Penetration Testing and Mitigation of Vulnerabilities Windows Server
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International Journal of Network Security, Vol.18, No.3, PP.501-513, May 2016 501 Penetration Testing and Mitigation of Vulnerabilities Windows Server Deris Stiawan1, Mohd Yazid Idris2, Abdul Hanan Abdullah2, Mohammed AlQurashi3, Rahmat Budiarto3 (Corresponding author: Deris Stiawan) Department of Computer Science, Universitas Sriwijaya, Indonesia1 Department of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Malaysia2 College of Computer Science and Information Technology, Al Baha University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia3 (Email: [email protected]) (Received Jan. 15, 2015; revised and accepted Apr. 11 & Aug. 24, 2015) Abstract ous work [14] which compares attack sophistication with attacker skill knowledge. Cyber attack has become a major concern over the past Meanwhile, analysis by [6, 12, 18] highlights an explo- few years. While the technical capability to attack has sion of security threats in recent years such as Trojans, declined, hacking tools - both simple and comprehensive viruses, worms, adware, spyware and DoS which are con- - are themselves evolving rapidly. Certain approaches are tinuing to grow, multiply and evolve. According to [14] necessary to protect a system from cyber threats. This indicate the technical capability to attack tended to de- work engages with comprehensive penetration testing in crease. On the other hand, hacking tools are getting more order to find vulnerabilities in the Windows Server and effective and also increasingly available and accessible to exploit them. Some forms of method penetration test- the public. Moreover, attackers are able to detect vulner- ing have been used in this experiment, including recon- abilities faster than security experts or vendors and can naissance probes, brute force attacks based on password cause time delays by patching in vulnerabilities. guessing, implanting malware to create a backdoor for escalating privileges, and flooding the target. This exper- Research conducted by [26, 27] found that Windows iment was focused on gaining access in order to ascertain Server has more serious vulnerabilities, as several of its the identities of hackers and thus better understand their services and daemons are unsecured and open to ac- methods and performed penetration testing to evaluate cess. This lays open the possibility of exploitation. Ad- security flaws in the Windows Server, which is a famous ditionally [32] located vulnerabilities in the Apache and OS for web applications. It is expected that this work will IIS HTTP server on the Windows Server operating sys- serve as a guideline for practitioners who want to prepare tem. [28] conducted an attack scenario on the Windows and protect their systems before putting them online. Server. Keywords: Mitigation, penetration testing, vulnerabilities, In order to understand how to protect against and pre- windows server vent attacks, it is useful to understand from the attacker's perspective what methods they will use, what goals they have and how they launch their attacks. This experi- 1 Introduction ment takes improvised actions to highlight several types of attacks carried out such as: probes to obtain detailed A definition of hacking is presented by [9, 25]. These information, brute force for guessing passwords, gaining sources also identify security violation trends in internet- privileges access and flooding the target to reduce the working and their effects. More illegal activities such as availability of services. hacktivism, hacking and exploiting weaknesses have been The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. described by [12, 16, 29] offer a different perspective by Section 2 presents the related works. Section 3 presents highlighting the potential economic threats and impacts the taxonomy of the attack this experiment is concerned. of cyber attacks. A growing problem, hacking activities Section 4 describes experimental experiments. This sec- combine easy to learn pentest with a variety of tools such tion deals with data collecting and an attack scenario in- as those offered by C.E.H [11]. Moreover, they use both cluding scanning and exploitation for mitigating vulner- simple and comprehensive tools (defined as 'Metasploit'), ability. Finally, Section 5 offers a conclusion and sugges- as defined by [5, 21]. This reinforces the findings of previ- tions for future work. International Journal of Network Security, Vol.18, No.3, PP.501-513, May 2016 502 2 Related Works of attack: Probes, Remote to Local (R2L), User to Root (U2R) and DoS as widely used in the field of intrusion Penetration testing has been described in different ways detection/prevention system, with reference to [3, 4, 8, since 1989 by [24]. New methods and approaches are con- 31]. tinuously being expanded from year to year. In 2001, [7] described certain steps needed to prevent threats and con- vey the importance of understanding the mindset of an 3 Experiments attacker, as well as their methods and goals. In line with that, [2] has suggested a methodology to