Just read a
short fictional story on hacking/cracking.
It's about a guy, Sendai, who tries to make money on his investments (there were references/jibes to SCO Unix!) and beat the market by monitoring the network activity of companies. I found this idea rather intriguing (because I am interested in investments yeah?) and continued reading.
After a while, the focus abruptly changed to a normal hack job (I wasn't aware of this until I finished reading though) but it had already got me going so I carried on reading.
So the story goes on to describe how Sendai gets a new assignment from a mysterious employer who wants 3 different hosts residing in different parts of the world installed with a very stealthy rootkit. The rest of the story describes how Sendai goes about fufilling his client's request.
There was mention of familiar tools such as
nmap and
Metasploit. And I gave a little chuckle when the character Sendai opted to use an insecure wireless AP with ESSID "linksys". That's because Singapore's largest free wifi provider by far is also "linksys". Coming in second was "Netgear" if I recall correctly.
Read more!Anyway, back to the story. I found the decision to bruteforce a ssh account in the first host and the
eventual solution to be a little too risky and the other, very unlikely.
For the second host, I have extremely minimal experience with Solaris so I was quite surprised to understand the mention of Solaris's restrictive ICMP rate limiting against UDP port scans. It's as if to prove a point because Microsoft doesn't. Is this still the case?
The second box was unpatched and Sendai got in easily using Metasploit. Otherwise, he would have had to take some time to locating recent vulnerabilities and modifying recent exploit code to get in.
For the third host, I couldn't believe that he managed to telnet in without credentials again. On the Solaris 8 (it's old so it's possibly late on patches too? On second thought, its heavily used so maybe not) box, I think he could have also tried a new root exploit and then install a keylogger to get the user passwords as an alternative to brute-forcing the password hashes.
Of course, these are the random thoughts I had as I read through the story. So you could think about them too when you read through story too! There were quite a few things mentioned that I was totally unaware of. But I am not gonna say what in case everyone finds out what a real security n00b I am...
Overall, the short story was a fun and light read. So here's the
link again.
Wow. The book is available on Amazon too.
