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2014 Toolsmith Tool of the Year: SimpleRisk

Congratulations to Josh Sokol of SimpleRisk, LLC.
SimpleRisk is the 2014 Toolsmith Tool of the Year.
We mustered 933 total votes this year of which 438 went to SimpleRisk.
In Josh's own words, "I began writing SimpleRisk because I needed a tool to aide in my risk management activities and spreadsheets just weren't cutting it. But once I had a POC created, I knew that it was too good to keep to myself. I've always wanted to give back to the security community that has given so much to me. That's why I decided to release SimpleRisk under a Mozilla Public License 2.0. I hope it's as useful to you as it is for me."
Voters agree, SimpleRisk is definitely useful. :-)
Here's how the votes broke down.

Congratulations to all toolsmith entries and participants this year, and in particular to runners up Artillery from Dave Kennedy and Binary Defense Systems and ThreadFix from the Denim Group.
2015 promises us another great year of tools for information security practitioners and as always, if there are tools you'd like me to cover in toolsmith, please feel free to submit your favorites for consideration.

2014 Toolsmith Tool of the Year

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toolsmith: Inside and Outside the Wire with FruityWifi & WUDS

Prerequisites

I recommend a dedicated (non-VM) Kali distribution if you don’t have a Raspberry Pi.

Introduction

I have noted to myself, on more than one occasion, now more than eight years in to writing toolsmith, that I have not once covered wireless assessment tools. That constitutes a serious shortcoming on my part, one that I will rectify here with a discussion of FruityWifi and WUDS. These tools serve rather different purposes but both conform to the same principle of significant portability as both run on Raspberry Pi. Both also run on Debian systems (Kali) which is how I ran both for toolsmith testing purposes. FruityWifi is an open source platform with which to audit wireless networks, allowing users to conduct various attacks via the web interface or remote messaging. It is modular, feature-rich, and just celebrated a v2.0 release with many upgrades. WUDS, or the Wi-Fi User Detection System, on the other hand, is a proximity-based physical security concept that alerts on unapproved Wi-Fi probe requests bouncing off a WUDS sensor. Per the WUDS introduction, “The combination of a white list of unique identifiers for devices that belong in the area (MAC addresses) and signal strength (RSSI) can be used to create a protected zone. With tuning, this creates a circular detection barrier that, when crossed, can trigger any number of alert systems. WUDS includes an SMS alert module, but the sky is the limit.”

WUDS comes to us courtesy of toolsmith alum Tim Tomes (@lanmaster53) whose Recon-ng, the 2013 Toolsmith Tool of the Year, we covered in May 2013.

For FruityWifi highlights I reached out to xtr4nge (@FruityWifi), the project lead/developer.

The initial idea was to create an open source application to audit wireless networks and perform penetration tests from a Raspberry-Pi, or any other platform or device in a flexible, modular and portable manner.

Soon after the first version was published, FruityWifi was presented to a Rooted Warfare Spain audience (Rooted CON) in March 2014. FruityWifi was well received at the conference and by users from the onset, and many users sent feedback and ideas to improve it. 

A new version of FruityWifi (v2.0) was published a few weeks ago featuring many changes and updates; a new interface, new modules, Realtek chipsets support (confirmed in my testing with my Alfa card), Mobile Broadband (3G/4G) support, a new control panel, and more. The tool is under constant development and new modules and improvements are being published regularly.

Tim kindly provided detail regarding his favorite WUDS features and use case. His favorite feature is the alert system, and I strongly second this; I’ll show you why later in the article. Tim built a really simple interface for creating new alerts for the system, which does not require the need to dig into core components of the code to create new alerts. You need only add a function to the alerts.py file, name it correctly, and add associated options to the config.py file, and you’re finished. Tim’s script originally included just an SMS alerting mechanism, but he has since added a Pushover notification alert (5 minutes and 8 lines of code to implement); he exclusively uses the Pushover alert.