ensure that the The dataset employed in this study was Intrusion Threat penetration testing exercise is reliable, repeatable and re- Detection Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (ITD UTM), as portable. shown in Figure 1, available in [30]. All attacks were executed and infiltrated on ITD UTM. The network envi- Analyses and predictions by [12, 18] indicate that ronment is set up for exploitation using Windows Server there has been an explosion of security threats in recent and two terminal clients running as attackers. They are years. This has been corroborated and previously pre- connected to 3COM Superstack II 100 Mb/s, as shown in dicted by [17, 19], which describe a future war based on Figure 1. cyber attacks. More recently, [23] has predicted and anal- ysed cyber attacks in the context of further security vio- lation trends. Meanwhile, [10] has referred to Microsoft 3.1 Data Collecting and Procedures warning users about the strengths of character passwords Several steps must be taken to conduct these experiments. such as: a combination of case sensitive letters and digits, This work is an improvement on some of the advice of- maximum-minimum password age, and minimum pass- fered by [22] and this research agrees with the argument word length. expressed by [1], particularly on these problems: (i) re- Furthermore, it seems that every bug can cause vul- cent trends and new methods of attack have been in- nerabilities which are existent and undocumented, of- volved, (ii) control and guideline steps for penetration, ten never being revealed, discovered or exploited. From and (iii) various methods of attack for penetration and the attacker's perspective, vulnerability is an opportu- mitigation become comprehensive. In this experiment, nity that can be exploited. A vulnerability database is a three weeks were spent collecting data and finding vul- collection of records containing technical descriptions of nerability within CVE and security communities. More- vulnerabilities in computer systems. Common Vulnera- over, five weeks was spent attempting penetration testing bilities and Exposures (CVE) began in 1999 as a result of on the victim. There are some differences in the results the adoption of a common naming practice for describing obtained in the first and second data collection. The first software vulnerabilities and including security tools and data were collected directly from the server, regardless of services as well as on the fixed sites of commercial and the network broadcast. Conversely, the second data were open source software package providers. We argue that collected using the hub terminal which also captured the dependencies exist between scanning phases and informa- broadcast network. Furthermore, this procedure was fol- tion holes from CVE vulnerability databases. This has lowed in this section: consequences for access. Additionally, work by [13, 15, 20] describes the benefits 1) To distinguish between normal traffic and attack, the of CVE compatibility, integrating vulnerability services attack was separated and divided into several stages and tools allowing more complete security provision and based on time, machine target and method of attack. more alert advisory services. Every month CVE MITRE 2) Machine 10.10.10.1 is a NAT Firewall server that receives between 150 and 300 new announcement alert both allows and denies private traffic to and from and advisory submissions from ISS, Security Focus, Neo- the internet. hapsis, and the National Infrastructure Protection Cen- tre. Currently CVE identifies compatible enablement 3) TCPdump is used to sniff real traffic. It uses the lib- data exchange between security products and provides cap library to capture packets and has the ability to a baseline for evaluating coverage of tools and services. consider the properties of an ideal as a packet snif- There are thousands of information vulnerabilities within fer. TCPdump produced raw data (pcap files) during the CVE database. Unfortunately, time is required to experiments conducted via 10.10.10.30. make a patch release after exploitation has been found. 4) Machine 10.10.10.40 running on Snort IDS 2.8.5.2 Consequently, there is usually a a time delay between an (Build 121), PCRE ver 8.12. This is used to iden- exploitation identification and a patch and signature re- tify the threat as well as to compare attacks carried lease. It can be argued that there are dependencies in the out which can be recognised by snort signature. results between the scanning stages [15] and information vulnerabilities in the CVE database. This means that 5) Two machine attackers, 10.10.10.15 (called Hacker the vulnerability could be a security flaw exploitable by XP) running on Windows XP SP3 and 10.10.10.20 attackers. based on Backtrack 4 (called Hacker BT) to pene- In this experiment followed four dominant categories trate Windows Server SP3 in 10.10.10.25. International Journal of Network Security, Vol.18, No.3, PP.501-513, May 2016 503 Figure 1: Topology of test bed environment Meanwhile, in this experiment all attacks were exe- • Attackers try to escalate privilege to adminis- cuted on ITD UTM.