Pilihanraya Kecil Permatang Pauh

Pilihanraya Kecil Permatang Pauh

So you're eager to learn about pointers but unfortunately you got stuck because they seemed to you terrible in nature? That's not true I know, but many of the people get confused when they arrive at the topic of pointers. Well pointers are the most important tools in C programming and are the one that can make you fly (unless you don't know how to ride over them). In this article we're going to learn basics of pointers.

Pointers are the varaibles that store addresses of other variables. Easy ain't it?

So lets start with the decleration of a pointer, pointer is decreleared as:

data_type *var_name;
e,g
int *pt;

well the astrisk(*) before the variable name is the thing that makes variable a pointer. So far so good now what?
Now lets say we want to store address of a variable in our pointer variable that seems pretty complex..!

Let's do it:

int number = 100;
int *pt = &num;

Is it really complex..?
what we are doing here is that we are first declaring and initializing a integer variable (number) with value of 100 and then we declare and initialize a pointer variable (pt) with the address of number variable. Now pt (pointer variable) contains the address of number (integer varaible). So what? Now we can use this pointer variable to change the value of number variable. Is this some kind of Magic? Maybe. Lets' do it:

*pt = 200;

what we have done here is that we De-referencing the pt variable with the asterisk (*) and then assigned it the value of 200 now the number variable contains 200. Isn't it a magic? De-referencing is used for accessing the value of the variable towards which our pointer is pointing simple. So lets write a full program of what we have learned so far.

/*Pointer Basics: Creating and Using Pointers*/
#include<stdio.h>
int main(void){
int number = 100;
int *pt = &number;
printf("Value of 'number' is: %d", number);
printf("Address of 'number' is: %p", pt);
*pt = 200;
printf("New value of 'number' is: %d", number);
return 0;
}

What this whole program did was it created a integer variable and a pointer to integer variable and then printed out the value and address of the 'number' variable and after that we De-referenced the pointer variable so that we can access the value to which our pointer variable is pointing and changed the old 100 value with new 200 value and at last we printed that out. Easy isn't it?
But do you know that you can get the address of a variable even by using ampersand (&) operator? Lemme show you how. I'll declare and initialize a variable 'var' and then print it to screen using ampersand (&) operator:

int var = 10;
printf("Address of 'var' is %p\n", &var);

the last statement here will print out the address of 'var' not value so that means it is equal to this statement:

int *pt = &var;
printf("Address of 'var' is %p\n", pt);

here we first assigned the address of 'var' to pointer variable 'pt' and then printed out the address of 'var' using the pointer variable (pt).
So lets write another program that will wrap up this part of 'Pointer Basics':

/*Pointer Basics Part 1: Program 2*/
#include<stdio.h>
int main(void){
   int var = 10;
   int *pt = &var;
   printf("The Value of 'var' is: %d\n", var);
   printf("De-referencing: *pt = %d\n", *pt);
   printf("Ampersand: The Address of 'var' is %p\n", &var);
   printf("pt = %p\n", pt);
   return 0;
}

So that's the end of first part watch out for the next part in which we'll tighten our grip on pointers and get ready for some Advanced '*po(inter)-fo'.

Related news

Pilihanraya Kecil Permatang Pauh

Introduction

It was 20 November, and I was just starting to wonder what I would do during the next month. I had already left my previous job, and the new one would only start in January. Playing with PS4 all month might sound fun for some people, but I knew I would get bored quickly.

Even though I have some limited red teaming experience, I always felt that I wanted to explore the excitement of getting Domain Admin – again. I got my first DA in ˜2010 using pass-the-hash, but that was a loooong time ago, and things change quickly.

While reading the backlogs of one of the many Slack rooms, I noticed that certain chat rooms were praising RastaLabs. Looking at the lab description, I felt "this is it, this is exactly what I need." How hard could it be, I have a whole month ahead of me, surely I will finish it before Christmas. Boy, was I wrong.

The one-time fee of starting the lab is 90 GBP which includes the first month, then every additional month costs 20 GBP. I felt like I was stealing money from Rastamouse and Hackthebox... How can it be so cheap? Sometimes cheap indicates low quality, but not in this case.

