CTIN Digital Forensics Conference - No fluff, all forensics

For those of you in the Seattle area or willing to travel who are interested in digital forensics there is a great opportunity to learn and socialize coming up in March.
The CTIN Digital Forensics Conference will be March 13 though 15, 2013 at the Hilton Seattle Airport & Conference Center. CTIN, the Computer Technology Investigators Network, is non-profit, free membership organization comprised of public and private sector computer forensic examiners and investigators focused on the areas of high-tech security, investigation, and prosecution of high-tech crimes for both private and public sector.

Topics slated for the conference agenda are many, with great speakers to discuss them in depth:
Windows Time Stamp Forensics, Incident Response Procedures, Tracking USB Devices, Timeline Analysis with Encase, Internet Forensics, Placing the Suspect Behind the Keyboard, Social Network Investigations, Triage, Live CDs (WinFE & Linux)
F-Response and Intella, Lab - Hard drive repair, Mobile Device Forensics, Windows 7/8 Forensics
Child Pornography, Legal Update, Counter-forensics, Linux Forensics, X-Ways Forensics
Expert Testimony, ProDiscover, Live Memory Forensics, Encase, Open Source Forensic Tools
Cell Phone Tower Analysis, Mac Forensics, Registry Forensics, Malware Analysis, iPhone/iPad/other Apple products, Imaging Workshop, Paraben Forensics, Virtualization Forensics


Register before 1 DEC 2012 for $295, and $350 thereafter.

While you don't have to be a CTIN member to attend I strongly advocate your joining and supporting CTIN.

toolsmith: Arachni - Web Application Security Scanner

Part 1 of 2 - Web Application Security Flaw Discovery and Prevention

Prerequisites/dependencies

Ruby 1.9.2 or higher in any *nix environment

Introduction

This month’s issue kicks off a two part series on web application security flaw discovery and prevention, beginning with Arachni. As this month’s topic is another case of mailing lists facilitating great toolsmith topics, I’ll begin this month by recommending a few you should join if you haven’t already. The Web Application Security Consortium mailing list is a must, as are the SecurityFocus lists. I favor their Penetration Testing and Web Application Security lists but they have many others as well. As you can imagine, these two make sense for me given focuses on web application security and penetration testing, and it was via SecurityFocus that I received news of the latest release of Arachni. Arachni is a high-performance, modular, open source web application security scanning framework written in Ruby. It was refreshing to discover a web app scanner I had not yet tested. I spend a lot of time with the likes of Burp, ZAP, and Watobo but strongly advocate expanding the arsenal.

Arachni’s developer/creator is Tasos "Zapotek" Laskos, who kindly provided details on this rapidly maturing tool and project.

Via email, Tasos indicated that to date, Arachni's role has been that of an experiment/learning-exercise hybrid, mainly focused on doing things a little bit differently. He’s glad to say that the fundamental project goals have been achieved; Arachni is fast, relatively simple, quite accurate, open source and quite flexible in the ways which it can be deployed. In addition, as of late, stability and testing have been given top priority in order to ensure that the framework won't exhibit performance degradation as the code-base expands.

With a strong foundation laid and a clear road map, future plans for Arachni include pushing the envelope where version 0.4.2 include improved distributed, high-performance scan features such as the new, distributed crawler (under current development), and a new, cleaner, more stable and attractive Web User Interface, as well as general code clean-up.

Version 0.5 is where a lot of interesting work will take place as the Arachni team will be attempting to break some new ground with native DOM and JavaScript support, with the intent of allowing a depth/level of analysis beyond what's generally possible today, from either open source or commercial systems. According to Tasos, most, if not all, current scanners rely on external browser engines to perform their duties bringing with them a few penalties (performance hits, loss of control, limited inspection capabilities, design compromises, etc.), which Arachni will be able to avoid. This kind of functionality, especially from an open and flexible system, will be greatly beneficial to web application testing in general, and not just in a security-related context.