Tim’s favorite WUDS use case story is cited in his article, about the deliveryman alerting the system during testing. He’d been doing some testing the night before and in the middle of the afternoon the following day, an SMS message came through to his phone notifying him that someone had crossed his detection barrier. He was about to write it off as a false positive when the doorbell rang and it was a delivery service dropping off a package. The alert served as positive affirmation that the concept is a sound one.

In the future, Tim plans to either expand WUDS, or create another tool all together, that does the exact opposite of WUDS. Rather than alert on foreign MAC addresses, this tool would allow the user to configure the sensor to alert when certain MAC addresses leave the premises during specified windows of time. This would provide a sort of latchkey system that is not challenged by MAC randomization issues; devices will be properly connected to the local WAP with their normal MAC addresses when on premises. That said, the tool would need to be expanded to sense more than just probes.

I ran FruityWifi and WUDS on a dedicated Lenovo T61p laptop with Kali 64-bit installed and utilized the onboard wireless adapter.  Both tools are optimized to perform well on Raspberry Pi, but as I don’t have one, I experimented with both Ubuntu and Kali and was far more satisfied with Kali, no muss, no fuss. All installation steps that follow assume you’re running on Kali.

FruityWifi installation

FruityWifi installation is very simple. Download the master zip file or git clone the repository to your preferred directory, then cd /FruityWifi from there. Run ./install-FruityWifi.sh. If you have any issues after installation where FruityWifi isn’t available via the browser, it may be related to the Nginx/PHP5-FPM deployment. You can follow the FruityWifi Nginx wiki guidance to correct the issue. Thereafter, browse to http://localhost:8000 or https://localhost:8443, login with admin and admin (change the password), and you’re off to the races as seen in the UI’s configuration page per Figure 1.

Figure 1 – FruityWifi configuration page

FruityWifi inside the perimeter

Building on the same principles as the Pwn Plug, a FruityWifi-enable device can wreak havoc once unleashed inside any given network. There are a significant number of modules you can install and enable, a veritable fruit basket, depending on what you wish to accomplish, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – FruityWifi modules galore

If you utilized the earlier version of Fruity, you’ll really appreciate the update that is 2.0. Clean, fast, intuitive, and lots of fresh functionality. Red-teamers will enjoy AutoSSH, which allows reverse SSH connections, and automatic restart for connections that have been closed or dropped. FruityWifi 2.0 includes Nessus, Nmap, and Meterpreter as well. MDK3 is particularly attractive if you’re conducting an aggressive pentest and you want to create a distraction or a disruption.  You had better have permission before going off with MDK3, wireless hacking is deemed criminal in more than one state. MDK, or murder, death, kill for WLAN environments, utilizes a variety of SSID, authentication, and de-authentication flooding techniques to create wireless DoS conditions, and on occasion, WLAN hardware resets. My favorite recent addition to FruityWifi isn’t one of the hacking or enumeration tools, it’s actually vFeed from our friend @toolswatch. To quote vFeed’s description from the Fruity UI, is a vulnerability database (SQLite) that “provides extra structured detailed third-party references and technical characteristics for a CVE entry through an extensible XML schema.” You can search it right on your FruityWifi instance, after you’ve run Nmap and Nessus scans, identified potentially vulnerable targets and want to look up the related CVE. The available data includes:

• Open security standards: CVE, CWE, CPE, OVAL, CAPEC (all per Mitre), and CVSS
• Vulnerability Assessment & Exploitation IDs: Metasploit, Saint Corporation, Nessus Scripts, Nmap, Exploit-DB, milw0rm
• Vendors Security Alerts: Microsoft, Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, and others

I looked up CVE-2013-3893, as seen in Figure 3, and was treated to a summary and exploit details. Take note of the vFeed export feature as well. I love vFeed so much I wrote an R parser to turn the XML export into human readable Excel docs for broad reporting and consumption without the machine layer. I’ll be sharing that via the HolisticInfoSec blog and website.

