How are hackers able to find such complicated exploits?
In: Technology
If you’re curious, have a listen to the Darknet Diaries podcast – it’s full of case studies of hacks, exploits and how they were identified, prevented and/or solved. It’s fascinating and accessible to people that aren’t experts in information security.
Ex vulnerability researcher here, basically you need to understand the system you’re exploiting and find a flaw in the logic to use to your advantage. If you want a more in-depth analysis let me know and I can explain how I’d find and create exploits.
It’s kind of like an ant colony looking forward food; you can kill (some of) them, or plug where they’re coming in, but they’re constantly searching for a tiny little hole to navigate until they get back in.
Really don’t need complicated exploits when Bob uses the same password for 10 different accounts. And opens every email attachment or clicks on any link.
A program that runs in a computer for example can be broken down into instructions. There are other programs out there called disassemblers that can show these instructions and in some cases provide a human readable description such as: here are the instructions that are followed when a user copies and pastes. By analysing the code a hacker might see that there is no check done on the amount of information that is copied. The hacker may then see or deduce what happens when they exploit this oversight. In some particular case it might be that copying a specific set of symbols that appear to make no sense can actually change the outcome of the perviously mentioned instructions by overwriting the programs instructions with the information copied. These new “hacked” instructions may then do malicious things like download nadsty programs
You try all the doors and ground floor windows. If that doesn’t work you lock for the hide-a-key rock that the local Home Depot sells. If that doesn’t work you look for easily climbed parts of the house and unlocked second story windows. If that doesn’t work you start getting creative and seeing if maybe you can impersonate a meter reader or some other ruse to get in.
It’s just a matter of trying different things (using known exploits, vulnerbilites, default passwords, security holes like strong networks (but some jackass has a web enabled coffee pot that you can get onto the network through using “admin” and “password”). Are they running old code on their websites that has known vulns? Do you know their employee email addresses and can you send them off-the self viruses to let you in?
The first thing you might try (checking doors) is simply looking for their employee login and trying known default accounts, and employee names and common passwords. Then you might start checking their publicly facing websites for known vulnerabilities. Then maybe (using automated software) you start scanning their home network for open or easily entered connections. Maybe their home network is great, but a branch is weaker.
Once something cracks, either an IoT device isn’t properly secured, you get an employee login, you get on their network another way (maybe it was as easy as sitting in the parking lot and looking for free wifi or running wifi password cracking software on a poorly secured wifi) what you do would depend on what you’re after.
Hacking things is like looking at a wall of various well built-ness, you’re objective is to get a needle from one side of the wall, to the other (by going through it). You scan the wall and search for a week point, a common one being people themselves, and you try and exploit it and break that part of the wall. There’s no one way to hack into things. You could (And I would never condone this without someone’s explicit and written prior consent):
Brute force admin credentials to try and gain access to the system.
If you’re resources are big and the target is big enough, you could go for bribery or even break in to the physical location where the computers are held, stick a usb into a computer and leave a lovely little virus which’ll give you what you want.
Best one is probably by people, email claiming to be IT or some other fake identity, state that you’ll need their email and password for xyz bs reason. Whilst most people probably won’t fall for it, all you need is one high up person who’s not tech savvy enough to spot the scam and then you have access to a whole bunch of information. If you can trick someone high up at twtiter for instance, to click on a scam link or open a nasty virus file, that can be you hacking in and finding what you need.
Generally speaking, the better the security, the more complicated the exploit, whilst I’m not a hacker, I imagine they’d start off with the lower level simple stuff, and then work their way up to the increasingly complicated exploits as their attempts fail
Everything starts with a single exploit discovery, like a null-byte exception, buffer overflow, or unsanitized inputs. Then, you look for more. Once you have enough to formulate a full-blown attack, you can either wait, sell the information, or develop attacks based on those vulnerabilities. Once they get good enough, they’ll already have attacks ready for most common vulnerabilities allowing them to quickly cripple or download all information from the compromised systems.
They are often extremely intelligent and have worked on or chosen to learn at a very deep level how certain systems work. No system is perfect, a lot of programming focuses more on getting things to work rather than being fool proof. Foolproof is a goal, but not a requirement. If you know the system you can understand how to exploit it.
ELI5: While bad guys are often highly skilled in their target technology, it’s also a team effort supported by everyone else on the planet (both good and bad).
Researchers and vendors announce their vulnerabilities so they can be understood and fixed by good guys, though that often means they’re also understood and exploited by bad guys.
These records are public too: https://nvd.nist.gov/
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