Dharshin's Blog

I created this basic script to generate a small report from nmap scan results. It's just a quick-and-dirty bash script that can generate a CSV file from .gnmap files that are produced by nmap scanner. You can either use this for reporting or just to get a quick view of the hosts, open ports and services. It has been quite useful for me for penetration tests that I do. The following is a sample file I generated from an nmap scan and I opened the CSV in Microsoft Excel.

This is part 2 of the article, click here to read part 1 of the article. Modern Approaches to Attack Graphs Generation and Analysis In the modern approach, attack graphs are generated without the full knowledge about the network – which represents real-world scenarios. Then during the attack phase, the rest of the information is learned and the attack graph is altered accordingly. A planner or an intelligent mechanism such as a neural network is used to analyze the graphs and then to generate attacks. There are two notable research papers that discuss on attack planning. Ghosh and Ghosh proposed a new approach to attack planning using a planner [35]. Then Obes et al. have used the same concept and integrated the planner to a penetration testing framework to successfully conduct a penetration test [36].

This article is written based on the literature survey of my Master's theses on Automating Penetration Tests. The main objective of this research is to look into ways that penetration tests can be automated. However, I strongly believe that the capabilities of a good penetration tester cannot be automated using a computer program. So the intention is to automate systematic steps of penetration tests to save time and effort for the penetration tester. Basic Automation of Penetration tests There have been various attempts to simplify penetration tests by automating various steps of the penetration test. The simplest attempt is Autopwn [3] in the Metasploit framework [4]. The first penteser gathers information about target systems using Nmap or Nessus. This information is imported to a database using a database module in Metasploit. Autopwn query the database for open ports and services. Then it loads the exploits in Metasploit that match these services and launch them against ...

If you are a manager with a different background than IT or if you are a non-technical person wondering whether to conduct a penetration test for your organization, this article might be of help to you. What's Penetration Testing? In a penetration test (a. k. a. pentest) penetration testers (a. k. a. pentester) simulate an actual attack on the system being tested to assess the weaknesses of the system(s) and gives recommendations on fixing the vulnerabilities discovered. Penetration Testing Vs. Ethical Hacking? Ethical hacking is a buzz word that became popular in the information security industry with the introduction of the Certified Ethical Hacker exam by EC-Council. Although some argue that penetration testing and ethical hacking are two different things, it's quite hard to identify any difference between the two

This article discusses how you can disable DNS lookup on Cisco routers and switches and effect when DNS lookup is enabled. Problem In privilege EXEC mode, if you type in something other than a Cisco IOS command, the router assumes that you typed a domain name and it tries to resolve what ever you type. Although this feature is can be useful in some situations, for most of the time, this is a pain, especially if you do not have DNS server configured. The router becomes irresponsive for about 5-6 seconds trying to resolve the name. The following is an example. R4#wrong-command Translating "wrong-command"...domain server (255.255.255.255) (255.255.255.255) Translating "wrong-command"...domain server (255.255.255.255) % Unknown command or computer name, or unable to find computer address R4#