Simple Next Generation Firewall Manipulation Leading to Data Exfiltration

I was asked to take over a project involving implementing some Next Generation Firewalls. In this particular case it was Cisco Firepower Threat Defense. I was told that these NGFWs are all singing, all dancing and given the cost of them you’d expect that and more. I was told they understand more than just Layer 3 meaning we can do things like write rules based on FQDN, allow traffic based

Creating a Highly Interactive Honeypot With HonSSH

HonSSH is essentially an SSH proxy, acting like a Man-in-The-Middle attack. It sits between the attacker and a honeypot and proxies the SSH connections. By doing this it can log all interactions, spoof (rewrite) login passwords and even capture files downloaded by the attacker on to the honeypot for later analysis. Below is my topology: Configuring the Honeypot Server For the honeypot server (the server attackers will login to), I’m using Ubuntu 14.04

Disabling WordPress XML-RPC and Banning Offenders With fail2ban

This isn’t something new. SANS ISC reported on this 2 years ago. The bad guys love anything that can be used in a reflection DoS and the WordPress XML-RPC functionality is a prime candidate. There are various ways to disable it, through WordPress plugins for example, or by hacking away at code. All of these are fine if you’re in control over what gets installed on the web server. In a shared

Banning Repeat Offenders With fail2ban

More and more I see fail2ban banning the same hosts repeatedly. One way to tackle this could be to increase the ban time but you could also have fail2ban monitor itself to find “repeat offenders” and then ban them for an extended period of time. Firstly, create a filter definition: [Definition] failregex = fail2ban\.actions\[\d+\]: WARNING \[.*\] Unban <HOST>$ ignoreregex = fail2ban\.actions\[\d+\]: WARNING \[repeat-offender\].*$ This will be used against the fail2ban log and

Open Curtains – VNC With No Authentication

A few weeks ago I read an article about mass scanning the Internet for VNC servers that don’t require authentication. Dubbed “open curtains” because it’s like having your curtains open allowing anyone passing by to glance in. The person doesn’t need to bypass any security in place or have a key to your door to get this access – it’s open for everyone to take a peek inside. To achieve