Th3 S3cr3t Ag3nt

This is the story of a phishing email that came across my desk. It's good to take a look at what the bad guys are doing sometimes. It's often not rocket science but it's handy to keep an eye on the simple techniques used. And if this isn't your day job you probably don't get forwarded a huge number of phishing emails, malware to analyse or dodgy sites to investigate. In fact hopefully you do your best to avoid all of those things. The Attack Chain So this particular phishing campaign started as many others do with a simple phishing email. It's not an aggressive email, it's not selling itself too hard, no spelling mistakes, no funny looking URLs and it's pretty simple. There's only one link to click on. Just a quick note here about clicking on links in nefarious emails. Don't do it unless you are ready to. This link could trigger some malware, it could be unique to the targeted email (so the attacker knows the email address is valid...

When cracking passwords, efficiency is everything. You've spend hard earned money on GPUs, you may as well optimise your password lists to make sure that you don't waste time hashing passwords that are out of policy for your target organisation. So that's simple enough with a few grep and sed commands but after a while you start to feel lazy and script it. Thats why I've added  password policy script to my password munging script . Using the policy script is pretty straightforward: ./policy.py -luns passwords.txt -o passwordsinpolicy.txt The switches are as follows: -l --lowercase passwords must include lowercase letters -u --uppercase passwords must include uppercase letters -n --numeric password must include numbers -s --special passwords must include special characters All of the above are switched on by default. The input file must have each password on a separate line. There are also the following optional switches: -m --min minimu...

Password munging is the art of changing a word that is easy to remember until it becomes a strong password. This is how most people make up passwords. Munge stands for M odify U ntil N ot G uessed E asily. The trouble is that it doesn't work very well. We can guess the modifications. Password selection. Take the average office worker that is told that it's time to change their password and come up with a new one. They have just been on holiday to New York with their family and so following common advice they choose that as their password. newyork No! They are told they must include capital letters NewYork No! They are told they must include numbers N3wY0rk No! They are told they must include a special character N3wY0rk! There, now that's a password that meets security requirements and our office worker can get on with their actual job instead of playing with passwords. Scripting similar munges There are a number of ways that they could munge the...