Arachni success stories include incredibly cool features such as WAF Realtime Virtual Patching. At OWASP AppSec DC 2012, Trustwave Spider Lab’s Ryan Barnett discussed the concept of dynamic application scanning testing (DAST) exporting data that is then imported into a web application firewall (WAF) for targeted remediation. In addition to stating that the Arachni scanner is an “absolutely awesome web application scanner framework” Ryan describes how to integrate export data from Arachni with ModSecurity, the WAF for which he is OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set (CRS) project leader. Take note here as next month in toolsmith we’re going to discuss ModSecurity for IIS as part two of this series and will follow Ryan’s principles for DAST to WAF.   

Other Arachni successes include highly-customized scripted audits and easy incorporation into testing platforms (by virtue of its distributed features).  Tasos has received a lot of positive feedback and has been pleasantly surprised there has not been one unsatisfied user, even in the Arachni's early, immature phases. Many Arachni users end up doing so out of frustration with the currently available tools and are quite happy with the results after giving Arachni a try given that Arachni gives users a decent alternative while simplifying web application security assessment tasks.

Arachni benefits from excellent documentation and support via its wiki, be sure to give a good once over before beginning installation and use.

Installing Arachni

On an Ubuntu 12.10 instance, I first made sure I had all dependencies met via sudo apt-get install build-essential libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev ruby1.9.1-dev ruby1.9.1.

For developer’s sake, this includes Gem support so thereafter one need only issue sudo gem install arachni to install Arachni. However, the preferred method is use of the appropriate system packages from the latest downloads page.

While Arachni features robust CLI use, for presentation’s sake we’ll describe Arachni use with the Web UI. Start it via arachni_web_autostart which will initiate a Dispatcher and the UI server. The last step is to point your browser to http://localhost:4567, accept the default settings and begin use.

Arachni in use

Of interest as you begin Arachni use is the dispatcher which spawns RPC instances and allows you to attach to, pause, resume, and shutdown Arachni instances. This is extremely important for users who wish to configure Arachni instances in a high performance grid (think a web application security scanning cluster with a master and slave configuration). Per the wiki, “this allows scan-time to be severely decreased, by as much as n times less under ideal circumstances, where n equals the number of running instances.”   

You can configure Arachni’s web UI to run under SSL and provide HTTP Basic authentication if you wish to lock use down. Refer to the wiki entry for the web user interface for more details.

Before beginning a simple scan (one Dispatcher), let’s quickly review Arachni’s modules and plugins. Each has a tab in Arachni’s primary UI view. The  45 modules are divided into Audit (22) and Recon (23) options where the audit modules actively test the web application via inputs such as parameters, forms, cookies and headers while the recon modules passively test the web application, focusing on server configuration, responses and specific directories and files. I particularly like the additional SSN and credit card number disclosure modules as they are helpful for OSINT, as well as the Backdoor module, which looks to determine if the web application you’re assessing is already owned. Of note from the Audit options is the Trainer module that probes all inputs of a given page in order to uncover new input vectors and trains Arachni by analyzing the server responses. Arachni modules are all enabled by default. Arachni plugins offer preconfigured auto-logins (great when spidering), proxy settings, and notification options along with some pending plugins supported in the CLI version but not yet ready for the Web UI as of v.0.4.1.1

To start a scan, navigate to the Start a scan tab and confirm that a Dispatcher is running. You should see the likes of @localhost:7331 (host and port) along with number of running scans, as well as RAM and CPU usage. Then paste a URL into the URL form, and select Launch Scan as seen in Figure 1. 

 

Figure 1: Launching an Arachni scan

While the scan is running you can monitor the Dispatcher status via the Dispatchers tab as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Arachni Dispatcher status

From the Dispatchers view you can choose to Attach to the running Instance (there will be multiples if you’ve configured a high performance grid) which will give a real-time view to the scan statistics, percentage of completion for the running instance, scanner output, and results for findings discovered as seen in Figure 3. Dispatchers provide Instances, Instances perform the scans.

Figure 3: Arachni scan status

Once the scan is complete, as you might imagine, the completed results report will be available to you in the Reports tab. As an example I chose the HTML output but realize that you can also select JSON, text, YAML, and XML as well as binary output such as Metareport, Marshal report, and even Arachni Framework Reporting. Figure 4 represents the HTML-based results of a scan against NOWASP Mutillidae.

