Year: 2022

Cowrie Honeypot

Until recently I did not know that honeypots I encounter are based on Cowrie. But it does not change much to be honest. I already seen almost 100 of these while randomly exploring things on the internet. It was first thought that they are honeypots, by pure intuition. You enter a system and run ps to list processes and see broad range of things like:

  • ejabberd (erlang)
  • nginx worker process
  • VBoxService
  • mysqld

But on the other hand you are unable to run top command or any other which normally are available on valid systems. Then comes to your mind that there is something wrong with it. How naive it is to think that someone or something will be so dumb not to know that it is fake…

Anyway, I started thinking why on earth would someone deploy Cowrie or any other Honeypot setup. In theory by using honeypots you attract attacker to enter and play around. You can grab passwords, files with malware and commands they try to use. This way you can build your antimalware solutions. But it would require lots of such systems deployed and for sure it is just like that.

Second use case is when such honeypot is deployed on private networks and would be the first choice of person or system entering your perimeter. It will spend time and effort on hacking fake system loosing interest in other things and gives time to identify this threat and properly mitigate it by applying patches and reconfiguring systems.

Further reading:

https://github.com/cowrie/cowrie

SSH access using Ruby to outdated servers

If for some unknown reasons you need to connect thru SSH to some outdated server using Ruby code, then you are in the right place. But first a little piece of theory behind it. There are 4 configurable things in OpenSSH concerning security configuration:

  • KexAlgorithms: per-connection keys (key exchange)
  • HostkeyAlgorithms: public key to identify server to clients
  • Ciphers: connection encryption
  • MACs: message authentication codes

As time passes various algorithms become deprecated and are known to be vulnerable. However there are tons of servers on the internet and on private networks which still use these old things. On a regular SSH client as well as net-ssh Ruby client code you will not be able to connect to such servers, instead you will receive error messages that you are unable to establish connection.

There is solution for that.

First:

:host_key => "+ssh-dss"

Then:

append_all_supported_algorithm: true

With these two additional options which you pass to Net::SSH.start method you will be able to connect to the most of running servers out there. Still there will be some chance you may need to adjust it, like for some old Cisco hardware, but you will cover 99.99%. Hope that you find it useful no matter if you try to administer you old networking rig or just playing around with various things…

Proxmox node out of cluster

I was replacing drives and memory in one of servers and out of a sudden node was unable to start. When finally it booted it was gone out of cluster. Weird. This node has been installed on SSD drive which had 2 years or constant runtime. Debian prompted with some file system issue at one and another time. After few reboots finally it booted successfuly but node was unable to communicate properly with other cluster members.

I tried to start time synchro from the stratch to no avail. I pulled out other drives than this one with operating system without any change. I restared also other cluster members. The node was available to log in and check it out, but I felt that any hacking could result in unpredictable behavior in the future, so I decided to reinstall it.

There are few things to remember if reinstalling node. First it will be planned operation you must cancel and remove replication jobs because after node will be shutdown there is no chance to do this from user interface. If node is already unaavailable then:

pvecm expected 1
pvesr list
pvesr delete JOBID --force

Next, from other nodes run node deletion command:

pvecm delnode NODENAME

When reinstalling node remember not to use the same IP and node name. It might work, but…

KeeneticOS PPTP VPN server

If you own this router then you might be interested how to setup VPN Server. I am personally interested in a way of how to do this using CLI only. It looks easy however there is one odd settings you should be aware of. To start with, it will be PPTP VPN server, but as far as I know this KeeneticOS can set up also OpenVPN and possibly WireGuard, but as always PPTP is the easiest to configure. Start with logging into the box. It might sound obvious, but there are plenty of hardware which requires now unsuported algorithms and ciphers:

ssh  -o "HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-dss" admin@x.x.x.x -o"KexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1" -c aes256-ctr

Fortunately you can pass options to ssh client for HostKeyAlgorithms, KexAlgorithms and also ciphers (-c argument). This allows you to enter the box. Next:

vpn-server
mtu 1400
system configuration save
exit
service vpn-server
vpn-server interface YOURINTERFACE
vpn-server pool-range x.x.x.x y

Now we are close, but one odd thing:

no isolate-private
system configuration save
copy running-config startup-config

A word of explanation here. We just set up server on a interface with given pool-range which is client IP range while connecting to the VPN. We connect using username and password which is also used to access the box via SSH. Service command enables VPN server or any particular service you work on. Last thing is to disable network isolation, and we do this by specifying “no” before isolate-private. In the end we save configuration and copy current configuration into defaults. We are done here.

