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The complete guide to today’s hard-to-defend chained attacks: performing them and preventing them
Nowadays, it’s rare for malicious hackers to rely on just one exploit or tool; instead, they use “chained” exploits that integrate multiple forms of attack to achieve their goals. Chained exploits are far more complex and far more difficult to defend. Few security or hacking books cover them well and most don’t cover them at all. Now there’s a book that brings together start-to-finish information about today’s most widespread chained exploits–both how to perform them and how to prevent them.
Chained Exploits demonstrates this advanced hacking attack technique through detailed examples that reflect real-world attack strategies, use today’s most common attack tools, and focus on actual high-value targets, including credit card and healthcare data. Relentlessly thorough and realistic, this book covers the full spectrum of attack avenues, from wireless networks to physical access and social engineering.
Writing for security, network, and other IT professionals, the authors take you through each attack, one step at a time, and then introduce today’s most effective countermeasures— both technical and human. Coverage includes:
- Constructing convincing new phishing attacks
- Discovering which sites other Web users are visiting
- Wreaking havoc on IT security via wireless networks
- Disrupting competitors’ Web sites
- Performing–and preventing–corporate espionage
- Destroying secure files
- Gaining access to private healthcare records
- Attacking the viewers of social networking pages
- Creating entirely new exploits
- and more
Andrew Whitaker, Director of Enterprise InfoSec and Networking for Training Camp, has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek. He coauthored Penetration Testing and Network Defense. Andrew was a winner of EC Council’s Instructor of Excellence Award.
Keatron Evans is President and Chief Security Consultant of Blink Digital Security, LLC, a trainer for Training Camp, and winner of EC Council’s Instructor of Excellence Award.
Jack B. Voth specializes in penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and perimeter security. He co-owns The Client Server, Inc., and teaches for Training Camp throughout the United States and abroad.
informit.com/aw
Cover photograph © Corbis /
Jupiter Images
$49.99 US
$59.99 CANADA
From the Back Cover
The complete guide to today’s hard-to-defend chained attacks: performing them and preventing them
Nowadays, it’s rare for malicious hackers to rely on just one exploit or tool; instead, they use “chained” exploits that integrate multiple forms of attack to achieve their goals. Chained exploits are far more complex and far more difficult to defend. Few security or hacking books cover them well and most don’t cover them at all. Now there’s a book that brings together start-to-finish information about today’s most widespread chained exploits–both how to perform them and how to prevent them.
Chained Exploits demonstrates this advanced hacking attack technique through detailed examples that reflect real-world attack strategies, use today’s most common attack tools, and focus on actual high-value targets, including credit card and healthcare data. Relentlessly thorough and realistic, this book covers the full spectrum of attack avenues, from wireless networks to physical access and social engineering.
Writing for security, network, and other IT professionals, the authors take you through each attack, one step at a time, and then introduce today’s most effective countermeasures— both technical and human. Coverage includes:
- Constructing convincing new phishing attacks
- Discovering which sites other Web users are visiting
- Wreaking havoc on IT security via wireless networks
- Disrupting competitors’ Web sites
- Performing–and preventing–corporate espionage
- Destroying secure files
- Gaining access to private healthcare records
- Attacking the viewers of social networking pages
- Creating entirely new exploits
- and more
Andrew Whitaker, Director of Enterprise InfoSec and Networking for Training Camp, has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek. He coauthored Penetration Testing and Network Defense. Andrew was a winner of EC Council’s Instructor of Excellence Award.
Keatron Evans is President and Chief Security Consultant of Blink Digital Security, LLC, a trainer for Training Camp, and winner of EC Council’s Instructor of Excellence Award.
Jack B. Voth specializes in penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and perimeter security. He co-owns The Client Server, Inc., and teaches for Training Camp throughout the United States and abroad.
informit.com/aw
Cover photograph © Corbis /
Jupiter Images
$49.99 US
$59.99 CANADA
Phoenix cannot believe what is in front of his eyes. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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A worthwhile read!
[value of resource] x [likelihood of exploit] = [risk level]
For example, a high value resource that is unlikely to be exploited should be ranked as a low risk, as should a low value resource that is likely to be exploited. Think of this in terms of a temporary database of publically available information used to populate a user demonstration website that is wiped out every 24 hours. If that information is compromised it has no value, so even if the compromise is likely it is a low risk system. Conversely if a system that contains critical financial information is confined to a single workstation that is removed from any networking and housed in a guarded facility it too is a low risk system (since the likelihood of compromise is low).
