INF5290 Ethical Hacking

Lecture 1: Introduction to Ethical

Hacking, Information Gathering

Universitetet i Oslo
Laszlo Erdödi
Lecture Overview

• What is ethical hacking?

• Steps of penetration testing
• Information gathering techniques

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Why ethical hacking is necessary at all?

• Computer systems have several security problems

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What is the reason for having so many
security issues?
• Lack of money
• Lack of time
• Lack of expertise
• Negligence
• Convenience
• Old systems
• Too complex systems
• 3rd party components
• And many others…

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How does the usability and functionality
influence the security? Why not plug the cable out? 

Security
A webpage with only one
login form (https, strong
password)
Thorough risk assessment
to choose the appropriate
mitigations

The system should be

launched tomorrow, now
we have no time for How I hate to memorize
security, but we will focus all these passwords, I
on the security from always use «123456»
tomorrow! Really!

Complexity
Convenience
Functionality Oh com’on, why me?

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Why ethical hacking is necessary at all?

• Checking the system from the attacker’s perspective can

reveal serious security deficiencies
• The «attacker» thinks like a real hacker (but not totally)
– Do we use the same methodology as the real hackers?
– Do we have the same goals?
– Do we have to hide ourselves when ethically hacking?
– What makes hacking ethical?
– What is allowed and what is not?
• The system security cannot be guaranteed without deep
and regular penetration testing
– Can it be guaranteed with penetration testing? Unfortunately not
always perfectly, the keyword is the appropriate mitigation
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The motivation behind hacking – Why?
To understand the real hackers, first we have to
understand the motivations:

• What a cool thing to be a hacker

• Because I can
• Money
• Revenge
• Annoyance
• Protesting against something
• Organized and well-paid professional groups (mafia and
governmental groups)
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The goal of hacking

• Break the information security triple (confidentiality,

integrity, availability)
– Steal confidential information
– Modify data
– Make services unavailable (Denial Of Service)

• To promote security? YES!

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Type of hackers

• Black hat hackers: with malicious intent

• White hat hackers: perform penetration testing to
promote the security
• Script kiddies: amateurs (usually young kids) using publicly
available software tools to attack
• Protest hackers (protest against something e.g. anonymous)
• Grey hat hackers: usually white hat, but can be black hat
• Red hat hackers: Stopping black hat hackers by attacking
them
• Blue hat hackers: Hacking in order to take revenge
• Green hat hackers: beginners to hacking

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Be ethical and legal, it’s never worth
doing anything against the law!!!

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Differences between ethical and non-
ethical hacking
• Task: Find the admin password of «NonExistingBank AS»
• How do I start? Which one of these will be used by the
black hat and the white hat hackers?
– Try with the websites, maybe there’s a server side scripting flow?
– Try to apply for an account to have access to password protected
sites?
– Try with low level exploitation against the server?
– Try to access the DMZ through a less controlled service?
– Try to sneak inside the building to have access to the internal
network?
– Try social engineering emails against the employees?
– Try to make friendship with the system admin?

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Differences between ethical and non-ethical
hacking
• Legal (contract) • Illegal
• Promote the security by • Steal information, modify data,
showing the make service unavailable for
vulnerabilities own purpose
• Find all vulnerabilities • Find the easiest way to reach
the goal (weakest link)
• Without causing harm • Do not care if the system will
be destroyed (but not too
early)
• Document all activities
• Without documentation
• Final presentation and
report • Without report, delete all clues
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Main steps of hacking
Spectacular, but not real! 
• Information gathering
• Identifying the target
domain
• Finding vulnerabilities
• Exploiting the
vulnerabilities
• Lateral movements
• Carry out the goal

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Steps of an attack with available info as
the hacking process proceeds

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Detailed steps of hacking
1. General information gathering: collecting all available
information from the target and systemize the
information
2. Technical information gathering: collecting network and
system specific information like target ip ranges
3. Identifying available hosts in the target network (which
computer can be attacked)
4. Identifying available services in the target network
(which service can be attacked)
5. Manual mapping of the services (to check how it looks
like, the impressions, system reactions, mitigations, etc.)

