Category: Hacking

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The Darkside

Ransomware, the stuff of your worst nightmares. It seems as if this is getting very serious. The Darkside is a group of hackers that have recently caused a lot of pain. For example in the US the Colonial Pipeline has been shut down – that’s 5,550 miles of pipe for the oil industry. Meanwhile in Washington DC police are also subject to ransomware – they have allegedly offered $100,000 dollars – apparently this was not enough! So not only are they locking up all those machines they are also sifting thru all your data, and exposing that infomation on the net, using it as an extra point of leverage.

As noted in the Kerbs article. “Security firm Emsisoft found that almost 2,400 U.S.-based governments, healthcare facilities and schools were victims of ransomware in 2020”.

How do you defend against this? So there is a few ways to approach this – one is to air-gap and remove mission critical computers from the internet. Think about it, that payroll machine? That set of servers that run the production plant? Do they really need to be on the internet 24 /7 ? May be you have one cable that you physically connect when and only when you need to (to run OS software and security updates). Maybe you set up a seperate airgaped network for that server and the network of production machines. Silo those machines. 

Anti virus software. Use it but configure it so it doesn’t stop your functionality. This can sometimes feel like a black art, and it’s often hard to get the balance right but it is a good idea for a lot of users. 

Backup your files. You have that latest pitch? Is it backed up? Can you restore it? Do you know how long it would take to re build your server? Those 20 machines that are the core of your company? Knowing this and the cost of the emergency rebuild process is something that you should be on to. 

Get rid of those very old machines! If you have an old machine that’s never been updated it’s a huge risk vector. Spend some time and money now before it costs you big time.

Use your firewall /s! This is a great starting point, if your activley monitoring things use that info – put it back into your firewall. Do you have a mcahine build you maintain? Why not use that firewall info in your machine builds?

What ever you do “Have a plan!” A cyber security plan.

Being able to protect and if necessary re build you network from scratch is one way of beating these crooks – but if you start looking into the detail of what’s involved it’s scary stuff. Stay safe on the interwebs people!

 Related reading – Darkside hack
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/a-closer-look-at-the-darkside-ransomware-gang/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_cyberattack

https://www.intel471.com/blog/darkside-ransomware-colonial-pipeline-attack

Washington DC Police
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbgbk/washington-dc-police-allegedly-offered-dollar100000-to-hackers-to-stop-leak

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xeuledoc

xeuledoc is a tool (hacking?) that can determine the owner of a google doc and often the name and email are available. I’ve been testing it and it seems to work well! Although it seems to only work with publicly shared documents.

The interesting thing is that you may not want your name and email address available to every one! Ever shared info via a google doc? You may be exposing at least your name and email to people who are unscrupulous – might be time to think about all the docs you may have shared! Is it a good thing that your email address and name are linked to this data?

It also seems to work with the “Security setting” anyone who has this link. It will be interesting to see if google “fix” this, and how long it might take.

Note this above example is included in the application as published by its owner.

Github link to application
https://github.com/Malfrats/xeuledoc

Apparently it can also work on
Google Docs – Google Spreadsheets – Google Slides – Google Drawning – Google My Maps – Google Apps Script – Google Jamboard

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From my Spells book No1 Tcpdump

So I have a number of journals one of which I call “Spells” ! It’s just a collection of scripts commands etc. But for years now I’ve been thinking about putting together some short snappy articles about each of them – so finally hear we go!

Tcpdump is a “data-network packet analyser computer program”
What does it do? It lets you look at network traffic and see what is coming into and out of your computer.

Typically this can be useful if you want to see what is going on with a particular application (it might be a web server or a mail server – you might want to look at DNS traffic).

Usage is fairly straight forward 

ie “sudo tcpdump” Will give you pretty much everything coming in and going out of the machine. It’s interesting to run this and if you look closely you can get an idea of web page construction – live connectivity all sorts of interesting stuff. But it is sometimes a lot of information (use control command key combination to stop the session).

sudo tcpdump port 53
Will give you an idea of whats going on with regards DNS
If your running a web server “sudo tcpdump port 80” or “sudo tcpdump port 443” will give you a good picture of whats going on.

It’s even useful just to see if the network is up – for example you can bring up a couple of terminal windows
“sudo tcpdump icmp” in one window and “ping 8.8.4.4” in another, will give you feedback like this and indeed prove that your computer is infact on the interweb!

Tcpdump and icmp running in seperate terminal windowss!

If you want to actually capture data to a file try something like this
“sudo tcpdump -s 0 -w dumpfile host 8.8.8.8” and then “ping 8.8.8.8” that will create a packet dump in a format that can be read via tcpdump or something like wireshark if you want to view things in a GUI.
 
Although this is just a basic introduction to packet tracing, tcpdump is the grandaddy of all packet tracers and it’s a good skill to have. 

One word of warning though, is that you should not run tcpdump on a network that is not yours! Ie check if your doing this at work, as in some situations it could be considered not appropriate or verging on hacking. Use with caution!

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Long pass phrases!

Yarn bike

Don’t use a pass word! Use a pass phrase . Twelve or more letters, the odd number and lower and upper case letters, make it something you can remember but long and easy for you to remember is the most important thing.

For example I like dogs, bentley cars and pingpong I might write a sticky note that says
*_*
Fave animal
Fave car
Fave sport

and the pass phrase might look like

Dog*_*bentley*_*pingpong

This is a good pass phrase
But think of it like this

To quote From the TheGreatContini who posts on stackoverflow.
While discusing “How long to brute force 16 character secret key“

There are 62 possibilities for each character, and 16 characters. This translates to 62^16 (47672401706823533450263330816) trials worse case, or half of that on average. If the attacker can do a billion trials per second, that means 47672401706823533450 seconds, which is about 1511681941489 years. I think that’s pretty good protection. You could even chop off a few characters and still feel pretty safe.

Probably best not to put your exact pass phrase in this (just in case some one nasty sniffs if across the net work or the interweb) but have a play with this site it’s fun and gets the point home.

The other thing is don’t use the same pass phrase for all accounts!
What you might say do I have to remember lots of pass phrases? Well the next thing to do is start using the keychain, but I’ll talk more about this in another exciting episode!

Have fun and be safe on the interwebs