After finding potential security holes, the next step is to confirm whether they’re indeed vulnerabilities in the context of your environment. Before you test, perform some manual searching. You can research websites and vulnerability databases, such as these: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures ( http://cve.mitre.org/cve ) US-CERT Vulnerability Notes Database ( www.kb.cert.org/vuls ) NIST National Vulnerability … Read more
Where does reverse engineering fit in for the ethical hacker? Reverse engineering is often viewed as the craft of the cracker who uses her skills to remove copy protection from software or media. As a result, you might be hesitant to undertake any reverse engineering effort. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is often brought … Read more
Social engineering attacks cover a wide range of activities. Phishing, for instance, is a social engineering attack (SEA). The victim receives a legitimate-looking e-mail, follows a link to a legitimate-looking website they’re familiar with, and often divulges sensitive information to a malicious third party. As end users are made aware of such activities, the attacks … Read more
Since technology can be used by the good and bad guys, there is always a fine line that separates the two. For example, BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that al- lows individuals all over the world to share files whether they are the legal owners or not. One website will have the metadata … Read more
Beyond the basic searching techniques explored in the previous articles, Google offers special terms known as advanced operators to help you perform more advanced queries.These operators, used properly, can help you get to exactly the information you’re looking for without spending too much time poring over page after page of search results. When advanced operators … Read more
Advanced Google users begin testing advanced queries right from the Web interface’s search field, refining queries until they are just right. Every Google query can be represented with a URL that points to the results page. Google’s results pages are not static pages.They are dynamic and are created “on the fly” when you click the … Read more
Google searching is a process, the goal of which is to find information about a topic.The process begins with a basic search, which is modified in a variety of ways until only the pages of relevant information are returned. Google’s ranking technology helps this process along by placing the highest-ranking pages on the first results … Read more
Google query building is a process.There’s really no such thing as an incorrect search. It’s entirely possible to create an ineffective search, but with the explosive growth of the Internet and the size of Google’s cache, a query that’s inefficient today may just provide good results tomorrow—or next month or next year.The idea behind effective … Read more
To some extent, an organization deploying a third-party web server product is inevitably placing its fate in the hands of the software vendor. Nevertheless, there is still a large amount that a security-conscious organization can do to protect itself against the kind of software vulnerabilities. Choose Software with a Good Track Record Not all software … Read more
If you are lucky, the web server you are targeting may contain some of the actual vulnerabilities described in this chapter. More likely, however, it will have been patched to a more recent level, and you will need to search for something fairly current or brand new with which to attack the server. A good … Read more