PPTP VPN on Wive-NG router

On Wive-NG router when talking about VPN you have either PPP or WireGuard. As PPP is first listed so I tried it before trying WireGuard. Here are my thoughts. Configuration is pretty simple. In the router menu, go to Services – VPN Server. Then select PPTP protocol. In the Users section create new user with login and password and that’s all from the server side.

From the client side it is also pretty simple. First install pptp-linux:

sudo apt install pptp-linux
cd /etc/ppp/peers
touch PPTP

Next thing is to fill configuration file with settings as follows:

pty "pptp x.x.x.x --nolaunchpppd --debug"
name USERNAME
password PASSWORD
remotename PPTP
require-mppe-128
require-mschap-v2
refuse-eap
refuse-pap
refuse-chap
refuse-mschap
noauth
debug
persist
maxfail 0
defaultroute
replacedefaultroute
usepeerdns

With this configuration it is time to activate connection:

chmod 600 /etc/ppp/peers/PPTP
pon PPTP

To disable connection:

poff PPTP

There is one downside of using it. It create several routes of course but it prevents accessing client from outside, so in case of setting it up on remote host you will instantly loose connection. On a local machine it will not be a problem.

Ubuntu resize LVM

During installation Ubuntu will create LVM with half of the space available. In order to expand it to whole space available you need to extend logical volume and expand file system as follow:s

lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/maper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv
resize2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

EcoRouter 2008 change user password

Possibility that you own or operate EcoRouter 2008 with EcoBNGOS are very low. However just in case you will have to work with this one it will be useful to know at least some basic commands. I choose user password change as it is the most important thing at first glace after setup, so:

enable
configure terminal
username admin
password YOURPASSWORD
write

After this logout and login again to check if it is working. On some routers there might be a problem with not enough disk space to save configuration change, that’s why you need to also check if the change has been applied properly.

MikroTik RouterOS 7.5 change default DNS

Want to change default DNS for the network in MikroTik’s RouterOS CLI? You can use web UI but it could have some issues preventing from configuration save, so it is nice to know how to use it via CLI. First login into the box and then:

ip dhcp-server network set dns-server=1.1.1.1 X

Change X with the network number of your preference. You can show them using print command at /ip/dhcp-server/network level. Last thing: the option that may prevent from configuration save on UI is DHCP Option Set. When empty (for various reasons) then you need to go to CLI to do the job. It is the only way.

airodump-ng and aireplay-ng to deauthenticate clients from access point

Disconnecting wireless clients from access points

The problem

The nature of wireless networking is quite problematic because transmission goes over air and can be intercepted by anyone. Of course there is data packet stream encryption. But deauthentication frames are not encrypted and can be forged. It’s applicable to IEEE 802.11 standard. However if your device is capable of 802.11w standard amendment then the management frames are protected from forging, however in various devices this option is disabled by default even if they support it. In case of your device check manual for default settings. It’s worth enabling this option. Not enabling, and securing both stations and base stations can lead not only to service denial/disruption, but also opens way to few possible attacks like “evil-twin“.

How to

To identify network or device to disrupt you can use airodump-ng. It turns your network adapter into listening mode and scans nearby networks. To switch between stations or base stations mode press “a”. For realtime sorting press “r”. Last must know shortcut is “s” for sorting. Space bar pauses scanning. 

ip addr # to look for yournetadapter
sudo airodump-ng yournetadapter -w capturefilename

Base stations, which are access points are identified by column BSSID. Stations, which are clients, shows in the second table below. You can choose to deauthenticate just with MAC address of an access point or ESSID, which is human readible name. You can also pick some stations from the the second table to direct a deauthentication attack more precisely.

For a deauthentication part of the procedure use aireplay-ng tool. Pass –deauth with number of frames to send. If targeting only access points then pass -a with MAC of BSSID. If you target also some stations, then pass -c with MAC of a station (client).

sudo aireplay-ng --deauth 100 -a BSSIDMAC -c STATIONMAC yournetadapter

With proper values passed, stations will be disconnected from access point so their wireless service will be disrupted. As mentioned before it applies only to devices without IEEE 802.11w extension, which is most of consumer network devices. For enterprises it is highly possible that they will have proper enhancements already enabled.

Afterword

With airodump-ng you can select particular wireless channel to scan. You can also identify networks without security enabled at all. With traffic capturing feature enabled you can intercept precious parts of authentication procedure so you could try to crack it offline.

As an optional tool for any wireless related activities I can recommend WIFiman for Android which does the job of network perimeter exploration.