My experience

Regarding my previous experience, I already took OSCP, OSCE, SLAE (Securitytube Linux Assembly Expert), and PSP (Powershell for Pentesters), all of which helped me a lot during the lab. I also had some limited red teaming experience. I had more-than-average experience with AV evasion, and I already had experience with the new post-exploit frameworks like Covenant and Powershell Empire. As for writing exploits, I knew how a buffer overflow or a format string attack worked, but I lacked practice in bypassing ASLR and NX. I basically had zero experience with Mimikatz on Windows 10. I used Mimikatz back in 2012, but probably not since. I also had a lot of knowledge on how to do X and Y, on useful tools and hot techniques, but I lacked recent experience with them. Finally, I am usually the last when it comes to speed in hacking, but I have always balanced my lack of speed with perseverance.

RastaLabs starts in 3,2,1 ...

So I paid the initial entry fee, got the VPN connection pack, connected to the lab, and got my first flag after ... 4 days. And there were 17 of them in total. This was the first time I started to worry. I did everything to keep myself on the wrong track, stupid things like assuming incorrect lab network addresses, scanning too few machines, finding the incorrect breadcrumbs via OSINT, trying to exploit a patched web service (as most OSCPers would do), etc. I was also continually struggling with the tools I was using, as I never knew whether they were buggy, or I was misusing them, or this is just not the way to get the flag. I am sure someone with luck and experience could have done this stage in 2-3 hours, but hey, I was there to gain experience.

During the lab, whenever I got stuck with the same problem for more than 30-40 hours and my frustration was running high, I pinged Rastamouse on the official RastaLabs support channel on https://mm.netsecfocus.com/. I usually approached him like "Hi, I tried X, Y, and Z but no luck", then he replied "yeah, try Y harder". This kind of information was usually all I needed, and 2-3 hours later I was back on track again. His help was always enough, but never too much to spoil the fun. The availability and professionalism of Rastamouse was 10/10. Huge multi-billion dollar companies fail to provide good enough support, this one guy here was always there to help. Amazing. I highly recommend joining the Mattermost channel – it will help you a lot to see that you are not the only one stuck with problems. But please do not DM him or the channel if you have not already tried harder.

What's really lovely in the lab is that you can expect real-world scenarios with "RastaLabs employees" working on their computer, reading emails, browsing the web, etc. I believe it is not a spoiler here that at some point in time you have to deliver malware that evades the MS Defender AV on the machine. Yes, there is a real working Defender on the machines, and although it is a bit out of date, it might catch your default payload very quickly. As I previously mentioned, luckily I had recent experience with AV evasion, so this part was not new to me. I highly recommend setting up your own Win10 with the latest Defender updates and testing your payload on it first. If it works there, it will work in the lab. This part can be especially frustrating, because the only feedback you get from the lab is that nothing is happening, and there is no way to debug it. Test your solution locally first.

Powershell Empire turned out to be an excellent solution for me, the only functionality it lacked was Port Forwarding. But you can drop other tools to do this job efficiently.

A little help: even if you manage to deliver your payload and you have a working C&C, it does not mean your task with AV evasion is over. It is highly probable that Defender will block your post-exploit codes. To bypass this, read all the blog posts from Rastamouse about AMSI bypass. This is important.

Lateral movement

When you finally get your first shell back ...

A whole new world starts. From now on, you will spend significant time on password cracking, lateral movement, persistence, and figuring out how Windows AD works.

In the past, I played a lot of CTF, and from time to time I got the feeling "yeah, even though this challenge was fun, it was not realistic". This never happened during RastaLabs. All the challenges and solutions were 100% realistic, and as the "Ars poetica" of RastaLabs states:

...which is sooooo true. None of the tasks involve any exploit of any CVE. You need a different mindset for this lab. You need to think about misconfigurations, crackable passwords, privilege abuse, and similar issues. But I believe this lab is still harder to own than 90% of the organizations out there. The only help is that there are no blue-teamers killing our shells.

About the architecture of the lab: When connecting to the lab with VPN, you basically found yourself in a network you might label as "Internet", with your target network being behind a firewall, just as a proper corporate network should be.

