Cybersecurity Insights

Setting the scene

A fair amount of the work we do in the Foregenix Penetration Testing team is, in one way or another, a flavour of web application penetration testing. In these assessments we come across command execution vulnerabilities that belong in one of two different categories:

1. Those were the output is returned directly to the user and,
2. Well… those that are not.

In this blog post we will discuss the latter, cases where the output of our command is not directly displayed on the application, and present a strategy for obtaining access to the output of our command using recursive DNS queries. Finally we construct a practical example of the discussed strategy via a step by step process bypassing different constraints imposed to us by the use of DNS as an out of band retrieval method.

A great deal has been written about the Magento 1 End Of Life in June 2020 (less than 45 days time), this article will present a different perspective into the challenge.

eCommerce environments are under constant threat from attackers; if your website touches cardholder data at any point, you’re a target. It doesn’t matter if you’re a big multinational conglomerate, or a tiny independent merchant; if you’re deploying poor security measures, they probably have you in their sights.

File integrity monitoring (FIM) systems are a critical part of your website's immune system. If you want to find and destroy malicious code, you’ll need to know where it is and where it’s come from. FIM systems will log changes made to your website, where they’ve come from and when they were made. Utilising a FIM log in your security strategy will help provide you with up to date knowledge of the inner workings of your website.

But why is file integrity monitoring important?

If you're like me and love watching movies, don't be deceived by the title. The CIA does not represent the Central Intelligence Agency who infiltrates the criminal organizations undercover and takes them down once they have enough evidence. The CIA referred to here is the CIA triad that all security fundamentals and frameworks are built upon. It is the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability that we take into consideration when architecting solutions for our organizations.

In our previous post, Red Teaming: Command and Control protocols, we performed a very brief introduction of RETURNINGPATIENT in the general context of choosing different command and control strategies in our red teaming campaigns. In this post, we will take a deeper dive into RETURNINGPATIENT itself and discuss its properties and its limitations.