Week 5 Readings and In the News

Foot Printing and Enumeration

As the first steps in hacking process, Foot Printing/Reconnaissance is intended for information gathering of the target organization using publicly accessible information without being intrusive. It may include information such as: DNS information, DNS zones, IP ranges, host names, services/ports/protocols used, potential applications, email address aliases to reveal usernames, publicly accessible internal network resources, identifying potential resources and systems in the network, read HTML codes of target web site pages. Simply reading news and reading online articles about security postures related to targeted organization may reveal a lot of potential vulnerabilities. Collect as much as information as possible to find weaknesses and act upon them. Various tools should be used in order to obtain such information such as: google content hacking with certain commands, whois, dig, nslookup, ping, traceroute, usenet, Teleport Pro, wget, Foca for Windows, Linux Kali as greatest collection of hacking tools and commands.

As the next step, Enumeration process would involve scanning system and networks to reveal detailed information, such as: user accounts, host names, OS types. It is done by querying database of target’s Registrar, then Organizational Queries, Domain Queries, Network Queries and POC Queries.  Some of the tools used here are: nslookup, trace route, enum, finger, nmap, fping, hping, TCP and UDP Scans, Ping Sweeps, strobe, superscan, IPeye, SATAN, NetCAT, WArDialing tools, nbtstat, nbtscan, nltest, ruser, telnet, tftp, rpcdump, rpcinfo.

Gaining Access to targeted systems would involve using Vulnerability scanners such as Nessus or Armitage exploit analysis in KALI Linux. Crack passwords using hash crackers such as NghashCrack. Sniff Data using WireShark or TCP Dump tools.

Bottom line is that in order to maximally protect organization against different hacking threats it is important to design multi-layered enterprise architecture to create multi-leveled traffic filtering and access control approach.  Therefore, it is important to act and think as a “white” hacker!

Question to the Class:

What multilayered solution would be optimal for various types of businesses?

In the News:

The hackers embedded the malicious code in Apple apps by convincing developers of legitimate software to use a tainted, counterfeit version of Apple’s software for creating iOS and Mac apps, which is known as Xcode, Apple said.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/20/apples-ios-app-store-suffers-first-major-attack.html