There are a bunch of workstations – Win10 only, and some servers like fileserver, exchange, DC, SQL server, etc. The majority of servers are Windows Server 2016, and there is one Linux server. The two sites are adequately separated and firewalled.

As time passed, I was getting more and more flags, and I started to feel the power. Then the rollercoaster experience started. I was useless, I knew nothing. Getting the flag, I was god. One hour later, I was useless.

For example, I spent a significant amount of time trying to get GUI access to the workstations. In the end, I managed to get that, just to find out I did not achieve anything with it. For unknown reasons, none of the frameworks I tried had a working VNC, so I set up my own, and it was pain.

On December 18, I finally got Domain Admin privileges. So my estimation to "finish the lab" in one month was not that far off. Except that I was far from finishing it, as I still had to find five other flags I was missing. You might ask "you already have DA, how hard could it be to find the remaining five?". Spoiler alert, it was hard. Or to be more precise, not hard, just challenging, and time-consuming. This was also a time when connections on Mattermost RastaLabs channel helped me a lot. Hints like "flag X is on machine Y" helped me keep motivated, yet it did not spoil the fun. Without hints like this, I would not have written this post but would have been stuck with multiple flags.

About exploitation

And there was the infamous challenge, "ROP the night away." This was totally different from the other 16. I believe this image explains it all:

If you are not friends with GDB, well, you will have a hard time. If you don't have lots of hands-on experience with NX bypass - a.k.a ROP - like me, you will have a hard time with this challenge. The binary exploit challenges during OSCP and OSCE exams are nowhere near as complex as this one. If you have OSEE, you will be fine. For this challenge, I used GDB-Peda and Python pwntools – check them out in case you are not familiar with them. For me, solving this challenge took about 40 hours. Experienced CTF people could probably solve it in 4 hours or less.

Conclusion

I would not recommend taking this lab for total beginners *. I also do not recommend doing the lab if you only have limited time per day, which is especially true if you are working on your home computer. I probably would have saved hours or even days if I had set up a dedicated server in the cloud for this lab. The issue was that the lab workstations were rebooted every day, which meant that I always lost my shells. "Persistence FTW", you might say, but if your C&C is down when the workstation reboots, you are screwed. "Scheduled tasks FTW", you might say, but unless you have a strict schedule on when you start your computer, you will end up with a bunch of scheduled tasks just to get back the shell whenever you start your computer. Day after day I spent the first hour getting back to where I had been the day before. And I just figured out at the end of the lab why some of my scheduled tasks were not working ...

I would be really interested to see how much time I spent connected to the lab. Probably it was around 200–250 hours in total, which I believe is more than I spent on OSCP and OSCE combined. But it was totally worth it. I really feel the power now that I learned so many useful things.

But if you consider that the price of the one-month lab is 20 GBP, it is still a very cheap option to practice your skills.

* It is totally OK to do the lab in 6 months, in case you start as a beginner. That is still just 190 GBP for the months of lab access, and you will gain a lot of experience during this time. You will probably have a hard time reaching the point when you have a working shell, but it is OK. You can find every information on Google, you just need time, patience and willingness to get there.

Anyway, it is still an option not to aim to "get all the flags". Even just by getting the first two flags, you will gain significant experience in "getting a foothold". But for me, not getting all the flags was never an option.

If you are still unconvinced, check these other blog posts:

https://jmpesp.me/a-rastalabs-story/

https://www.gerrenmurphy.com/rastalabs-review/

Or see what others wrote about RastaLabs.

Footnote

In case you start the lab, please, pretty please, follow the rules, and do not spoil the fun for others. Do not leave your tools around, do not keep shared drives open, do not leave FLAGs around. Leave the machine as it was. If you have to upload a file, put it in a folder others won't easily find. This is a necessary mindset when it comes to real-world red teaming. Don't forget to drop a party parrot into the chat whenever you or someone else gets a new flag. And don't forget:

OSCP has no power here. Cry harder!

