Escalating an attack using DNS redirection
If an attacker or penetration tester has compromised a host on the internal network, they can escalate the attack using DNS redirection. This is generally considered to be a horizontal attack (it compromises persons of roughly the same access privileges); however, it can also escalate vertically if the credentials from privileged persons are captured. In this example, we will use bettercap (to be explored in more detail in Chapter 11, Action on the Objective and Lateral Movement) as a sniffer, interceptor, and logger for switched LANs. It facilitates man-in-the-middle attacks, but we will use it to launch a DNS-redirection attack to divert users to sites used for our social engineering attacks.
To start the attack, we need to install bettercap, which is not installed by default in the latest version of Kali. This can be achieved by running sudo apt install bettercap
. We should be able to activate any module that is required; for example...