Figure 3 – FruityWifi’s vFeed module informs the analyst

FruityWifi represents a fabulous way to establish a foothold inside a given perimeter, pivot to additional targets, and conduct complete compromise. Let’s now explore WUDS, intended to help you defend the perimeter. First a little red, then a little blue. Wi-fi not?

WUDS Installation

Tim’s Bitbucket installation guidance is short and sweet:

sudo apt-get install iw python-pcapy sqlite3 screen

# launch a screen session

screen

# install WUDS

git clone https://LaNMaSteR53@bitbucket.org/LaNMaSteR53/wuds.git

cd wuds

# edit the config file

leafpad config.py

# execute the included run script

./run.sh

You really need to get your config.py implementation correct. Default settings work well initially until you get to your ALERT_SMS CONFIG. You’ll need SMTP server access, including the outgoing SMTP server with the TLS port along with username and password, in order to send alert messages. Android and iOS users (there are browser plugins too) can also take advantage of a Pushover account, as Tim mentioned.

Debug is enabled by default, if there are issues, when you run ./run.sh you’ll receive failure notice.

WUDS defends the perimeter

Once WUDS is running there’s not a whole lot to actually see. No sexy UI, just a SQLite database and alerts of your choosing. Figure 4 represents a sqlite browser view of logs.db the WUDS datastore.

Figure 4 – A view to the WUDS database

You’ll note that the detected devices all have received signal strength indications (RSSI) of higher than -50. Recall, how much I stressed config.py. The default RSSI threshold for triggering alerts is -50, but you can adjust it depending on how you wish to define your perimeter.  

The real pleasure comes from the first alerts received on your mobile device. As you see in a screen shot from my phone (Figure 5), proximity alerts advise me that a variety of devices have been detected on the premises. Ruh-roh!

Figure 5 –WUDS alerts of perimeter violations

True story. When I first enabled WUDS in my office at work, I immediately received alerts for an HP device that was beaconing for my home wireless AP. This freaked me out for a minute as I knew of no HP devices currently in use and certainly not those looking for my house infrastructure. After looking around again, and calming down a bit, a spotted it, an old HP printer under my desk that I’d brought in for scanning, had turned it on years ago, and literally forgotten about it ever since. And there it was, blindly beaconing away for a WAP it would never again communicate with. Thanks WUDS!

You’ll find all sorts of interesting devices chattering away when you enable WUDS. Just remember, the more dense the population area, the noisier it will be. Avoid self-induced mobile device DoS attacks. :-)

In Conclusion

Great tools from xtr4nge and Tim, I’m thrilled to have gotten off the schnide regarding wireless topics with FruityWifi and WUDS. I’m thinking there’s actually an opportunity to incorporate WUDS in FruityWifi. You heard it here first. Enjoy these tools, they’re both a ton of fun and incredibly useful at the same time.

Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

xtr4nge, FruityWifi project lead and developer

Tim Tomes, WUDS project lead and developer

2013 Toolsmith Tool of the Year: Recon-ng

Congratulations to Tim Tomes of Black Hills Information Security.

@LaNMaSteR53's Recon-ng is the 2013 Toolsmith Tool of the Year.

We had quite the turnout this year, with 881 total votes.

Recon-ng finished first with 44% of the vote, in a very tight race with ProcDOT which came in second with 40%, and all others pulling up the rear.

Tim will receive a book of his choosing or a donation to his preferred charity. 

Congratulations and thank you to all of this year's participants. 2014 should bring us another great year of tools for information security practitioners. Please feel free to submit your favorites for consideration.

toolsmith: Hey Lynis, Audit This

Prerequisites/dependencies

Unix/Linux operating systems

Introduction

Happy holidays to all readers, the ISSA community, and infosec tool users everywhere. As part of December’s editorial theme for the ISSA Journal, Disaster Recovery/Disaster Planning, I thought I’d try to connect tooling and tactics to said theme. I’m going to try and do this more often so you don’t end up with a web application hacking tool as part of the forensics and analysis issue. I can hear Tom (editor) and Joel (editorial advisory board chair) now: “Congratulations Russ, it only took you seven years to catch up with everyone else, you stubborn git.” :-)

