security.crudtastic.com

So, as you all know, I’m doing the Offensive Security – Pentesting with Backtrack course at the moment. It’s meant to be fun, it’s meant to be a joyous occasion, it’s not meant to lead to tears and anger!!

I guess it’s not the Offensive Security guys fault .. its a weird combination that causes an instant FAIL!

Let me run you through the scenario (and do my best to explain it). It seems that if you install VMware Fusion on OS X 10.6, and then run NMAP inside of a virtual machine in VMware that you MAY encounter problems. It’s a weird one because there are guys that are running the same config as me that do not experience these issues. Anyway, when you try and run certain scans as root, nmap will return an error that there are “no hosts up”. If you in turn run the scan as a standard user it works fine! The issue here is that some scans need to run as root, and then they fail. This is a known problem that seems to be talked about on a few forums and stuff. It also extends to zenmap!

Right now i’m going to configure a new backtrack installation on virtualbox and see if that gives me any better luck. If it works out i’ll have to transfer all my work from the vm image over to my virtualbox image. I can’t say i’m really too thrilled about this, i’m trying to plough through all this coursework so I can organise the exam soon. The super weird thing is that this issue has only just popped up recently (I have work saved in Leo that proves it DID work earlier on), god only knows what I did. I should learn to make snapshots WAY more often!

Hopefully this will explain this error to someone else that has the same issue as me. Hopefully you wont spend a day and a bit trying to work out why you cant do an nmap scan through proxychains like me!

So we all know Conficker is meant to explode our brains, empty our bank accounts and then run off with our dog on the 1st of April right? There’s a bunch of people that have applied the MS08-067 patch that basically stops all this nastiness, they’re probably also the same people that have strong passwords and an up to date antivirus solution.

So I guess the next thing is trying to track down machines that are already infected. The guys at SkullSecurity have a great blog article on how to use nmap to scan your network and detect these infected hosts.

If you get any errors it’s really worth reading through all the comments, Ron has done a great job in trying to respond to everyone. There are apparently some other tools coming out soon from other vendors .. but who doesn’t love an excuse to bust out nmap in anger!