Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows

By : Phil Bramwell
Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows

By: Phil Bramwell

Overview of this book

Windows has always been the go-to platform for users around the globe to perform administration and ad hoc tasks, in settings that range from small offices to global enterprises, and this massive footprint makes securing Windows a unique challenge. This book will enable you to distinguish yourself to your clients. In this book, you'll learn advanced techniques to attack Windows environments from the indispensable toolkit that is Kali Linux. We'll work through core network hacking concepts and advanced Windows exploitation techniques, such as stack and heap overflows, precision heap spraying, and kernel exploitation, using coding principles that allow you to leverage powerful Python scripts and shellcode. We'll wrap up with post-exploitation strategies that enable you to go deeper and keep your access. Finally, we'll introduce kernel hacking fundamentals and fuzzing testing, so you can discover vulnerabilities and write custom exploits. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in identifying vulnerabilities within the Windows OS and developing the desired solutions for them.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Fuzzy registers – the low-level perspective


The fuzzing research we've done so far was effective in discovering the fact that these two FTP programs are vulnerable to overflows. Now, we need to understand what's happening behind the scenes by watching the stack as we send fuzz payloads. Of course, this will be done with a debugger. Since we're on Windows in this lab, we'll fire up WinDbg and attach it to the vulnerable software PID. Since we just got done toying around with the nfsAxe client, I'll assume that's still up and ready to go in your lab. Keep your 3Com Daemon lab handy, though, because the principles are the same. Let's go down the rabbit hole with Metasploit's offset discovery duo: pattern_create and pattern_offset.

Calculating the EIP offset with the Metasploit toolset

Head on over to the tools directory in Metasploit with cd /usr/share/metasploit-framework/tools. First, let's generate a 4,000-byte payload, as we know that's enough bytes to overwrite critical parts of memory:

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