Better late than never I always say, so back to it. As cited in many resources, including Georgetown University’s System and Operations Continuity page, “Of companies that had a major loss of business data, 43% never reopen, 51% close within two years, and only 6% will survive long-term.” Clearly then, a sound disaster recovery and planning practice is essential to survival. The three control measures for effective disaster recovery planning are preventive, detective, and corrective. This month we’ll discuss Lynis, a security and system auditing tool to harden Unix/Linux (*nix) systems, as a means to which facilitate both preventative (intended to prevent an event from occurring) and detective (intended to detect and/or discover unwanted events) controls. How better to do so than with a comprehensive and effective tool that performs a security scan and determines the security posture of your *nix systems while providing suggestions or warning for any detected security issues? I caught wind of Lynis via toolswatch, a great security tools site that provides quick snapshots on tools useful to infosec practitioners. NJ Ouchn (@ToolsWatch), who runs toolswatch and the Blackhat Arsenal Tools event during Blackhat conferences, mentioned a new venture for the Lynis author (CISOfy) so it seemed like a great time to get the scoop directly from Rootkit.nl’s Michael Boelen, the Lynis developer and project lead.

According to Michael, there is much to be excited about as a Lynis Enterprise solution, including plugins for malware detection, forensics, and heuristics, is under development. This solution will include the existing Lynis client that we’ll cover here, a management and reporting interface as well as related plugins. Michael says they’re making great progress and each day brings them closer to an official first version. Specific to the plugins, while a work in progress, they create specialized hooks via the client. As an example, imagine heuristics scanning with correlation at the central node, to detect security intrusions. Compliance checking for the likes of Basel II, GLBA, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOx is another likely plugin candidate.
The short term roadmap consists of finishing the web interface, followed by the presenting and supporting documents. This will include documentation, checklists, control overviews and materials for system administrators, security professionals and auditors in particular. This will be followed by the plugins and related services. In the meantime CISOfy will heavily support the development of the existing Lynis tool, as it is the basis of the enterprise solution. Michael mentions that Lynis is already being used by thousands of people responsible for keeping their systems secure.
A key tenet for Lynis is proper information gathering and vulnerability determination/analysis in order to provide users with the best advice regarding system hardening. Lynis will ultimately provide both auditing functionality but monitoring and control mechanisms; remember the above mentioned preventative and detective controls? For monitoring, there will be a clear dashboard to review the environment for expected and unexpected changes with light touch for system administrators and integration with existing SIEM or configuration management tools. The goal is to leverage existing solutions and not reinvent the wheel.

Lynis and Lynis Enterprise will ultimately provide guidance to organizations who can then more easily comply with regulations, standards and best practices by defining security baselines and ready-to-use plans for system hardening in a more measurable and action-oriented manner.
One other significant advantage of Lynis is how lightweight it is and easy to implement. The requirements to run the tool are almost non-existent and it is, of course, open source, allowing ready inspection and assurances that it’s not overly intrusive. Michael intends to provide the supporting tools (such as the management interface) as a Software-as-as-Service (SAAS) solution, but he did indicate that, depending on customer feedback and need, CISOfy might consider appliances at a later stage.

I conducted an interesting little study of three unique security-centric Linux distributions running as VMWare virtual machines to put Lynis through its paces and compare results, namely, SIFT 2.1.4, SamuraiWTF2.1, and Kali 1.0. Each of these was assessed as pristine, new instances, as if they’d just been installed or initialized.

Setting Lynis up for use

Lynis is designed to be portable and as such is incredibly easy to install. Simply download and unpack Lynis to a directory of your choosing. You can also create custom packages if you wish; Lynis has been tested on multiple operating systems including Linux, all versions of BSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris. It's also been tested with all the package managers related to these operating systems so deployment and upgrading is fundamentally simple. To validate its portability I installed it on USB media as follows.

