David Dodd

Gitrob on the Network Developers generally like to share their code, and many of them do so by open sourcing it on GitHub, a social code hosting and collaboration service. Many companies also use GitHub as a convenient place to host both private and public code repositories by creating GitHub organizations where employees can be joined.  Sometimes Employee might publish things that might be sensitive in nature and these things might lead to compromise of a system. Gitrob is a tool that Michael Henriksen developed that scans the github repositories and match filenames against a range of patterns for files that typically contain sensitive or dangerous information. The first thing the tool does is to collect all public repositories of the organization itself. It then goes on to collect all the organization members and their public repositories, in order to compile a lis... (more)

Planning, Scoping and Recon Techniques

The purpose of this article is to describe some tools and techniques in performing the planning, scoping, and recon portion of a penetration test. In covering these tools and techniques the reader will learn how to use them to find vulnerabilities in their organization and help improve security posture. Some other names for this first phase of penetration testing are; OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), Footprinting, Discovery, and Cyberstalking. Introduction During reconnaissance we'll gather information from public sources to learn about the target and try to find what is importan... (more)

Intruder Detection with tcpdump

To capture, parse, and analyze traffic tcpdump is a very powerful tool. To begin a basic capture uses the following syntax. tcpdump -n –i -s -n      tells tcpdump to not resolve IP addresses to domain names and port numbers to service names. -I       tells tcpdump which interface to use. -s      tells tcpdump how much of the packet to record. I used 1515 but 1514 is sufficient for most cases. If you don’t specify a size then it will only capture the first 68 bytes of each packet. A snaplen value of 0 which will use the required length to ... (more)

Performing a Penetration Test on a Customer’s Network

When performing a penetration test on a customer’s network by simulating an attack and trying to find a way inside many forget there is an easier way. Many networks have well established security protection through firewalls, Intrusion Detections/ Protections Systems that will alert to your presents. Performing a vulnerability scan using tools such as NeXpose, Nessus, nmap, etc will alert many systems. By performing some research on the target and learn what the company does you can narrow your attack. By using some social engineering you can email your payload to an inspecting v... (more)

Metasploit Helpful Tips

Introduction The Metasploit Framework is a penetration testing toolkit, exploit development platform, and research tool. The framework includes hundreds of working remote exploits for a variety of platforms. Payloads, encoders, and nop slide generators can be mixed and matched with exploit modules to solve almost any exploit-related task. This tutorial will walk you through how to use the latest version of Nessus pre-built plugin filter ‘Metasploit Framework' in your pentest assignments. It will also cover some useful metasploit tips to achieve privilege escalation. Wouldn't it b... (more)