Figure 4: HTML Arachni results

Even the reports are feature-rich with a summary tab with graphs and issues, remedial guidance, plugin results, along with a sitemap and configuration settings.

The results are accurate too; in my preliminary testing I found very few false positives. When Arachni isn’t definitive about results, it even goes so far as to label the result “untrusted (and may in fact be false positives) because at the time they were identified the server was exhibiting some kind of anomalous behavior or there was 3rd part interference (like network latency for example).” Nice, I love truth and transparency in my test results.

I am really excited to see Arachni work at scale. I intend to test it very broadly on large applications using a high performance grid. This is definitely one project I’ll keep squarely on my radar screen as it matures through its 0.4.2 and 0.5 releases.

In Conclusion

Join us again next month as we resume this discussion when take Arachni results and leverage them for Realtime Virtual Patching with ModSecurity for IIS. By then I will have tested Arachni’s clustering capabilities as well so we should have some real benefit to look forward to next month. Please feel free to seek support via the support portal, file a bug report via the issue tracker, or to reach out to Tasos via Twitter or email as he looks forward to feedback and feature requests.

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

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

Tasos "Zapotek" Laskos, Arachni project lead

toolsmith: Network Security Toolkit (NST) - Packet Analysis Personified

Prerequisites

Virtualization software if you don’t wish to run NST as a LiveCD or install to dedicated hardware.

Introduction

As I write this I’m on the way back from SANS Network Security in Las Vegas where I’d spent two days deeply entrenched analyzing packet captures during the lab portion of the GSE exam. During preparation for this exam I’d used a variety of VM-based LiveCD distributions to study and practice, amongst them Security Onion. There are three distributions I run as VMs that are always on immediate standby in my toolkit. They are, in no particular order, Doug Burk’s brilliant Security Onion, Kevin Johnson’s SamuraiWTF, and Back Track 5 R3. Security Onion and SamuraiWTF have both been toolsmith topics for good reason; I’ve not covered Back Track only because it would seem so cliché. I will tell you that I am extremely fond of Security Onion and consider it indispensable. As such, I hesitated to cover the Network Security Toolkit (NST) when I first learned of it while preparing for the lab, feeling as if it might violate some code of loyalty I felt to Doug and Security Onion. Weird I know, and the truth is Doug would be one of the first to tell you that the more tools made available to defenders the better. NST represents a number of core principles inherent to toolsmith and the likes of Security Onion. NST is comprehensive and convenient and allows the analyst almost immediate and useful results. NST is an excellent learning tool and allows beginners and experts much success in discovering more about their network environments. NST is also an inclusive, open project that grows with help from an interested and engaged community. The simple truth is Security Onion and NST represent different approaches to complex problems. We all have a community to serve and the same goals at heart, so I got over my hesitation and reached out to the NST project leads.

The Network Security Toolkit is the brainchild of Paul Blankenbaker and Ron Henderson and is a Linux distribution that includes a vast collection of best-of-breed open source network security applications useful to the network security professional. In the early days of NST Paul and Ron found that they needed a common user interface and unified methodology for ease of access and efficiency in automating the configuration process. Ron’s background in network computing and Paul’s in software development lead to what is now referred to as the NST WUI (Web User Interface). Given the wide range of open source networking tools with corresponding command line interface that differ from one application to the next, this was no small feat. The NST WUI now provides a means to allow easy access and a common look-and-feel for many popular network security tools, giving the novice the ability to point and click while also providing advanced users (security analysts, ethical hackers) options to work directly with command line console output.
According to Ron, one of the most beneficial tool enhancements that NST has to offer for the network and security administrator is the Single-Tap and Multi-Tap Network Packet Capture interface. Essentially, adding a web-based front-end to Wireshark, Tcpdump, and Snort for packet capture analysis and decode has made it easy to perform these tasks using a web browser. With the new NST v2.16.0-4104 release they took it a step forward and integrated CloudShark technology into the NST WUI for collaborative packet capture analysis, sharing and management.
Ron is also fond of the Network Interface Bandwidth monitor.  This tool is an interactive dynamic SVG/AJAX enabled application integrated into the NST WUI for monitoring Network Bandwidth
usage on each configured network interface in pseudo real-time. He designed this application with the controls of a standard digital oscilloscope in mind.
Ron is also proud of NST’s ability to Geolocate network entities. We’ll further explore using NST’s current repertoire of available network entities that can geolocated with their associated application, as well as Ron’s other favorites mentioned above.