1)      On a Linux system downloaded lynis-1.3.5.tar.gz

2)      Copied and unpacked it to /media/LYNIS/lynis-1.3.5 (an ext2-formatted USB stick)

3)      In VMWare menu, selected VM, then Removable Devices, and checked Toshiba Data Traveler to make my USB stick available to the three virtual machines mentioned above.

You can opt to make modifications to the profile configuration (default.prf) file to disable or enable certain checks, and establish a template for operating system, system role, and/or security level. I ran my test on the three VMs with the default profile.

Using Lynis

This won’t be one of those toolsmith columns with lots of pretty pictures, we’re dealing with a command prompt and text output when using the Lynis client. Which is to say, change directories to your USB drive, suxh as cd /media/LYNIS/lynis-1.3.5 on my first test instance, followed by sh lynis –auditor HolisticInfoSec –c from a root prompt as seen in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1: Lynis kicking off

You can choose to use the –q switch for quiet mode which prompts only on warnings and doesn’t require you to step through each prompted phase. Once Lynis is finished you can immediately review results via /var/log/lynis-report.dat and grep for suggestions and warnings. You’re ultimately aiming for a hardening index of 100. Unfortunately our first pass on the Kali system yielded only a 50. Lynis suggested installing auditd and removing unneeded compilers. Please note, I am not suggesting you actually do this with your Kali instance, fine if it’s a VM snapshot, this is just to prove my point re: Lynis findings. Doing so did however increase the hardening index to a 51. J

Lynis really showed its stuff while auditing the SANS SIFT 2.1.4 instance. The first pass gave us a hardening index of 59 and a number of easily rectified warnings. I immediately corrected the following and ran Lynis again:

• warning[]=AUTH-9216|M|grpck binary found errors in one or more group files|
• warning[]=FIRE-4512|L|iptables module(s) loaded, but no rules active|
• warning[]=SSH-7412|M|Root can directly login via SSH|
• warning[]=PHP-2372|M|PHP option expose_php is possibly turned on, which can reveal useful information for attackers.|

Running grpck told me that 'sansforensics' is a member of the 'ossec' group in /etc/group but not in /etc/gshadow. Easily fixed by adding ossec:!::sansforensics to /etc/gshadow.

I ran sudo ufw enable to fire up active iptables rules, then edited /etc/ssh/sshd_config with PermitRootLogin no to ensure no direct root login. Always do this as root will be bruteforce attacked and you can sudo as needed from a regular user account with sudoers permissions. Finally changing expose_php to Off in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini solves the PHP finding.

Running Lynis again after just these four fixes improved the hardening index from 59 to 69. Sweet!

Last but not least, an initial Lynis run against SamuraiWTF informed us of a hardening index of 47. Uh-oh, thank goodness the suggestion list per sudo cat /var/log/lynis-report.dat | grep suggestion gave us a lot of options to make some systemic improvements as seen in Figure 2.

FIGURE 2: Lynis suggests how the Samurai might harden his foo

Updating just a few entries pushed the hardening index to 50; you can spend as much time and effort as you believe necessary to increase the system’s security posture along with the hardening index

The end of a Lynus run, if you don’t suppress verbosity with the –q switch will result in the like of Figure 3, including your score, log and report locations, and tips for test improvement.

FIGURE 3: The end of a verbose Lynis run

Great stuff and incredibly simple to utilize!

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to the Lynis Enterprise release from Michael’s CISOfy and believe it will have a lot to offer for organizations looking for a platform-based, centralized means to audit and harden their *nix systems. Again, count on reporting and plugins as well as integration with SIEM systems and configuration management tools such as CFEngine. Remember too what Lynis can do to help you improve auditability against controls for major compliance mandates.

Good luck, and wishing you all a very Happy Holidays.

Stay tuned to vote for the 2013 Toolsmith Tool of the Year starting December 15^th.

Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

Michael Boelen, Lynis developer and project lead