Credential Harvesting (Part 1)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 





Overview

Credential Harvesting is a process of obtaining sensitive information like login credentials, hashes, authentication tickets, and any other information that can be useful in login into a system. The extracted information is used to gain unauthorized access to systems, networks, or applications.

There are two types of credential harvesting- external and internal. External credential harvesting generally include phishing emails and other techniques to trick a user into disclosing his username and password. Different approaches are used to obtain credentials via internal networks. 

Credential Access

Credential access describes how hackers find compromised systems and get their login credentials. This can enable them to assume the identity of authentic users and navigate laterally across a network to gain access to additional resources like systems and apps. Attackers believe that using authentic credentials is a more desirable strategy than taking advantage of weaknesses.

Sensitive data belonging to users, the Windows operating system, and other applications can be found in abundance in the operating system's memory. During execution or at runtime, data is loaded into memory. As a result, only administrator users with complete system control can access memory. Sensitive data kept in memory includes AD tickets, cached passwords, and clear-text passwords. In addition, Active Directory contains a wealth of data on machines, users, groups, and other entities. Therefore, one of the goals of a penetration test is to inventory the Active Directory infrastructure. Although AD has a strong design, administrators' incorrect configuration leaves it open to several types of assaults. Some of the Active Directory misconfigurations that can leak user's credentials are:

  1. Users' description
  2. Group Policy SYSVOL
  3. NTDS
  4. AD attacks

If attackers gain initial access to a target network they can easily perform many network attacks against local computers, including the AD environment. The Man-In-The-Middle attack allow the penetration tester to create a rogue or spoof trusted resources within the network to steal authentication information such as NTLM hashes.

Local Windows Credentials

Keylogger is a hardware or software tool for recording and tracking keystrokes. Keyloggers were first created for acceptable uses, such parental control or software development input. They could be abused, though, to steal data. In a busy and dynamic environment, searching for credentials using keyloggers is a useful option for penetration testers. The penetration tester can use tools like the Metasploit framework or others to do keylogging if it is known that a compromised target has a logged-in user.

Passwords and other details related to local accounts are stored in the SAM, a Microsoft Windows database. That is why penetration testers find it to be a highly valuable target. To make it more difficult to access, these details are stored in an encrypted format in the SAM database. Furthermore, no user may read or access it while the Windows operating system is open, although there are a number of methods and hacks that can be used to extract the contents of the SAM database. The Metasploit framework is used in one, while registry hive or volume shadow copy are used in the other.

Conclusion

This is the beginning of a new topic, Credential Harvesting. Here, some of the harvesting techniques are discussed in detail.




































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