Paul also shared something I enjoyed as acronyms are so common in our trade. He mentioned that the NST distribution can be used in many situations. One of his personal favorites is related to the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) which occurs each year. FIRST for Paul is For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology where I am more accustomed to its use as Forum for Incident Response and Security Teams. Paul mentors FIRST team 868, the TechHounds at the Carmel high school in Indiana, where in FRC competitions, teams have used NST (or could use) during a hectic FRC build season:

·      Quickly identity which network components involved with operating the robot are "alive"

o   From the WUI menu: Security -> Active Scanners -> ARP Scan (arp-scan)

·         Observe how much network traffic increases or decreases as we adjust the IP based robot camera settings

o   From the WUI menu: Network -> Monitors -> Network Interface Bandwidth Monitor

·         Capture packets between the robot and the controlling computer

·         Scan the area for WIFI traffic and use this information to pick frequencies for robot communications that are not heavily used

·         Set up a Subversion and Trac server for managing source code through the build season.

o   From the WUI menu: System -> File System Management -> Subversion Manager

·         Teach the benefits of scripting and automating tasks

·         Provide an environment that can be expanded and customized

While Paul and team have used NST for robotics, it’s quite clear how their use case bullet list applies to the incident responder and network security analyst. 

Installing NST

NST, as an ISO, can be run as LiveCD, installed to dedicated hardware, and also as a virtual machine. If you intend to take advantage of the Multi-Tap Network Packet Capture interface feature with your NST installation set up as a centralized, aggregating sensor then you’ll definitely want to utilize dedicated hardware with multiple network interfaces. As an example, Figure 1 displays using NST to capture network and port address translation traffic across a firewall boundary.

Figure 1: Multi-Tap Network Packet Capture Across A Firewall Boundary - NAT/PAT Traffic

Once booted into NST you can navigate from Applications to System Tools to Install NST to Hard Drive in order to execute a dedicated installation.

Keep in mind that when virtualizing you could enable multiple NICs to leverage multi-tap, but your performance will be limited as you’d likely do so on a host system with one NIC.

Using NST

NST use centers around the WUI; access it via Firefox on the NST installation at http://127.0.0.1/nstwui/main.cgi. 

The first time you login, you’ll be immediately reminded to change the default password (nst2003). After doing so, log back in and select Tools -> Network Widgets -> IPv4 Address. Once you know what the IP address is you can opt to use NST WUI from another browser. My session as an example: https://192.168.153.132/nstwui/index.cgi.

Per Ron’s above mentioned tool enhancements, let’s explore Single-Tap Network Packet Capture (I’m running NST as a VM). Click Network -> Protocol Analyzers -> Single-Tap Network Packet Capture where you’ll be presented with a number of options regarding how you’d like to configure the capture. You can choose define the likes of duration, file size, and packet count or select predefined short or long capture sessions as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Configure a Single-Tap capture with NST

If you accepted defaults for capture storage location you can click Browse and find the results of your efforts in /var/nst/wuiout/wireshark. Now here’s where the cool comes in. CloudShark (yep, Wireshark in the cloud) allows you to “secure, share, and analyze capture files anywhere, on any device” via either cloudshark.org or a CloudShark appliance. Please note that capture files uploaded to cloudshark.org are not secured by default and can be viewed by anyone who knows the correct URL. You’ll need an appliance or CloudShark Enterprise to secure and manage captures. That aside the premise of CloudShark is appealing and NST integrates CloudShark directly. From the Tools menu select Network Widgets then CloudShark Upload Manager. I’d already upload malicious.pcap as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: CloudShark tightly integrated with NST

Users need only click on View Network Packet Captures in the upload manager and they’ll be directed right to the CloudShark instance of their uploaded capture as seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Capture results displayed via CloudShark

Many of the features you’d expect from a local instance of Wireshark are available to the analyst, including graphs, conversations, protocol decodes, and follow stream.

