Tag Archives: network scanning

Scanning for Single Critical Vulnerabilities

Where I work, we have a decent sized IP space and scanning can be problematic. Within our IP space, we can have ~20 Million IP’s available. Traditional scanning using NMAP, while effective, can take a long time even with aggressive scan setting. By leveraging new scanning technologies like Masscan (hxxps://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan), this scanning can be done in minutes. With moderate settings, I don’t want to crash firewalls, it takes about 15 min per port.

While this example is specific to Heartbleed, I use this technique for any of the exploit-of-the-day. By using a fast port scanner to reduce the number of hosts to only the systems running the service in question, you can dramatically speed up your scan time. Additionally, within the first couple of days of an exploit, you may be using a custom script to scan rather than a plugin from an enterprise solution.

Another use case is a vulnerability found during incident response. If I determine a specific vulnerability was used to compromise a server, I then use this technique to determine other possible compromised systems. If they were not compromised, then we have them patch.  — Tom Webb

Masscan

Installing  the utility is easy

git clone https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan

cd masscan/

make; make install

Masscan uses a similar command line to nmap.

masscan -p 443,448,456,563,614,636,989,990,992,993,994,995,8080,10000

10.0.0.0/8 -oG 10-scan-ssl - -max-rate 10000
  • -oG Grepable output
  • -p port to scan
  • 10.0.0.0/8 network to scan
  • -oG Output in grepable format
  • 10-scan-443 is filename created by scan
  • --make-rate sets the speed of the scan

Once Masscan has quickly identified targets for deeper inspection, you can use your more specific tool to determine if the system is vulnerable.  In this example, its an nmap plugin.

NMAP

cd /tmp

svn co https://svn.nmap.org/nmap

cd nmap

./configure;make;make install

To get the input file in the correct format, use the following command to get just a file with a single IP per line.

grep -v '#' 10-scan-443 |awk '{print $2}' >/tmp/nmap

To run nmap, make sure you have the right ports specified, the specific script you need and specify the correct input file.

nmap -p 443,448,456,563,614,636,989,990,992,993,994,995,8080,10000 --script=ssl-heartbleed.nse -iL /tmp/nmap -oA /tmp/ssl-vul-test

 

SOURCE: https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Scanning+for+Single+Critical+Vulnerabilities/18881

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masscan – The Fastest TCP Port Scanner

masscan is the fastest TCP port scanner. It can scan the entire Internet in under 6 minutes, transmitting 10 million packets per second.

It produces results similar to nmap, the most famous port scanner. Internally, it operates more like scanrand, unicornscan, and ZMap, using asynchronous transmission. The major difference is that it’s faster than these other scanners. In addition, it’s more flexible, allowing arbitrary address ranges and port ranges.

NOTE: masscan uses a custom TCP/IP stack. Anything other than simple port scans will cause conflict with the local TCP/IP stack. This means you need to either use the -S option to use a separate IP address, or configure your operating system to firewall the ports that masscan uses.

PF_RING – Beyond 2 million packets/second

To get beyond 2 million packets/second, you need an Intel 10-gbps Ethernet adapter and a special driver known as “PF_RING DNA” from http://www.ntop.org/products/pf_ring/. Masscan doesn’t need to be rebuilt in order to use PF_RING. To use PF_RING, you need to build the following components:

libpfring.so (installed in /usr/lib/libpfring.so)
pf_ring.ko (their kernel driver)
ixgbe.ko (their version of the Intel 10-gbps Ethernet driver)

You don’t need to build their version of libpcap.so.

When masscan detects that an adapter is named something like dna0 instead of something like eth0, it’ll automatically switch to PF_RING mode.

Usage

Usage is similar to nmap. To scan a network segment for some ports:

masscan -p80,8000-8100 10.0.0.0/8

This will:

  • scan the 10.x.x.x subnet, all 16 million addresses
  • scans port 80 and the range 8000 to 8100, or 102 addresses total
  • print output to that can be redirected to a file

To see the complete list of options, use the –echo feature. This dumps the current configuration and exits. This output can be used as input back into the program:

masscan -p80,8000-8100 10.0.0.0/8 --echo > xxx.conf
masscan -c xxx.conf --rate 1000

Banner checking

Masscan can do more than just detect whether ports are open. It can also complete the TCP connection and interaction with the application at that port in order to grab simple “banner” information.

The problem with this is that masscan contains its own TCP/IP stack separate from the system you run it on. When the local system receives a SYN-ACK from the probed target, it responds with a RST packet that kills the connection before masscan can grab the banner.

The easiest way to prevent this is to assign masscan a separate IP address. This would look like the following:

masscan 10.0.0.0/8 -p80 --banners --source-ip 192.168.1.200

The address you choose has to be on the local subnet and not otherwise be used by another system.

In some cases, such as WiFi, this isn’t possible. In those cases, you can firewall the port that masscan uses. This prevents the local TCP/IP stack from seeing the packet, but masscan still sees it since it bypasses the local stack. For Linux, this would look like:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 60000 -j DROP
masscan 10.0.0.0/8 -p80 --banners --source-port 60000

On Mac OS X and BSD, it might look like this:

sudo ipfw add 1 deny tcp from any to any 60000 in
masscan 10.0.0.0/8 -p80 --banners --source-port 60000

Windows doesn’t respond with RST packets, so neither of these techniques are necessary. However, masscan is still desigend to work best using its own IP address, so you should run that way when possible, even when its not strictly necessary.

The same thing is needed for other checks, such as the –heartbleed check, which is just a form of banner checking.

You can download masscan here: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan

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