Interop: 5 Up-and-Coming Hacking Tools
The security professional's toolbox is fairly mature, with ethical hackers commonly using familiar and powerful tools such as Metasploit, Nmap, Wireshark and dozens of others, many of them conveniently wrapped up for free in the security-focused Kali Linux distribution.
Still, in the fast-moving field of IT security, new threats and tools are constantly emerging. In a standing-room-only session at Interop New York this week, David Rhoades of Maven Security Consulting recommended five up-and-coming tools that can help penetration testers do their jobs better.
1. XSScrapy
Rhoades' presentation followed one on vulnerability management by John P. Pironti, president of IP Architects LLC, in which Pironti noted that two of the most significant classes of vulnerabilities remain cross-site scripting and SQL injection. Addressing the cross-site scripting problem is a relatively new tool called XSScrapy by security researcher Dan McInerney, Rhoades noted. The description of XSScrapy on GitHub Inc. is a "Fast, thorough, XSS spider. Give it a URL and it'll test every link it finds for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities."
2. Gauntlt
Designed for devops, the team behind Gauntlt aimed to help make development of new code more secure by creating a tool that makes checking for vulnerabilities repeatable, reliable, reviewable, rapid and resilient with a reduced attack surface. The tool launches other attack tools at a target and reports the results.
One of the Gauntlt developers, Mani Tadayon, described it as the opposite of static code analysis in a presentation announcing the tool in 2012. "We're looking at the system as, kind of, not a black box but a grey box. We're looking at the running instance. The difficulty with code analysis is like, what is it? Is it Java, is it Ruby? Is it this framework? That framework?" Tadayon said. "[With Gauntlt] it's like, we don't [need to] know what's going on inside your app."
3. Minion
Another relatively recently released platform for performing security tests on Web applications is Minion from the Mozilla Project (the team behind the Firefox browser).
4. BadUSB
A USB hack presented by SR Labs at BlackHat 2014 in August and called BadUSB introduced a new form of malware that reprograms the controller chips inside USB devices. "USB sticks, as an example, can be reprogrammed to spoof various other device types in order to take control of a computer, exfiltrate data, or spy on the user," SR Labs explained in a description of the session.
5. NetHunter
Finally, Rhoades pointed his audience to Kali Linux Nexus NetHunter. Developed by Offensive Security, the company behind Kali Linux, and Kali community member "BinkyBear," NetHunter takes the idea of a penetration platform and essentially puts that particular hell on wheels.
NetHunter is designed as an open source penetration testing platform for an Android OS tablet (Nexus 10), mini-tablet (Nexus 7) or smartphone (Nexus 5). Some of the tools include wireless 802.11 frame injection, one-click MANA Evil Access Point setups, HID keyboard and even BadUSB-based "man-in-the-middle" attacks.
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 02, 2014