Labs have been included to get the most out of this book. The labs are designed to enhance the subject matter by supplying tangible examples of what is covered. To be successful with the labs, the following minimum system settings are required:

• 8 GB of RAM minimum (16 GB recommended)
• 50 GB of disk space
• The rights to install applications

Ethical hacking represents a group of skills within cyber security that manifests in a few distinctive roles, including pen testers, blue teamers, and purple teamers. Ethical hackers are also part of a larger group known as white hat hackers, whose focus is education and defense. We will discuss this in detail in the White hat hackers section later in this chapter.

What role does the ethical hacker play in organizational security? Unlike threat actors (black hats), who are motivated primarily by financial gain, ethical hackers align themselves on the defensive side of networks, attempting to secure networks by pointing out flaws and misconfigurations that malicious attackers would take advantage of. They are commonly associated with penetration testing but really can assume any role within an organization. Ethical hackers represent the apex of security practices within an organization. These practices start with core areas such as antivirus software and patch management and move on to more complex security issues such as remote automation and administration, as well as ingress and egress, encryption, and authentication.

Depending on their specific role, ethical hackers use a variety of tools and techniques to search for outdated software, misconfigured systems, and potential security weaknesses within the network. They use this information to not only bolster the overall organizational security but to find weaknesses and oversights that attackers would find by using the same techniques they use. Some other operations ethical hackers perform include discovering incomplete policies and procedures. They are also skilled in the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of adversaries. This means they understand how attackers operate, what tools they use, how they find information, and how they use that to take advantage of an organization. Ethical hackers also realize security is an evolving discipline where learning and growth never end. One place to get a better understanding of attackers and the operations they perform is to review the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which lays out a matrix of 13 categories showing various attacks. For more information, see https://attack.mitre.org/.

How does one become an ethical hacker? There are several approaches that can be taken, including using this book, and courses covering hacking and cyber security that can get you started. There are also certifications, including the Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP), Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), and Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH). However, even with all these opportunities and paths that can be taken, the one thing needed more than anything else is just to be curious – about how all this technology works, how information is stored and communicated, and how technology interoperates with other machines and devices.

Now that we know what ethical hacking is, let’s take a look at what makes up information security.

Information security and, subsequently, ethical hacking methodologies revolve around three core principles: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA). These core principles provide the framework for information security and are used by ethical hackers and security professionals to test security and security solutions. These principles can be described as follows:

• Confidentiality: Data stored on networks in the form of databases, files, and so on carries a certain level of restriction. Access to information must be given only to authorized personnel. Some examples include nonpublic financial information that could be used to make investment decisions; this is also known as insider trading. Another example would be company patents or trade secrets.

  Ensuring this information is reserved for only those who need to know about it can be addressed through techniques such as encryption, network segmentation, and access restrictions, as well as practicing the principle of least privilege. These are the things ethical hackers check and test to make sure there are no gaps or exposure of information beyond what is authorized.

• Integrity: Data that is accessed and viewed, whether part of an email or viewed through a web portal, must be trustworthy. Ethical hackers and security personnel ensure that data has not been modified or altered in any way; this includes data at rest as well as data in transit. Examples of integrity checks include showing and storing hash values and the use of techniques, including digital signatures and certificates.
• Availability: The last principle is that of availability. Information that is locked down to a level where no one can access it not only defeats the purpose of having data but affects the efficiency of those who are authorized to access it. However, just like the other principles, there is a fine line between availability by authorized personnel and confidentiality. An ethical hacker tests availability in a number of ways. Some examples include remote access for employees, establishing hours of operation for personnel, and what devices can have access.

The concepts of CIA will be covered throughout the chapters as attack techniques are discussed and the principle(s) that are violated as part of an attack, as well as what practice (or practices) could be implemented to prevent/detect an attack. Next, let’s take a look at attackers and why they attack.

Attacks do not operate in a vacuum, and as such, attacks and intrusions can be broken down into three core areas, sometimes referred to as the intrusion triangle or crime triangle. In other words, certain conditions must exist before an attack can occur. These core areas are Motive, Means, and Opportunity.

We’ll look at what each of these in the following sections.

Motive

An attacker must have a reason to want to attack a network. These motives include exploration, data manipulation, and causing damage, destroying, or stealing data. Motives may also be more personal, including financial, retaliation, or revenge. Examples include a disgruntled employee who wants to do damage based on some grievance with the company managers or coworkers. Another would be a cybercrime group targeting a company or industry to extort money through ransomware or some other means. Still, another would be a script kiddie who stumbled upon the network and thought it might be interesting to see what they could get access to. More on script kiddies in the Types and profiles of attackers and defenders section.

For investigators, it is also important to differentiate between motives for criminal activity and the operational goals and objectives associated with the larger crime. As an example, compromising user accounts is not the goal of an attack; gaining access to the corporate network and stealing data is. The account compromise is simply an operational goal.