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Detailed steps of hacking
6. Automatic vulnerability scanning (intelligent tools with
huge vulnerability database)
7. Manual verification of the findings (to check if the
previous findings are real – true positive)
8. Exploitation
9. Lateral movements (to move through the network)
10. Ensure access until the end of the project
11. Achieve primary and secondary goals
12. Remove clues
13. Reporting and presentation
14. Removing the attacking files!!! (tools, data, script created
temporarily during the pentest)
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Type of ethical hacking projects

From the attacker’s location point of view:

• External penetration testing
• Web hacking
• Internal penetration testing
• Wireless penetration testing
• Social Engineering
From the attacker’s access (right) point of view:
• Black box testing
• Grey box testing
• White box testing
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General information gathering

• Usually the first step of every attack

• Before getting contact with the target we need to prepare
for the attack
• General information gathering covers all the efforts that is
done for collecting all the information from the target
• The collected information should be analyzed as well in
order to filter the important information
• Sometimes it is not obvious which information will be
useful later, all information should be systemized
• The result of the information gathering is a huge dataset
with dedicated information (e.g. user lists, etc.)
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 Methods to do information gathering

• Google and all search engines are best friends 

– Simple search engine queries
– Specific search engine queries (google hacking, see later)
– Cached data (data that are not online right now, but can be
restored)
• The social media is another best friend 
• Companies and persons spread lots of information from
themselves
• We can create personal and company profiles
• We can identify key persons and other key information

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Simple information gathering using
Google

• Default website (domain name), other sites

• History, several public data (faculties, number of staff
members)
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Simple information gathering using
Google
• Keypersons with contact details
• Important pages
• Services

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Collecting actual target related
information
• Reading the news

• Social media info

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Collecting cached information

• Archive.org wayback machine

• Google cached results

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Pipl.com – Finding accounts
• Personal
information

• Net catalogues
• Academic
records
• Social accounts

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Using social media to build personal
profile
• Work and education
• Places of living
• Contact info
• Family relationships
• Details
• Life events
• Photos
• Favorites (music, sports, films, etc..)
• Friends
• Timeline data
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Using social media to carry out social
engineering attacks - examples
Social Engineering using private information:
Isak spent 5 days at the Scandic Hotel Kristiansand. He posted on Facebook
(Checked in Scandic Kristiansand). 5 days later Isak receives an email from the
‘’Hotel’’ (attacker). Dear guests! Our hotel would like to surprise all our guests
between the age of 14 and 24 who visited us during the last month with a
SuperMario Cart game as a summer holiday surprise. Please fill in the following
form and provide your address: link We hope you enjoyed your stay at our hotel,
etc..

Building personal profile using social media

Stine has a Facebook account where she listed all her favorites. One of her favorite
singer is Rihanna. The attacker brute-forces Stina’s password and finds out that
one of her passwords is Diamonds2012. The attacker logs in to Stine’s Facebook
account and steals private photos, writes weird messages to her friends, etc.

Everyone can be misled, it’s just a question of timing and story!

Every information can be important, hackers collect all available information
and systemize them before planning the attack!

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Collecting information from webpages

• All static information can be downloaded at once (noisy,

but useful)
• Several tools exist like wget or Httrack

Httrack demo …

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Specific information search

• We can look for specific info such as email addresses,

phone numbers, meta data, etc.

Web Data Extractor

demo …

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Specific information search
• Foca is able to find documents by extensions
• It also shows several technical information

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Information gathering with Google
hacking
• Using specific Google
queries we can use
smart filtering or get
«hidden» data
• Filter to domain: use the
site keyword
• Negative filtering is also
possible:
site:uio.no -www

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Information gathering with Google
hacking
• Filter to file type with extension: use the type keyword
• Interesting file extensions: doc, xls, txt, conf, inc, sql, …
• Expressions can be combined

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Information gathering with Google
hacking

• The intitle expression

filters according to the
site title, the inurl filters
for the url content
• Try this one: site:uio.no
intitle:″index of″
(directory listing)

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Information gathering with Google
hacking
There is a database (google hack database – ghdb) that
contains up-to-date google hack expressions (check the
exploit-db website)

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Tools supporting automatic Google
hacking
SiteDigger (by FoundStone) is an old tool that carries out
google hacking using its own database

SiteDigger
demo …

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What is needed for the lectures and
workshops throughout the semester?
Kali Linux (http://kali.org)

• Debian based Linux distribution with

hundreds of preinstalled hacking tools
• Easy to use, tools are classified
according to the hacking tasks and
steps (info gathering, forensics,
vulnerability assessment, etc.)
• Easy to install (ready and up-to-date
Vmware and Virtualbox images)

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UiO-CTF (capture the flag)

• Join the University hacking team!

• International hacking competitions
• Regular team practice
• Meeting the latest hacking challenges
• Quick and effective professional development
• Great community 
• What you need is only free time to join us

facebook.com/uioctf/

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 End of lecture

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