Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing

The objective of this project was to find the 6 flags which were hiddent in a Windows and a Linux server. The process of finding the flags included the below.

Assessing the Attack Surface and Running Services

The initial step for Vulnerability Assessment is to understand the attack surface. It is essential to know which services are running in the system and which of these services could have possible vulnerabilities.

NMap scans

Nmap scans are used to find the running services and the open ports in both the Windows and Linux machines

NESSUS scan

NESSUS scan is run on the Windows machine to identify the running services and potentially vulnerable services running on the server

VeraCrypt

Some portion of the Windows memory was encrypted using VeraCrypt. The password to the encrypted volume was found using a Phishing attack.

Exploiting Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability Tool Procedure
SMB Vulnerability Metasploit Metasploit exploit was run and shell access was gained in the server
Weak Security knowlegde of users Phishing Attack Spear phishing used to persuade the user to reveal his password
Weak Passwords John the Ripper Passwords were brute forced
Poor error handling SQLMap SQL Injection was performed
Burpsuite Header details were grabbed
File Upload Vulnerability Weevely Backdoor was created to gain access to the file system