8 ms·
The Little White Box That Can Hack Your Network
- fabricode 15y agoPerhaps we need to move to policy of allowing only known mac addrs on internal networks. But maybe even this would be insufficient since one could sniff packets in order to steal someone else's valid mac address. That too would be insufficient since you can get the mac address off of the menu for most VOIP phones, and off the backsides of of other networked items, ... Perhaps there is no defense against this kind of attack.
- daeken 15y agoYou're right, MAC-based defenses don't work for this type of attack; even if you came up with some scheme where a switch port won't get turned on until you announce yourself from a trusted MAC, you can always MITM a phone/computer on the network and get it that way. The real solution here is proper network segregation and requiring encrypted traffic across the board, with sane key distribution schemes. But that's difficult and expensive.
- jetsnoc 15y agoFor every local LAN attack there are mitigation techniques. Cisco Switches have great features like DHCP Snooping and Dynamic ARP Inspection (DAI) to eliminate rogue DHCP servers and ARP spoofing. Further yet, with "switch-port security" you can lock down mac addresses per port. With port security and proper device segregation if you spoofed a phones mac address and plugged in to that port the switch would still put you in to only the voice vlan not the data lan. It's not perfect but there are a lot of things you can do to secure a local LAN. Unfortunately, most businesses must not even do the bare minimum if all they have to do is plug in a single PwnPlug without any attack vectors implemented like mac spoofing.
- Swannie 15y agoYep. My University implemented switch-port security before I arrived in 2001. Managed switches, central MAC register, you were placed on the VLAN your MAC said you belonged to. If your MAC appeared twice, you'd be locked out of the network and need to go and do some explaining (!). If your MAC moved around too much, ditto. If you had more than one ARP entry for your port, ditto.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoWhile this makes some sense, what happens if you plug your laptop into your roommates port? My university had a policy of disallowing students on the internal network - there was wifi and some special network ports with red cables for students. A classmate had a virus and was tracked down and yelled at in class because he was also plugged into the internal network...
- keithpeter 15y agoThe FE College I teach at (not residential) has a 'guest' wifi for any device you want. Just internet access, no https let alone any other protocol. The teenagers mainly use it with their Blackberry phones to get on BBM :-) Full authentication is only for College owned devices, not sure how they are managing that.
- driverdan 15y agoNo SSL? That's a terrible way to run a network. SSL is very important when using open WiFi.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoIt also emphasizes though that you shouldn't be doing anything long term or mission critical, but just for checking that one little thing...
- keithpeter 15y agoNo https because the College don't want students buying things over the College connection. Also stops me using Ubuntu launchpad in breaks
- rythie 15y agoReally you need 802.1x to do per port authentication. Though really you should still use encryption for all protocols and have strong passwords internally too.
- notatoad 15y agoIt seems more and more like the concept of an 'internal network' needs to die. Open everything up to the Internet at large, and harden it all accordingly. It makes sense from a user experience perspective (why shouldn't I be able to access my work from home or on the road), and with the increasing number of easily concealable connected devices it makes sense from a security perspective too.
- dillona 15y agoIf you have sensitive data that you'd rather other people not see, the Internet is the last place you put it. Even if the box has been "hardened"
- tylermenezes 15y agoThat is an extremely naïve perspective. Imagine you run IT for 10,000 PCs across the US. For one, maybe 10% of these would need to be upgraded to get to an OS with modern security. Then there's the servers for internal applications which can't be upgraded without breaking things. And then you'll need to deal with all the support, explaining to employees why, yes, although they have tasks which need to run overnight, no, they can't disable automatic update, because it would put the corporation at risk. Not to mention the amount of work it takes to keep computers up to date even when the user isn't a problem. And even with all of that, one day one of the computers gets a backdoor installed, and the attacker is able to copy everything off your network drive, because you didn't have any sort of IDS or firewall to prevent it. Smarter people than you have thought about this. There's a reason the idea of an internal network exists at all; NAT certainly wasn't something people were considering right from the start.
- hendzen 15y agoI'd wager that many if not most corporate internal networks are vulnerable to ARP poisoning. A little computer hooked up to the network via ethernet is all one would need to launch such an attack, and https is vulnerable since many users have been conditioned to click through any kind of invalid certificate warning. Consider downloading Cain&Abel and experimenting on your own home network just to see how powerful these tools are. Fortunately, methods of detecting ARP poisoning exist, but undoubtedly many IT departments invest heavily in firewalls without worrying about attacks originating from inside.
- tptacek 15y agoI don't know why anyone would bother with ARP poisoning. Internal pentests are invariably bloodbaths; you spend 3 hours getting shells on 2-3 systems, and then another hour getting shells on 200-300 more as a result of all the stuff you find on those 3. On internal networks, the admin password is always "admin", the database password "oracle".
- dhess 15y agoFor those of us who go to the trouble of attempting to lock down our internal networks by changing the default passwords; setting up guest wireless networks; and running SSH and Kerberized NFS/AFP; what do you recommend as a reasonable set of measures to defend against internal attacks? What does Matasano do? I'm particularly interested in strategies for layer 2.
- tptacek 15y agoFor whatever it's worth, this idea is at least 15 years old; it was a L0pht project that Mudge demo'd at Pumpcon in '97. If I'm remembering it right, it was a Palm device with Ethernet rigged to it and a modem.
- atomical 15y agoAm I missing something here? Why is the whitehat installing something that can do malicious things instead of a mock?
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoBecause people don't (want to) believe that they could have been pwned until they actually are pwned.
- keithpeter 15y ago“Right now they’re actually flying people out to the stores to spot check and do penetration basis, but now with something like this you don’t have to travel.” They send them out in jiffy bags to the regional branches, manager plugs one in, they can stay at head office and check the (branch) network. Saves money, provides hard data.
- atomical 15y ago1) Send a small devise that's actually a box of rocks to bank that plugs into wall 2) Call bank, ask if they installed the box. 3) Save tons of money hiring people with overpriced gadgets. 4) Profit
- CPlatypus 15y agoI'd really like to see a wireless version of this. Plug it in, let it take as long as it likes to crack a weak WEP key, then send you an email. On the down side, you might not be able to access as much via a wireless network. On the up side, the "air freshener" disguise is much more believable without the network cable. You could have a wifi+cel version, but a dual-wifi version would probably broaden the range of hardware/software you could use and would also be a bit more useful.
- hnwh 15y agoread the product website
- raesene2 15y agoFWIW, I hardly ever see WEP any more on wireless tests. WPA-PSK is still reasonably common even in corporates (mainly for guest networks), but realistically most companies I see are running 802.1X and PEAP against either Active Directory or a Cisco RADIUS Server.
- SpikeDad 15y agoWiFi Pineapple Mark IV? - http://hakshop.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/markiv-first-dibs http://hakshop.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/...
- perone 15y agoThis is a nice project for a Raspberry Pi.
- someone13 15y agoAnother, similar project is the Minipwner (http://www.minipwner.com/ http://www.minipwner.com/). It's effectively a TLINK router, flashed with OpenWRT and connected to a cellphone batttery pack, with a very small USB drive for storage and swap. It's also much cheaper - it cost me about $50, including shipping. Highly recommended if you want to play with this sort of thing.
- joshu 15y agoI have one. Not trying to build a hacking box but the instructions are useful nonetheless.
- trotsky 15y agoDoes anyone know how much it costs to run an ad like this at wired?
- jonah 15y agoI'd venture to guess similar to the cost of running one here. ;) (Disclosure: I have no association with either Wired or Pwnie Express.)
- akeck 15y agoQuis custodiet ipsos custodes?