It may also be important to understand the intensity of an attack and the motives behind it. People who are desperate are more determined to achieve their goals. The employee who is in a bad financial situation may see accessing and stealing company funds as the only means to alleviate the situation. And with that, the higher the pressure, the more likely it is that the employee will not only commit the crime but take larger risks to meet that goal.

Means

Once an attacker has a motive, they need the means to perform the attack. Means refers to the technology plus an individual’s or group’s skills, knowledge, and available resources. By understanding these requirements to commit a given crime, plus the potential motivations, investigators can narrow down attribution to individuals or groups and eliminate others. Additionally, investigators need to be aware of technological innovations as potential means of committing cybercrimes in relation to the crime committed. By way of example, a nation-state actor in China would not have the means to access and sabotage an electrical plant in the United States physically. However, once the electrical plant installed IoT sensors and connected them to the internet, the means would be made available.

Opportunity

The third part, completing the triangle, is opportunity. Used in conjunction with motive and means, an opportunity is that moment or chance where the attack can be completed successfully. For an opportunity to be available, it means that various protective mechanisms were either ineffective or non-existent. This means that human, technological, or environmental factors were conducive to the crime being committed. For example, a power failure might cause locked doors to fail open for safety but allow criminals free access to all areas of the company. Or, unpatched servers exposed to the internet might be discovered during a scan, informing attackers what exploit(s) will be successful in accessing the core network. You can see a visual representation of the crime triangle in the following figure:

Figure 1.1 – Crime triangle

Of the three areas, the ethical hacker has the most control over opportunity. As a defender, you cannot eliminate motive as that comes from the personal desires of the attacker, whether they are acting as an individual or a group. You also cannot eliminate means as knowledge is readily available, and skills can be acquired. This leaves opportunity as the area from which the odds of defending against and preventing most attacks are the most successful.

Now that we have looked at why intrusions happen, let’s take a look at the different types of people that make up the cyber security landscape, from attacker to defender.

Now that we have spent time describing what is being protected and why attacks might occur, let’s look at our attackers and some of the areas where attacks take place.

The hacker community and the titles ascribed to or acquired by these groups have been a source of confusion furthered by movies and media. With all these names and titles, it can be challenging to understand who is on the good side, so to speak, versus the dark side. Let’s start by breaking these groups down, and defining what they do and where they operate.

Let’s start at the top, with Black Hats and White Hats. These monikers came from old Western movies where bad guys wore black hats, and the good guys wore white hats. The concept stuck, and from it, the black hat hacker was born, who uses their skills to perform criminal acts. On the other side is the white hat hacker, who uses their skills to help educate and defend companies and individuals from black hat activities. As with all groups and hats, for that matter, one size does not fit all, and as such, subgroups exist under these titles.

Let’s explore each of these in the following sections.

Black hat hackers

Black hat hackers are criminals who break into computer networks with malicious intent. Black hat hackers often start as novice script kiddies using purchased exploits and hacker tools – more on them in the Script kiddie section.

Their motivations lie in financial gain, revenge, or simply spreading havoc. Sometimes they might be ideological in nature, targeting industries and people they strongly disagree with.

How do black hat hackers operate? Well, they operate like any other big business; they have learned how to scale up campaigns and create distribution networks for their software. They have even developed specialties such as ransomware or phishing services they can sell or rent out.

Some even have call centers that they use to make outbound calls, pretending to represent organizations including Amazon, Microsoft, the IRS, and even law enforcement. In these scams, they try to convince potential victims to download remote control software allowing remote access. The attacker then uses their access to gather information from the victim including personal information, passwords, and banking information.

How do people end up becoming black hat hackers? Some will get a job from forums or other connections where they might be solicited and trained by organizations to make money quickly. Leading black hats are skilled hackers who may have formal training in the computer science or security fields.

Black hat hacking is extremely difficult to stop and a problem that is global in nature. The separation by geography, jurisdictions, and politics poses significant challenges for law enforcement.

Black hat hackers have several subcategories, including script kiddies, hacktivists, cyber terrorists, and cyber criminals, with slightly different motivations. Let’s look at these categories.

Script kiddies

Script kiddies, sometimes called skids or skiddies, are described as people who may be new to the area and have few skills, relying on the work of others to accomplish their goals. For their goals and motivations, this includes trading exploits, and attacking networks with well-known attacks that are in many cases easily thwarted. They may try to develop their skills or join other groups to gain experience, or possibly be used by criminal organizations. What makes this group dangerous is there are many of them and they do not necessarily have a core motivation, making them more difficult to profile.

Hacktivists

Hacktivism is where hacking meets political and/or social agendas. A hacktivist group has a clear focus on using their skills to target governments, corporations, and even individuals that fall into the agenda they support. Because of the nature of what they do, hacktivist groups can incorporate several other groups, including script kiddies and black hat hackers who agree with the agenda. Some of the most well-known hacktivist groups include Anonymous, LulzSec, and WikiLeaks.