NST also includes the Network Interface Bandwidth Monitor. Select Network -> Monitors -> Network Interface Bandwidth Monitor. A bandwidth monitor for any interface present on your NST instance will be available to you (eth0 and lo on my VM) as seen in Figure 5.

Figure 5: NST’s Network Interface Bandwidth Monitor

You can see the +100 kbps spikes I generated against eth0 with a quick NMAP scan as an example.

NST’s geolocation capabilities are many, but be sure to setup the NST system to geolocate data first. I uploaded a multiple host PCAP (P2P traffic) via Network Packet Capture Manager, clicked the A (attach) button under Action and was them redirected back to Network -> Protocol Analyzers -> Single-Tap Network Packet Capture. I then chose to use the Text-Based Protocol Analyzer Decode option as described on the NST Wiki and clicked the Hosts – Google Maps button. This particular capture gave NST a lot of work to do as it includes thousands of IPs but the resulting geolocated visualization as seen in Figure 6 is well worth it.

Figure 6: P2P bot visually geolocated via NST

If we had page space available to show you the whole world you’d see that the entire globe is represented by this bot, but I’m only showing you North America and Europe.

As discussed in recent OSINT-related toolsmiths, there’s even an NST OSINT feature called theHarvester found under Security -> Information Search -> theHarvester. Information gathering with theHarvester includes e-mail accounts, user names, hostnames, and domains from different public internet sources.

So many features, so little time. Pick an item from the menu and drill in. There’s a ton of documentation under the Docs menu too, including the NST Wiki, so you have no excuses not to jump in head first.

In Conclusion

NST is one of those offerings where the few pages dedicated to it in toolsmith don’t do it justice. NST is incredibly feature rich, and literally invites the user to explore while the hours sneak by unnoticed. The NST WUI has created a learning environment I will be incorporating into my network security analysis teaching regimens. New to network security analysis or a salty old hand, NST is a worthy addition to your tool collection.

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

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

Paul Blankenbaker and Ron Henderson, NST project leads

The replacement security analyst's Top 10

I'm a huge football fan so the depth of my joy at the return of the "real" NFL referees cannot be measured. Given the replacement ref debacle I felt compelled to share a replacement security analyst's Top 10.
Note: at one time or another in my career I have truly heard all of these.
In no particular order...

1. Disable AV altogether, its inconvenient when moving malware samples around.
2. Passwords longer than eight characters make it hard to do your job.
3. Don't worry about chain of custody or evidence integrity, cases rarely go to court anyway.
4. When a concerned user calls about a potentially compromised system, tell them to just run McAfee Stinger.
5. Why would you want to keep DNS logs?
6. Go ahead and give developers the ability to deploy code to straight to production from their desktops. It helps them be agile and creates efficiency.
7. Proxying egress web traffic is an invasion of privacy and makes users mad, so don't do it.
8. Your vulnerability scanner is causing my service to crash! Turn it off!
9. We don't need to fix XSS. You can't hack a server with it.
10. But it is encrypted. We used MD5 hashing to store the credit cards in the database.

In a similar vein, you'll really enjoy Infosec Reactions if you haven't already seen it.
Welcome back, NFL refs. :-)
Cheers.

toolsmith: SearchDiggity - Dig Before They Do

Prerequisites

Windows .NET Framework

Introduction

I’ve been conducting quite a bit of open source intelligence gathering (OSINT) recently as part of a variety of engagements and realized I hadn’t discussed the subject since we last reviewed FOCA in March 2011 or Search Engine Security Auditing in June 2007. I’d recently had a few hits on my feed reader, and at least via one mailing lists, regarding SearchDiggity from Fran Brown and Rob Ragan of Stach & Liu. They’d recently presented Pulp Google Hacking at the 4^th Annual InfoSec Summit at ISSA Los Angeles as well as Tenacious Diggity at DEFCON 20 and the content certainly piqued my interest. One quick look at the framework and all its features and I was immediately intrigued. At first glance you note similarities to Wikto and FOCA given Search Diggity’s use of the Google Hacking Database and Shodan. This is no small irony as this team has taken point on rejuvenating the art of the search engine hack. In Fran’s InformationWeek report, Using Google to Find Vulnerabilities In YourIT Environment, he discusses toolsmith favorites FOCA, Maltego, and Shodan amongst others. I’ll paraphrase Fran from this March 2012 whitepaper to frame why using tools such as SearchDiggity and others in the Diggity arsenal is so important. Use these same methods to find flaws before the bad guys do; these methods use search engines such as Google and Bing to identify vulnerabilities in your applications, systems and services allowing you to fix them before they can be exploited. Fran and Rob’s work has even hit mainstream media with the likes of NotInMyBackyard (included in SearchDiggity) achieving coverage in USA Today. Suffice it to say that downloads from the Google Hacking Diggity Project pages jumped by 45,000 almost immediately, fueled largely by non-security consumers looking to discover any sensitive data leaks related to themselves or their organizations. A nice problem to have for the pair from Stach & Liu and one Fran addressed with a blogpost to provide a quick intro to NotInMyBackYardDiggity, to be discussed in more detail later in this article.  

