I recently discovered a fairly new man-in-the-middle tool called bettercap, which I will test in this video. I will explain the concept of ARP spoofing, install bettercap, and see how one can use it to sniff passwords on a network.



Here it is:



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If you need here is the full transcript of the video:

Hello there. My name is Gergely Revay or Geri. Today I’m gonna talk about bettercap. This is a new tool I found recently and it got my attention because it’s a man in the middle tool. And we talk about man in the middle attacks all the time like in an assessment when we say it’s bad to send stuff unencrypted on the network because a man in the middle attacker can then sniff your network and find out your passwords or anything. When I found this tool, I thought this would be a good opportunity to play a little bit with man in the middle attacks. So what I’m gonna do today is introduce bettercap, talk a little bit about network sniffing and ARP poisoning for those people who don’t really know what that is and how it works, and then we’ll install and try bettercap, the basic features. We’ll sniff network a little bit to find some passwords and talk about what bettercap is capable of.

So let’s start with the installation. So you can see here already, I have the bettercap website on my screen. And basically the installation is not that difficult because you can just use Ruby GEM to install. Bettercap is actually a full Ruby application and you can extend it in Ruby. So it’s good for you if you know Ruby well. Now, the installation is also documented in the website so you can check it out and also do it yourself. So let’s go to a terminal. First, I’m gonna install the dependencies, which some of it is already installed in Kali but I’m not gonna check exactly and just go on with the installation. And then it’s build essential Ruby development packages and libpcap for manipulating traffic. Yeah. So now we have the dependencies. Then let’s get on with the installation of bettercap. And it’s gem install bettercap. It’s gonna take a little bit so just be patient. Okay, the installation is ready so let’s see if we can execute it. Yes. So that’s how it works. That’s a good start.

Now, before I start getting into bettercap, I will just explain quickly how this network sniffing works, how ARP poisoning works, etc. For that, let me draw for you. So what happens here, I’m gonna use two computers, the Kali what you’ve seen and a Windows 8 machine. These are both virtual machines and they’re both on the same network. So what it essentially means is that we have Internet there. And then I have a router here. I have here my Kali and I have here my victim. So normally the victim communicates with the router directly and then that goes to the Internet.That goal that we want to reach is that this communication goes to Kali and then to the router. Now, bettercap offers different methods to do this. What we are gonna use is ARP poisoning, which means that Kali has a MAC address here. It’s called MAC K, let’s call it this way. He has a MAC V, and this has a MAC R. So these are normal MAC addresses that you already know. When the victim wants to go to the Internet, he has to first send the packets to the router. So what he will ask, he will know the IP address of the router, but he wants to find out what the MAC address for that IP address so that he can send the packet. He will ask the network what is the MAC address for that particular IP address.

Now, what bettercap does is whenever such a request happens, then he will always respond hopefully as the first responder. He always say that my MAC address is for that IP. So whenever the victim or the router or anybody else on this network asks for IP address or asks for the MAC address of an IP address, our attacker with bettercap will always say that my MAC address is related to this IP address. That way, basically, the victim is gonna think that on the network he has to send his packet first here because he will think that this is the router and then bettercap will relay this packet to the router but also when a packet comes back, the router will also think — because he will also request a MAC address – he will also think that Kali or bettercap is the victim. And then Kali will just relay again the packet to the victim. So we basically reached our goal here. Because of this ARP spoofing or ARP poisoning, all packets will cross our Kali machine through bettercap and then from this point on, basically bettercap is able to do whatever he wants with those packets. Bettercap also offers different tools to do different things with the traffic, but what we’re gonna try is just to look at the traffic find valuable information like passwords. So I hope that’s clear now, and I will just move on to working with bettercap and see how we can actually do a man in the middle attack.

