-world applications. The course begins with a detailed discussion of how two parties who have a shared secret key can communicate securely when a powerful adversary eavesdrops and tampers with traffic. We will examine many deployed protocols and analyze mistakes in existing systems. The second half of the course discusses public-key techniques that let two or more parties generate a shared secret key. We will cover the relevant number theory and discuss public-key encryption and basic key-exchange. Throughout the course students will be exposed to many exciting open problems in the field.” (c) Dan Boneh

– Advanced

“The course begins with constructions for digital signatures and their applications.   We will then discuss protocols for user authentication and zero-knowledge protocols.    Next we will turn to privacy applications of cryptography supporting anonymous credentials and private database lookup.  We will conclude with more advanced topics including multi-party computation and elliptic curve cryptography” (c) Dan Boneh

4. One-hour seminar by Xeno Kovah (Mitre) on rootkits highlights the few weaknesses in detection methodologies and many weaknesses in tools

5. Using buffer overflows

– Understanding the Stack – The beginning of this video explain Intel x86 function-call conventions when C code is compile

– Buffer Overflow Exploitation Megaprimer for Linux video series

6. Series of videos introducing wireless networking and the application of penetration testing tools to WLANs

Penetration Tester’s Toolkit

BackTrack is a Linux-based penetration testing arsenal that aids security professionals in the ability to perform assessments in a purely native environment dedicated to hacking. The manuals section provides you with simple information in order to get up and running with Back|Track and help with some additional features unique to the suite.

Nmap –free open source tool for network analysis and security audits.

Typical use:
nmap -A -T4 localhost
-A to identify operating system, trace and scan with scripts
-T4 configure time parameters (scale 0 to 5, higher the number – higher the speed)
localhost — target host

You can use “slow comprehensive scan” to get more detailed information pertaining target system
nmap -sS -sU -T4 -A -v -PE -PP -PS21,22,23,25,80,113,31339 -PA80,113,443,10042 -PO –script all localhost

For more information please refer to Nmap Reference Guide

Hydra is a flexible and fast password auditing tool which supports numerous protocols and parallelization.

Nikto – Open Source (GPL) web-scanner. This tool can help you find undeleted scripts (such as test.php, index_.php, etc), database administration utilities ((/phpmyadmin/, /pma, etc) and many more typical errors on target website.

To use simply start with:
/nikto.pl -host localhost

Acunetix – very easy to use web vulnerability scanner. Free version still has great functionality and can help checking web applications for SQL Injection, XSS & other web vulnerabilities

Nessus – very powerful free for home use web-scanner, which helps security auditors identify available running services on target system, check for potential security misconfiguration and many more

To test identified vulnerabilities you can use Metasploit Framework or try to find exploit (on explot search, Explot-db, etc.) and use it manually on your system

The Metasploit Framework helps security and IT professionals identify security issues, verify vulnerability mitigations, and manage expert-driven security assessments./

It is possible to use Nmap to analyze ports, identify services and Metasploit to exploit vulnerabilities depending on service (ssh, ftp, etc.)

Armitage – tool that can help you test network for vulnerabilities. Basically, it is a GUI for Metasploit Framework and Nmap. It visualizes targets, collects data and makes whole process of penetration testing easier

And to test all of these for those of you, who interested in vulnerability analysis, reverse engineering, debugging,, exploit development and privilege escalation, you can refer to Linux hacking challenges. This project has several virtual machines, exercises and manuals to help you improve your skills.

Here are some additional TOP lists of tools for penetration testing

Top 100 Network Security Tools
Top 10 Web Vulnerability Scanners
Top 10 Vulnerability Scanners
OWASP Top 10 Tools and Tactics
Web-based Application Security Scanners
Web Application Security Scanner List by WebAppSec