I reached out to Fran and Rob rather late in this month’s writing process and am indebted to them as they kindly accommodated me with a number of resources as well a few minutes for questions via telephone. There are Diggity-related videos and tool screenshots as well as all the presentations the team has given in the last few years. The SearchDiggity team is most proud of their latest additions to the toolset, including NotInMyBackyard and PortScan. Keep in mind that, like so many tools discussed in toolsmith, SeachDiggity and its various elements were written to accommodate the needs of the developers during their own penetration tests and assessments. No cached data is safe from the Diggity Duo’s next generation search engine hacking arsenal and all their tools are free for download and use.

Installing Search Diggity

SearchDiggity installation is point-and-click simple after downloading the installation package, but there are few recommendations for your consideration. The default installation path is C:\Program Files (x86) \SearchDiggity, but consider using a non-system drive as an installation target to ensure no permissions anomalies; I installed in D:\tools\SearchDiggity. SearchDiggity writes results files to DiggityDownloads (I set D:\tools\DiggityDownloads under Options à Settings à General) and will need permission to its root in order to Update Query Definitions (search strings, Google/Bing Dorks).  

Using SearchDiggity

I started my review of SearchDiggity capabilities with the Bing Hacking Database (BHDB) under the Bing tab and utilizing the menu referred to as BHDBv2NEW as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: A BHDB analysis of HolisticInfosec.org

As with any tool, optimization of your scan settings for your target before you start the scan run is highly recommended. Given that my site is not an Adobe Coldfusion offering there’s really no need to look for CFIDE references, right? Ditto for Outlook Web Access or SharePoint, but CMS Config Files with XSS and SQL injection instreamset options are definitely in order. Good news, no significant findings were noted using my domain as the target.

NotInMyBackyard is a recent addition to SearchDiggity for which the team has garnered a lot of deserved attention and as such we’ll explore it here. I used my name as my primary search parameter and configured Methods to include Quotes, and set Locations to include:

1)      Cloud Storage (Dropbox, Google Docs, Microsoft Skydrive, Amazon AWS)

2)      Document Sharing (scribd.com, 4shared.com, issuu.com, docstoc.com, wepapers.com)

3)      Pastebin (pastebin.com, snipt.org, drupalbin.com, paste.ubuntu.com, tinypaste.com, paste2.org, codepad.org, dpaste.com, pastie.org, pastebin.mozilla.org)

4)      Social (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn)

5)      Forums (groups.google.com)

6)      Public presentations charts graphs videos (Slideshare, Prezi, present.me, Gliffy, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe)

You can opt to set additional parameters such as Extensions for document types including all versions of Microsoft Office, PDF,CSV, TXT, database types including MS-SQL and Access, backup, logs, and config files, as well as test and script files. My favorites (utilized in a separate run) are the financial file options including Quicken and QuickBooks data files and QuickBooks backup files. Finally, there are a number of granular keyword selections to narrow your query results that might include your patient records, places of birth, or your name in a data dump. This is extremely useful when trying to determine if your email address, as associated with one of your primary accounts, has been accumulated in a data dump posted to a Pastebin-like offering. Just keep in mind, the more options you select the longer your query run will take. I typically carve my searches up in specific categories then export the results to a file named for the category.

As seen in Figure 2, NotInMyBackyard reveals all available query results in a clean, legible manner that includes hyperlinks to the referenced results, allowing you to validate the findings.