Cyber terrorists/cyber warriors

This group tends to be more elite and includes cyber forces employed by their respective governments or powerful groups with the means, both financially and ideologically, to attract the people necessary to complete their tasks. These tasks cover several areas, including the following:

• Disruption of major or significant websites
• Disruption of critical infrastructure systems such as communications systems, electrical grids, and water resources
• Espionage to spy on the target government to gain a strategic or an intelligence advantage

A term also synonymous with this group is cyber warfare since a large portion of this group involves nation-state activity.

Cyber criminals

This is a group that is motivated by profit and is composed of individuals or teams who use technology with malicious intent. This group may be involved in all types of crimes from credit card and identity fraud to bank account and medical record resale.

White hat hackers

This group is sometimes referred to as ethical hackers and is the opposite of black hat hackers. They defend computer systems and networks by identifying security flaws and making recommendations for improvements. Depending on their specific role, they perform a series of tests to check the efficiency of a security system. These tests can be simple security scans, policy and procedure tests, or attacker simulation tests. They can be performed by internal employees or third-party contractors attempting to find gaps in security.

How do white hat hackers operate? They use the same hacking methods as black hats; however, they have permission from the system owners to perform the operations and there are defined guidelines about what is being tested, which makes the process completely legal. So, instead of exploiting vulnerabilities and taking advantage of systems, white hat hackers work to help fix issues before actors with malicious intent discover them.

White hat hackers have a number of subcategories, including Pentesters (Red Team), Blue Team, and Purple Team, with slightly different duties. Let’s look that these categories.

Pentesters (red team)

This group is associated with pentesting and works in the offensive computing space. They are commonly third-party contractors who simulate an attack against a computer system to check for any exploitable vulnerabilities.

Blue hat hackers (blue team)

This group works in the defensive computing space and is commonly the internal employees in charge of various security systems, policies, and procedures. They establish the security measures for what needs to be protected and then monitor those measures, adjusting them based on their own tests and feedback from outside operations such as pentests and audits.

Purple team

There are times when the red team and blue team do not work well together. This can be caused by personalities and things such as ego and embarrassment. Other times, it can be caused by a disconnect between what the red team is testing and communicating to the blue team and how they might go about understanding and correcting the issues. Purple team members are there to bridge gaps in understanding and communication by having skills in both disciplines so they can ingest, distill, and translate information and details from one group to the other.

An example might be the results of a pentest showing that the dependence on legacy application frameworks opens an exploit vector that is easily taken advantage of with a simple buffer overflow to the authentication input screen. The blue team, not really knowing what to do with this information, turns to the purple team, who repositions the result to say something like “the outdated application has a buffer overflow vulnerability.” While it cannot be addressed directly with a patch to the system, it should be placed network-wise in a high-security group where, if the exploit is attempted, the attacker cannot gain anything further from it. This approach of understanding the problem, translating it, and offering potential solutions is what purple teams can do when working together or communications are not as effective as they could be.

There is one more group that does not really fit into any specific category, and that is gray hat hackers. Gray hat hackers are a peculiar mix of both black hat and white hat characteristics. They operate on their own, looking for network faults and hacks in networks, systems, and applications. They do so with the intention of demonstrating to owners and administrators that have networks, systems, and applications under their care and control that a defect exists in their security posture. Once they have validated that a vulnerability exists in a network or application, they may offer to help correct it, or in the case of an application, inform the company through responsible disclosure before publishing information publicly. In contrast, a black hat will exploit any vulnerability or tell others how to as long as they profit from it.

In many cases, gray hats are just curious and do provide beneficial information to companies about the security of their applications and services. However, many security professionals do not view their methods as ethical. The exploitation of a network is illegal, and they have not received permission from an organization to attempt to infiltrate their systems. Gray hats say they mean no harm with their hacking, and they are simply curious about high-profile systems operating without regard to privacy or laws. Regardless of the reasons, it is still illegal, and depending on what was done, it could land them in court or jail.

How do gray hat hackers operate? As stated earlier, gray hats work at the fringe of being black hats, but they look for opportunities to work their craft legally if they can. They look for companies that have bug bounty programs that encourage hackers to report their findings. In these cases, it is a win-win for the company as it gives an area for hackers to work in and helps to mitigate the risk of exploitation by a malicious actor. Once the hacker finds an exploit or vulnerability, they need to contact the organization and present their findings. The intent at this point is for the company to recognize the security flaw and begin the process of correcting it, and hopefully compensate the hacker for their time.

However, sometimes when organizations do not respond promptly or do not comply, the hacker may end up posting the vulnerability or exploitation method on the internet. This moral and ethical choice is what makes them gray hat hackers.

After exploring the different groups and their profiles, let’s look at the types of attacks that can be performed on networks and systems.