- Script Kiddie Exploit Trolling
- Pragmatism for More Sophisticated Attackers
- Buffer Overflow Exploits
- Password Attacks
- Web Application Attacks
- Exploiting Browser Flaws
- Conclusion
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Pragmatism for More Sophisticated Attackers
Whereas a script kiddie utilizes these Internet searches to troll for canned exploits without understanding their function, a more sophisticated attacker sometimes employs far more complex techniques to gain access. Let's focus on these more in-depth techniques for gaining access and the ideas underlying many of the canned exploits.
Of the five phases of an attack described in this book, Phase 3, the gaining access phase, tends to be very free-form in the hands of a more sophisticated attacker. Although the other phases of an attack (reconnaissance, scanning, maintaining access, and covering tracks) are often quite systematic, the techniques used to gain access depend heavily on the architecture and configuration of the target network, the attacker's own expertise and predilections, and the level of access with which the attacker begins. In this book, we discussed the reconnaissance and scanning phases in a roughly chronological fashion, stepping through each tactic in the order used by a typical attacker. However, given that gaining access is based so heavily on pragmatism, experience, and skill, there is no such clearly defined order for this phase of the attack. Thus, we discuss this phase by describing a variety of techniques used to gain access, without regard to the particular order in which an attacker might apply them. Our discussion of these techniques starts with attacks against operating systems and applications in this chapter, followed, in the next chapter, by a discussion of network-based attacks.
There are several popular operating systems and hundreds of thousands of different applications, and history has shown that each operating system and most applications are teeming with vulnerabilities. A large number of these vulnerabilities, however, can be attacked using variations on popular and recurring themes. In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss some of the most widely used and damaging application and operating system attacks, namely buffer overflow exploits, password attacks, Web application manipulation, and browser flaw exploits.