Figure 2: NotInMyBackyard flushes out results

I found that my search, as configured, was more enlightening specific to all the copies of my material posted to other sites without my permission. It was also interesting to see where articles and presentation material were cited in academic material. Imagine using your organizational domain name, and specific keywords and accounts to discover what’s exposed to the evildoers conducting the same activity.

You can focus similar activity with more attention to the enterprise mindset utilizing SearchDiggity’s DLP offerings. First conduct a Google or Bing run against a domain of interest using the DLPDiggity Initial selection. Once the query run is complete, highlight all the files (CTRL-A works well), and click the download button. This will download all the files to the download directory you configured, populating it with files discovered using DLPDiggity Initial, against which you can then apply the full DLP menu. I did as described against a target that shall remain unnamed and found either valid findings or sample/example data that matched the search regex explicitly as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Data Leak Prevention with SearchDiggity

 I only used the Quick Checks set here too. When you contemplate the likes of database connection strings, bank account numbers, and encryption-related findings, coupled with the requisite credit cards, SSNs, and other PII, it becomes immediately apparent how powerful this tool is for both prevention and discovery during the reconnaissance phase of a penetration test.

I’ll cover one more SearchDiggity component but as is usually the case with toolsmith topics there is much about the tool du jour that remains unsaid. Be sure to check out the SearchDiggity Shodan and PortScan offerings on your own. I’m always particularly interested in Flash-related FAIL findings and SearchDiggity won’t disappoint here either. Start with a Google or Bing search against a target domain with FlashDiggity Initial enabled. Much as noted with the DLP feature, after discovery, SearchDiggity will download the SWF files it identifies with FlashDiggity Initial. As an example I ran this configuration without a domain specified. By default, for a Google search, 70 results per query will be returned. Suffice it to say that with the three specific queries defined in FlashDiggity Initial searches, I was quickly treated to 210 results which I then opted to download. I switched over the Flash menu and for real s’s and g’s (work that one out on your own :-)) enabled all options. Figure 4 exemplifies (anonymously) just how concerning certain Flash implementations may be, particularly when utilized for administrative functions and authentication.

Figure 4: Find bad Flash with SearchDiggity

 FlashDiggity decompiles the downloaded SWF files with Flare and stores the resulting .flr file in the download directory for your review. It should go without saying that flaw enumeration becomes all that much easier. As an example, FlashDiggity’s getURL XSS detection discovered the following using geturl\(.*(_root\.|_level0\.|_global\.).*\) as its regex logic:  

this.getURL('mailto:' + _global.escape(this.decodeEmailAddr(v2.emladdr)) + '?subject=' + _global.escape(v2.emlsubj) + '&body=' + _global.escape(this.getEmailContent()));

This snippet makes for interesting analysis. Risks associated with getURL are well documented but the global escape may mitigate the issue. That said, the Flash file was created with Techsmith Camtasia in January 2009, and an XSS vulnerability was reported in October 2009 regarding SWF files created with Camtasia Studio. Yet, SWF files hosted on TechSmith’s Screencast service were not vulnerable and more than one reference to Screencast was noted in the decompiled .flr file. With one FlashDiggity search, we were able to learn a great deal about potentially flawed Flash files subject to possible exploit.

And we didn’t even touch SearchDiggity’s malware analysis feature set.  

In Conclusion

As always I’ll remind you, please use SearchDiggity for good, not evil. Incorporating its use as part of your organizational defensive tactics is a worthy effort. Keep in mind that you can also leverage this logic as part of Google Hacking Diggity Defense Tools including Alert and Monitoring RSS feeds. Configure them with your specific and desired organizational parameters and enjoy real time alerting and monitoring via your RSS feed reader. For those of you defending Internet-facing SharePoint implementations you’ll definitely want to check out the SharePoint Diggity Hacking Project too.

Enjoy this tool arsenal from Stach & Liu’s Dynamic Duo; they’d love to hear from you with kudos, constructive criticism, and feature requests via diggity at stachliu.com.

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

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

Francis Brown and Rob Ragan, Managing Partners, Stach & Liu, Google Hacking Diggity project leads