Author Archives: illwill

Recently I had done some training where we setup ESXI 6.7 on a Intel NUC. It’s been over a month since I’ve touched it. Apparently during the training my coworker had set a root password for the install, which was supposedly written down, but was either typed wrong in the notes or fat-fingered while setting it. Unfortunately, you can no longer boot into single user mode or Service Console to reset the password and VMware suggest you reinstall ESXI to reset the password. I didn’t want to risk trying that method because I wasnt sure if it would affect the currently installed VMs and I didn’t have a copy of ESXI with me to do so. Instead I used a bootable Kali USB to mount the ESXI drive and reset the root password to a blank password by editing the shadow file.

My new open source python OSINT framework, skiptracer was released @ HushCon East on June 1st. Initial attack vectors for recon usually involve utilizing pay-for-data/API (Recon-NG), or paying to utilize transforms (Maltego) to get data mining results. Using some basic python webscraping of PII paywall sites to compile passive information on a target. The modules will allow queries for phone/email/screen names/real names/addresses/IP/Hostname/breach credentials etc.. It will help you collect relevant information about a target to help expand your attack surface.`Everyone should be encourage to submit new ideas/modules. You can get the code here: https://github.com/xillwillx/skiptracer feel free to submit new modules or code fixes.

Phishing scams tricking unsuspecting users into opening nefarious files are nothing new, and attackers have using weaponized documents for just about as long. This week, I had the pleasure of being featured on Milton Security’s blog to talk about a new attack that was spotted as early as last year, and was finally patched by Microsoft in April. I went over this CVE-2017-0199 vulnerability that affected Windows based machines using Microsoft Word and the default built-in Wordpad, that enabled an attacker to send a malicious RTF file that would execute a HTA file remotely without any user interaction besides opening the file. I went over how to create the file using Metasploit, a python script, and finally just using Microsoft Word itself and editing the file to make it autorun. Spear-phishing attacks could allow the attacker to send these files to their victims over a spoofed in email and gain a foothold into the victim’s network if they weren’t properly patched which the article also covered towards the end on how to mitigate. So head over there and check it out. https://www.miltonsecurity.com/company/blog/analysis-cve-2017-0199-ms-word-threats-are-back