So let’s look at our target first or our victim. So what I’m gonna try to do is to try to intercept the traffic of this victim. We are gonna try to intercept the HTTP traffic to a particular website is cheezburger.com. I chose this website mostly because I don’t use tis application. So we can login here. I will just do it first as a normal user, and then we will try to intercept that again with bettercap. So the user is testerpepper@gerionsecurity.com. This is my old website. Okay, you see I successfully logged in. Now we’re gonna try to intercept the same thing with bettercap. So I’ll log out, even close my browser.

So now what we have to do is to come back to Kali and start bettercap with the proper configuration to do the spoofing for us. So first we need bettercap. And then we want to sniff the network so we use the sniffer. And then as I said, you can use different techniques for spoofing. The default is the ARP spoofing, but I will specify it here anyway so you just have it on the comment line. And since we are gonna work with HTTP and HTTPS traffic probably, I will use the HTTP and HTTPS proxies offered by bettercap. And for that, you say proxy http and minus minus proxy https. And there are different parsers in bettercap. What I’m gonna use now is the custom parser. And I will look for something like “password” in the traffic. And then we hope that the password for Cheezburger.com is gonna be called by bettercap.

So let’s start the sniffing. What you see here is that bettercap started. First it tries to figure out the targets on the networks so which one is the gateway, which one’s on the other machine on the network so that he can spoof these machines on the network. Because we chose the HTTPS proxy, it will also generate a certificate for itself to try to avoid recognition. Of course, this is not a real valid Google.com certificate. It’s a fake, but it could be useful. So let’s go back to the victim’s machine. Let’s load Cheezburger. Now you see there are already lots of things happening here. You see all this content because that’s HTTP and that’s what we are looking for. You can also see that it’s from many different places. The thing is that the website is just full of different content from different websites so that’s why the requests go to basically everywhere all around the Internet and not only to Cheezburger.com.

Let’s try to login. So the user is testerpepper@gerionsecurity.com. Okay, and I will just quickly change back to Kali. Again, lots of things happened. Let’s just try to find our password. This looks interesting. This is a GET request to the LoginOrRegister service. And if you look through for the password, whatever, whatever, oh, here is, this is the e-mail address. So this is username. And oh, what we can see here is the password, and this is actually the password I used. So it worked out. Of course, you know, you have to really look at the traffic. Scroll here, scroll there, but it worked.

Another thing that I would like to mention is that originally I actually wanted to spoof HTTPS traffic, and I started to play with Cheezburger. And it turned out that it uses just HTTP so this password is not even encrypted on the network which is general bad. But yeah, it’s Cheezburger.com so I didn’t have really high expectations. But the point is that our network spoofing was successful. We were able to attract all traffic between the router and the victim computer to Kali, to bettercap. We were able to actually sniff the password of the user during the login. So that’s very good. That was our goal.

One really important thing is that when you close bettercap, you need to gracefully exit which is implemented when you do Ctrl+C because the thing is that ARP poisoning is actually poisoning the ARP cache of the other computers so before you exit, you have to change back the MAC addresses of their caches to the original one. Otherwise, the network will just die for some time until they figure out that the MAC address in the cache is wrong and then request for new MAC addresses. So it’s always important if you do ARP poisoning that you gracefully exit from the tool.

Another thing that I would like to mention is that bettercap is trying to be extensible. So

if you come here to the library and you look around a little bit, then you will see everything that you could use is here and you can start implementing your old things. You can start to implement your own proxy to do like portable things with the request like change the content of the request or change the content of the response automatically so then you don’t have to like look in the logs to find the password. You can just done the password for yourself automatically or you can manipulate every response so that the user sees something else. So there are lots of possibilities here. And I think @evilsocket, the guy who writes bettercap, he did a really good job here. So if you find this interesting, you can start playing with bettercap as well. If you do something cool like write your own proxy tool or any kind of extension, then let me know or comment here so that everybody knows that there’s something new here. Or if you discover something interesting, also just comment on this post. That’s it. I was Geri Revay from Aether Security Labs and take care. Keep hacking. Ciao.