I will probably keep my subscription to the lab and try new things, new post-exploit frameworks. I would like to thank @_rastamouse for this great experience, @superkojiman for the ROP challenge. Hackthebox for hosting the lab with excellent uptime.

As for @gentilkiwi and @harmj0y, these two guys probably advanced red-teaming more than everyone else combined together. pwntools from @gallopsled was also really helpful. And I will be forever grateful to Bradley from finance for his continuous support whenever I lost my shells.

MOST USEFUL HACKING TOOL

1-Nmap-Network Mapper is popular and free open source hacker's tool.It is mainly used for discovery and security auditing.It is used for network inventory,inspect open ports manage service upgrade, as well as to inspect host or service uptime.Its advantages is that the admin user can monitor whether the network and associated nodes require patching.

2-Haschat-It is the self-proclaimed world's fastest password recovery tool. It is designed to break even the most complex password. It is now released as free software for Linux, OS X, and windows.

3-Metasploit-It is an extremely famous hacking framework or pentesting. It is the collection of hacking tools used to execute different tasks. It is a computer severity framework which gives the necessary information about security vulnerabilities. It is widely used by cyber security experts and ethical hackers also.

4-Acutenix Web Vulnerability Scanner- It crawls your website and monitor your web application and detect dangerous SQL injections.This is used for protecting your business from hackers.

5-Aircrack-ng - This tool is categorized among WiFi hacking tool. It is recommended for beginners who are new to Wireless Specefic Program. This tool is very effective when used rightly.

6-Wireshark-It is a network analyzer which permit the the tester to captyre packets transffering through the network and to monitor it. If you would like to become a penetration tester or cyber security expert it is necessary to learn how to use wireshark. It examine networks and teoubleshoot for obstacle and intrusion.

7-Putty-Is it very beneficial tool for a hacker but it is not a hacking tool. It serves as a client for Ssh and Telnet, which can help to connect computer remotely. It is also used to carry SSH tunneling to byepass firewalls. So, this is also one of the best hacking tools for hackers.

8-THC Hydra- It is one of the best password cracker tools and it consist of operative and highly experienced development team. It is the fast and stable Network Login Hacking Tools that will use dictonary or bruteforce attack to try various combination of passwords against in a login page.This Tool is also very useful for facebook hacking , instagram hacking and other social media platform as well as computer folder password hacking.

9-Nessus-It is a proprietary vulnerability scanner developed by tennable Network Security. Nessus is the world's most popular vulnerability scanner according to the surveys taking first place in 2000,2003,2006 in security tools survey.

10-Ettercap- It is a network sniffing tool. Network sniffing is a computer tool that monitors,analyse and defend malicious attacks with packet sniffing enterprise can keep track of network flow.

11-John the Ripper-It is a free famous password cracking pen testing tool that is used to execute dictionary attacks. It is initially developed for Unix OS. The Ripper has been awarded for having a good name.This tools can also be used to carry out different modifications to dictionary attacks.

12-Burp Suite- It is a network vulnerability scanner,with some advance features.It is important tool if you are working on cyber security.

13-Owasp Zed Attack Proxy Project-ZAP and is abbreviated as Zed Attack Proxy is among popular OWASP project.It is use to find vulnerabilities in Web Applications.This hacking and penetesting tool is very easy to use as well as very efficient.OWASP community is superb resource for those people that work with Cyber Security.

14-Cain & Abel-It is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating System. It allow easy recovery of various kinds of passwords by sniffing the networks using dictonary attacks.

15-Maltego- It is a platform that was designed to deliver an overall cyber threat pictures to the enterprise or local environment in which an organisation operates. It is used for open source intelligence and forensics developed by Paterva.It is an interactive data mining tool.

These are the Best Hacking Tools and Application Which are very useful for penetration testing to gain unauthorized access for steal crucial data, wi-fi hacking , Website hacking ,Vulnerability Scanning and finding loopholes,Computer hacking, Malware Scanning etc.

This post is only for educational purpose to know about top hacking tools which are very crucial for a hacker to gain unauthorized access. We are not responsible for any type of crime.

More articles

PENGUMUMAN...!!!

Monday, August 24, 2020

Pointers Part 1: The Basics