Читать книгу The Art of Attack - Maxie Reynolds - Страница 10

The attacker mindset (AMs) is a set of cognitive skills applied to four laws. It is evident and relevant across all professions, trades, and businesses, although it often goes under the guise of expertise. Many people exhibit AMs qualities within their domain, as we will look at shortly. The Art of Attack, however, is about gaining and using this mindset for malicious activity over any domain—but in a way that ultimately results in the betterment of an organization's security.

The laws say that you must know your end goal, be able to constantly collect information that you can weaponize and leverage to achieve that goal, develop a pretext that you never let slip, and have every action you take be for the advancement of the objective. As you will see, the cognitive skills needed to uphold these laws in an attack are broad, but they all have a single common thread: they relate to information, and most importantly, information as you perceive it. There is no attack without information, and learning to tie it back to your objective is the essence of AMs.

A woman spills coffee on herself, and it burns her. We hear, “Someone had butterfingers,” and comprehend hot liquids scald.

A lawyer hears “The coffee was too hot” and the winds of a lawsuit. This particular woman's lawyer took facts and bent them and shaped them to fit the objective set out by the law. This is what the attacker mindset looks like at work. Your attacker mindset will differ from that of a lawyer's, but the central principles remain: the building of an attack is based on information as you perceive it; the execution is based on the information as you apply it. AMs is nothing more or less than a way of taking information in and applying it to an objective. The mark of a good attacker is the ability to repurpose information in ways not intended by the source. This is made possible by using the first and second laws of the attacker mindset: the first law states that you start with the end in mind, and the second law states that you gather, weaponize, and leverage information as a means to that end.

As an example, if you hear of a company holding a conference, you may be able to phish them by gathering information on who their vendors are and impersonating those vendors by way of vish (a call in which an attacker attempts to gain information or perform an attack), phish (an email in whch an attacker aims to gain information or gain access to a user's machine/network), or even in person to gain sensitive details or access. If they are holding the event virtually, a well-crafted phish will have a high probability of being undetected. You might start by finding out which platform they are holding the event on and phishing them, pretending to be that platform. You might be able to phish their attendees or their speakers, appearing as if you are in fact reaching out from the hosting company itself, gaining access to potentially thousands of people's sensitive data. Most people's reaction to that possibility is that this sort of attack would be illegal. This is actually up for debate, depending on where in the world you live. Some governments can authorize this sort of test if you have a bank account in that country, as an example. Typically, though, it will be a company that hires you, and you will not be able to test their attendees.

Let's look at another example of how this mindset can take seemingly innocuous information—in this case given by the source—and use it to create a vulnerability. Say you are able to circumvent a company's technical defenses upon searching current or historical job postings. In this example, a company was looking for a candidate who had “an overview or understanding of SAP product and service portfolio (SAP Cloud Platform Integration, SAP PI/PO, API Management).” They were also looking for that person to have “sound knowledge of JavaScript and Groovy Script. [Be] able to configure Sound NetWeaver. Should be comfortable with Java Programming. Nice to have worked in UI developments using SAP Web IDE \#.”

There's a lot of information in this that could prove vital in various attacks against this target, including network, web app, phishing, and vishing attacks.

A network attack is an attempt to gain unauthorized access to the target's network, with the objective of stealing data or performing other malicious activity. Thanks to this job posting, I know that the target uses systems applications and products (SAP) systems, which are tempting to perform an attack on because they store and manage the lifeblood of any organization: critical information and business processes. SAP systems can be based on different platforms: ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming), Java, or HANA. We can assume this is based on Java, given the job description. The main SAP platform is SAP NetWeaver, and ExploitDB (www.exploit-db.com)—a popular website repository—shows that vulnerabilities exist for version 7.4, one of which showed that SQL injections are possible. This type of attack allows attackers to inject their own evil SQL commands, creating requests and paving the way for access to critical data in a database of users’ passwords, account information, and anything else stored in the database.

A simple vish could be made with this knowledge to multiple departments in the organization to gain more information based on these findings or to weaponize this information immediately to attempt to gain forgotten credentials. You may be able to gain entry to a secure building upon learning of an upcoming event they are holding and vishing to find out which type of ID is required to enter. If it's their work badge, you may be able to find a clear enough picture online to re-create one. You may be able to circumvent a whole building's security team by finding out what time the guards change shifts.

The possibilities are truly endless when you have information, and you can weaponize it and leverage it correctly. All of this neatly brings us to the cognitive skills an attacker must exhibit: an attacker must have curiosity in abundance; persistence to drive that curiosity into action so as to be moving forward all the time; the ability to process information into workable categories; mental agility enough that allows repurposing of information when a situation calls for it and the agility to adapt the information in ways not always intended by the source; and finally, this mindset requires self-awareness. Self-awareness is invisible. No one can “see” that you are self-aware, but almost everyone can feel if you are or not. You must leave people feeling however you need them to in order to fulfill your objective. I will cover this in a later chapter on target psychology.