Posts Tagged ‘Offensive Security’

OSCP diary – week *cough, cough*

Tuesday, February 14th, 2023

A long overdue update… I lost count what week I am in but I’m happy to report that I’ve continued working through the PEN-200 course at a steady pace and by now, I’ve finished all reports up to and including chapter 19 (password attacks).

This means I have four more chapters to go for the reporting. Maybe three because I have not been able to get PowerShell empire working properly. Which will leave the flags and the labs. As it is February now, completing the course around July or August still seems realistic.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Computer, security | Comments Closed

OSCP diary – week 04

Sunday, August 21st, 2022

I finally finished the LFI exercise… it took a while because I was using a & instead of a ? in the wrong place in the URL. <sarcasm>Surprisingly, things don’t work properly if you do that</sarcasm>. After that, it was smooth sailing. OR SO I THOUGHT. Took some more digging and I got the flag so I’m good maybe but I certainly did not follow the instructions so I’m not sure if there is a correct way to complete the exercise. But I guess one aspect of the course is also to show that following the book/the guidelines is not always necessary or recommended.

Moving on, I made progress on the RFI exercise and continued reading up on SQL injections.

This all seems to take a long time, I wonder if I’m wasting too much on these exercises >_<

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Computer, security | Comments Closed

OSCP diary – week 03

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

I’ve continued with the web application attacks chapter and I’m a bit ashamed to say I’m stuck on one of the LFI exercises. I try to finish all the exercises before moving on, or at least before moving to a completely new chapter.

In this particular exercise, I’ve tried a couple of things (what I could think of), watched the course videos (which I usually don’t) and did additional research but I’m still stuck. Might reach out to colleagues this week although I still have one idea that I need to check/confirm before asking others for ideas.

Meh, nobody said it’s easy.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Computer, security | Comments Closed

Burp Suite Community edition – Intruder

Friday, August 12th, 2022

If you accidentally dabble with a PEN-200 course, there is an introduction to the Burp Suite Intruder feature with a lot of meat on the bones.

Alas, since the course was created, Burp Suite released a newer version with a re-defined interface (covered by Burp Suite course on Pluralsight) but it’s still possible to piece together the required components to follow the course content.

Until…. everything is set as described and you click on “Start Attack” and you get this pop-up:

Is this another “feature” of the community edition to push you towards purchasing the Pro version of Burp Suite?

Well, it might be. But you don’t have to shell out the cash quite yet.

Head over to the Resource Pool tab and you’ll see:

In fact, what you’ll have to do is this:

And obviously select this added option, then start the attack. It will obviously be slower but this chapter in the course is about the principle, not about brute-forcing cracking real passwords.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Computer, security | Comments Closed

OSCP diary – week 02

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

Or is it week 3 already? Haha, looks like I lost track already.

Finished that Perl script to get nameservers from a domain. Finally.
Not that Perl might be a particular scripting language, but…. not chomping an input breaks a loop because of an empty variable? Although the same variable holds a value as evidenced in the loop?
Can’t really say I understand this so far.

Got through the scanning basics but I’m undecided on the inclusion of Nessus in the ‘textbook’. Not checked yet whether you’re allowed to use Nessus during the exam, but I guess no. It was good to do some hands-on exercises with Nessus but if the basis of the coure is the open-source Kali Linux, then including tools like VMware Fusion and Nessus in the course materials feels somewhat …. off.

Anyway, moving on web application security now.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Computer, security | Comments Closed

OSCP diary – week 01

Friday, July 29th, 2022

As mentioned in earlier posts, the OSCP certification is something I wanted to try for a while.

Thankfully it’s (somewhat) related to my work so the company was willing to financially support me for this course. After getting the final confirmation, I signed up for the PEN-200 course.

After signing up, students are required to hand in an official piece of identification before allowed access to the course and the labs, so I needed to comply with this as well.

Obstacle OpenPGP-encrypted emails – honestly, never used this much. Maybe shame on me? Not sure. Anyway, since I’m mostly using webmailers these days, how do I get this to work? Answer: Mailvelope, a Firefox extension.

After a couple of tries sending in the required information, it finally worked out and I was granted access to the course and the labs.

Obstacle VMware – I’m not Offensive Security so obviously it was their decision but I would have welcomed pre-prepared Kali VMs for virtualbox, not VMware. Even getting a trial version of VMware Fusion is a pain. brew.sh saved my sanity, at least until the trial period expires.

In the course (I’m doing the basics now, can’t tell about the later exercises), there are browser-based exercises [browser, openvpn, terminal] where you connect to a prepared machine but there are also exercises where you need to run your own Kali (presumably) virtual machines to do something.

Obstacle openvpn – this cost me a lot of nerves to set up because I was looking in the wrong place. openvpn itself can be easily installed but it needs a openvpn config file – which was nowhere linked on any page I browsed (introduction, help, FAQ – you name it). I had previously downloaded the config but just couldn’t find the file / link anymore – because it’s hidden – or linked – in the VPN link right at the top of every page in the course. Argh – well, I mentioned it cost me a lot of nerves. Obviously, I know now.

After all that, I was finally able to get started and I’m doing the basics now. No need to rush, I’m looking at this as a long-term project anyway.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Computer, security | Comments Closed