Unfortunately many auditors make risk assessments based on circumstances in a vacuum. This is where the concept of "chained exploits" becomes so valuable. For instance, if a vulnerability were discovered in a local binary accessible to users that allows privilege escalation, but the local binary exists on a system that has no users (other than administrators who already have root privileges) it is often considered a low risk. Many times patches for these sorts of vulnerabilities are not installed because the patch could introduce instability and would not be considered worthy of the expense given the low risk. Similarly a vulnerability could be discovered in a web service that when exploited could allow a remote attacker to gain an unprivileged local account that, say, only had access to read and write to the /tmp directory. This could also be considered a low risk since such limited access wouldn't present any threat to the system. However, if you "chained exploits" for the two vulnerabilities you suddenly have a condition where a remote attacker can gain a local account and elevate their privilege! This contravenes the low risk ranking of the individual vulnerabilities. When combined they suddenly become a very high risk to the system.
It was this sort of "chain" that I hoped CE would explore. Instead the material presented in the book consisted of context to several high risk vulnerabilities to explain why they might be used in tandem. For instance, the book would propose a scenario where a remote attacker installed a backdoor rootkit on a corporate network workstation then used that workstation to access the central database using default system administrator credentials. Each of the conditions used in these "chains" are extremely high risk already, and thus the book doesn't present any new material for seasoned information security professionals to consider.
For a novice this book is a great resource. It is full of the sorts of horror stories that professionals are all too familiar with, but could potentially be eye opening for a neophyte or someone unfamiliar with computer security. At the very least it is a page turning exploration of very real and often under appreciated risks to enterprises.
I was disappointed that the book didn't raise the level of discourse in the information security field but I suspect that wasn't the point of Chained Exploits. Instead it reads like a greatest hits sequence prepared by veteran penetration testers. It makes for interesting reading, but it isn't particularly informative. Don't look for any new 0 day exploits (or even a discussion of how to find such flaws). Instead the book contains a litany of well known routes to system compromise and illustrative narratives that tie them together in real world scenarios.
The narratives are all over the place and rarely bear any resemblance to each other. The stories follow the work of "Phoenix", a hacker who alternates from being someone that dresses poorly enough to be mistaken for a homeless person, performing attacks under duress as a shadowy employer threatens his girlfriend, to someone who has quit his job to live in a 3500 square foot house from the income he gets renting out large botnets.
The book suffers from too-many-authoritis, and each author has a very different writing style that makes each story different from the last. One author is very good at working different tools into his story, while one author feels compelled to list every tool that could possibly be used to pick a lock or sniff wireless traffic.
"Although Phoenix will not be using all these tools in his exploit, he could use:
-Tool A: Long description from the tool's website
-Tool B: Long description from the tool's website
-Tool C: Long description from the tool's website"
A few of the attacks are somewhat clever, while the majority are unneccessarily complex, apparently needing to hit a quota of different tools. In an attempt to find out what websites Phoenix's boss is browsing on a computer a few feet away, he decides to not use ARP Poisoning, MAC spoofing, or MAC flooding (although he discusses how each would work) in favor of using phishing to install a trojan to TFTP over a copy of netcat that he uses to manually install WinPcap so that he can trace a TCP stream in Wireshark in order to cut and paste a dump of the network traffic into a Hex Editor to save out a JPEG file. Apparently Phoenix is not a fan of simplicity.
The usage of tools is also all over the place. Sometimes he jumps right into using complex tools, while one story (the particularly egregious social engineering chapter) walks through Phoenix getting confused by how to choose the keyboard language when booting an Auditor CD.
The book would also benefit from another pass by an editor. One chapter begins with a backstory that clearly presupposes the reader has a clue about some past dealings that Phoenix has had with another character. The next story is where Phoenix is introduced to the character for the first time. Elsewhere, Phoenix decides to use his Vista based laptop, and a few pages later he is using that laptop and booting up into Windows XP. While the introduction includes the standard disclaimer that everything in the book is potentially illegal and should only be done in a lab, some authors throughout the book felt compelled to instert similar disclaimers that were unneccessary and should have been caught by the editor.
All-in-all, the book is okay, especially for someone new to the field of penetration testing who would like a little real-world context around how different tools might be use in conjunction with each other. If a second edition of this book is ever released, it could really use another pass by an editor to fix some silly errors and to help the authors speak in a unified voice. For me, the issues I mentioned above made the book somewhat difficult to read and enjoy.
On the positive side, I thought the cases were well written. The authors did a good job explaining the entire case, with an introduction, body, and summary. This was helpful when the cases later in the book got more complex. The nature of the cases was interesting, with a good amount of variety. On the negative side, I think Phoenix would have been caught and imprisoned fairly easily for some of his exploits. Anytime he interacted with the physical world, in person, near his home, he became an easy target for law enforcement. His computer tactics weren't too sharp either, as noted by other reviewers. I would have liked seeing the book end with a raid on his house, followed by a list of the ways he exposed his identity to the cops. On a minor note, the authors should have supplied better images to the publisher -- many are fuzzy.
If you liked the Hackers Challenge and Stealing the Network book series, and you want something a little more modern and complicated, you'll like Chained Exploits.
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