Skipfish : Web Application Security Reconnaissance@Kali Linux

1.   Skipfish is an active web application security reconnaissance tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active security checks. Skipfish is fast and easy to implement and can perform a robust scan of any website providing a lot of security tests, like php injection, XSS, format string vulnerabilities, overflow vulnerabilities, file inclusions and lot more categorized into high risk, medium risk and low risk issues. Skipfish also provides summary overviews of document types and issue types found; and an interactive sitemap, with nodes discovered through brute-force denoted in a distinctive way.

2.    The first thing that you should do is download the latest version of Skipfish here: http://code.google.com/p/skipfish/downloads/list

3.     The following screenshots show a stepped way to run and use this tool...

4.    As u download the file,you move to the terminal and cd to the place you have downloaded the file.Type the following command  to unzip the ,tgz file.

5.    There are pleothra command options available in Skipfish against a target website using a custom wordlist, enter skipfish, select your wordlist using the -W option followed by the location of the wordlist, select your output directory using -o followed by the location, and finally the target website.

Skipfish –o (output location) –S (location of wordlist) (target site)

The following example shows a scan using a wordlist called medium.wl on securityblogger.com. Skipfish will create a folder called Skipfishkaoutput on the desktop. This is run using the keyword skipfish, –o /root/Desktop/Skipfishkaoutput to specify the location to which send the output, -W /root/Desktop/medium.wl to specify the location of the dictionary and http://www.thesecuirtyblogger.com as the target to scan against.

So in the example that I take here,you need to type the following at the terminal :

It is also seen that the default Skipfish dictionaries will not run when using the –W command. You can copy a default wordlist and remove the read-only in the first line of the list (#ro) to run as a custom wordlist. This is shown in the following screen-shot:

Once the scan is complete or if you end it early, Skipfish will generate thousands of output files in the location specified when using the –o option to designate an output folder.To see the results, click on the index.html file, which will bring up an browser. You can click through the drop-down boxes to see your results.

The tool is pretty powerful indeed...can be gauged from the following screen shot of a news site that says that professional criminals used this tool to hack a financial site... :-)

Your passwords can be cracked easily if less then 16 Characters now!!!!

1.    When the IT security big bang of Do's and Don'ts started some years back it was widely advertised to the Cyber masses to keep their respective passwords any thing more then 8 characters with a mix and match of capitals and smalls with special characters...then this was increased to 10 and last heard it was 15...and was told that 15 character password which is not dictionary based will take years and is actually uncrackable...

2.  As recent as 4 days back,a team of 3(your read it rite it's three) hackers has been able to crack more than 14,800 supposedly random passwords from a list of 16,449 by simply brute forcing!!!!

Image courtesy : http://www.buzzquake.com/tag/brute-force-attacks/

3.   In December it was unveiled by Jeremi Gosney, the founder and CEO of Stricture Consulting Group, that a 25-computer cluster can cracks passwords by making 350 billion guesses per second. It can try every possible word in less than six hours to get plain text passwords from lists of hashed passwords...the word of significance is that you do not need high end machines and east-west architecture to build this kind of IT infra...it is simply a cluster of machines processing power...

4.   The general user in the cyber space like you and me have actually no control over which hashing process websites use and therefore remain at the mercy of an algorithm all would invariably be clueless about...so if you are concerned about security and your email id and password which is the key for so many transactions in your routine life.long passwords are the best defense....and not simply long it has to be a mix match of numerics,capitals,smalls and special characters!!!.

5.  All the best to all of us...keep surfing but avoid drowning!!!! :-)Thanks http://thehackernews.com

Is ur Account Hacked ?- Common ways u get compromised.

1.    There is no doubt on the fact that Google users are growing phenomenally.....and with this growing rise also comes the phenomenal rise and ways to get compromised or become a botnet.Thus a Google Account is also valuable for spammers and other unknown citizenry looking to impair you with ur personal info and data on ur pc and account inbox. It’s not so much about your account, but rather the fact that your circle of relatives and friends see your Google Account and mails from it as reliable.

2.   Nothing new about this but the most common ways hackers can login to your Google password are:

• Password re-use: You sign up for an account on a third-party site with your Google username and password. If that site is hacked and your sign-in information is discovered, the hijacker has easy access to your Google Account.

• Malware: You use a computer with infected software that is designed to steal your passwords as you type (“keylogging”) or grab them from your browser’s cache data.

• Phishing: You respond to a website, email, or phone call that claims to come from a legitimate organization and asks for your username and password.

• Brute force: You use a password that’s easy to guess, like your first or last name plus your birth date (“ujjwal3008”), or you provide an answer to a secret question that’s common and therefore easy to guess, like “dosa” for “What is your favorite food?”

3.   Another common error that we all unknowingly is that we keep the password same for multiple accounts on yahoo,gmail,blumail and so on.......put on ur thinking caps......if one account linked to other user name is compromised ....then in a way all are....