Enumerating Log File (ine)

 In this lab, we find an instance of the postfix mail server running whilst we are enumerating the running processes.


We can have a look at the log files for this service. Linux logs just about everything and by default stores the resulting files in /var/log In this case, the default location has been changed by somebody so we need to search elsewhere.


Log files help admin and other users know what is going on with the system - they often contain error messages. These files are therefore of interest to attackers as they can help us understand the compromised system and perhaps they will leak sensitive data.

There are lots of log files, though, so it makes sense to look into those which relate to running processes and services.

The files themselves can be quite long, so we can utilize the tail command - this is useful as often the most useful error messages are found towards the end of the log file.


The log file for the postfix mail service has leaked sensitive data - it was a good thing that we enumerated it!

It is now just a matter of exploiting the cronjob...



This lab shows us the importance of taking a look at log files for interesting running processes and services - we can include this step as a part of our initial enumeration of compromised machines after we have used the ps aux command.


I hope this post was of use.

 

puzz00







Popular posts from this blog

Hacking Year of the Owl (thm)

Image
NOTE: I am currently migrating my writeups and cybersecurity notes to  my github This writeup can be found in a new and shiny form at puzz00 year of the owl writeup  --- The Year of the Owl is a machine by MuirlandOracle on tryhackme   We start by using nmap to scan the TCP ports. The results show us that this appears to be a windows machine because we see netbios on port 139, SMB on 445 and winrm on its default port of 5985. We take a closer look but don't find much of interest. Since SMB is running, we can try a null session attack, but this does not work. We cannot connect using rpcclient without valid creds, either. Web app enumeration does not reveal anything of interest, so I have not included it in this post. We need to find another way to enumerate usernames and potential passwords. We can try common UDP ports using nmap. The results come back in the open|filtered state which is not very useful. We do not know if the ports are open or if the UDP datagrams are bei...
Read more

Hacking Reset (thm)

Image
  NOTE: I am currently migrating my writeups and notes regarding hacking aka pentesting to  my github - my reset writeup can be found here     Reset is a fun active directory based box on thm   We start with an nmap scan which shows us that the target machine is probably a domain controller as it has port 88 open. Domain controllers typically have this port open since they are involved in kerberos based authentication. We also find some useful data regarding the domain and machine we are attacking. In addition, we find port 5985 is open - this is of interest as it is a port which is used by winrm which in turn is a service which could potentially give us a remote session on the target machine if we find valid credentials.    Since smb is being used, we start our enumeration of the haystack machine by taking a look at it - can we get a null session and thereby enumerate useful data? We find that we can. The IPC$ share has read access to non-authentica...
Read more

Simple CTF (tryhackme)

Image
  I started with a quick SYN scan of all ports on the target machine. The -T4 flag speeds up the scan from the default -T3 and the -p- flag specifies all ports to be scanned. As can be seen from the results, ports 21, 80 and 2222 had services listening on them. It was now time to take a closer look at those three ports, so I used the -A flag with nmap to find out more. The anonymous login allowed using FTP on port 21 seemed interesting, so I connected to it in passive mode using the username anonymous and no password ftp -p 10.10.179.144 The connection was successful, but I could not get any listing of the directories or files using ls so I turned my attention to port 80 by navigating to the home page in my browser. I was greeted with a default Apache "It Works!" page. I then checked the robots.txt file and fired up a directory buster. I used gobuster as it is fast, but dirb, dirbuster or a home-grown one would also do. The /simple directory stood out as interesting, so I na...
Read more