You can distribute this document freely, as long as no changes are made to the file, or as long as someone else does not pretend credit for it. All comments and suggestions about the material presented here should be directed at [email protected]. If future versions of this document include add-ons coming from other people than me, then proper credit to the various authors will be clearly identified. All version updates of this document are to be released by me.
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This paper consists of the recollection and analysis of two network intrusion that I have performed as part of my duties as a computer security consultant. The name of the company I worked, as well as their customers that I hacked into, will remain anonymous for obvious reasons. The goal of this paper is to show real life cases of what computer security looks like in the wild, in corporate environments. I will try to outline the principal reasons why these intrusions were successful, and why this kind of performance could be achieved by almost anybody, putting whole networks at risks that their owner don't even begin to realize yet.
Preface
It's been over a year now that I delved into computer security. Before that, I was doing computer support and server admin on various platforms: DOS, OS/2, Novell, Windows. I have always been kind of a hack, but I never realized it until I had enough free time ahead of me to start studying the hacking scene and the computer security industry more in depth. That is how I started writing whitepapers, and that I was eventually invited to a conference to present some of my work. But I didn't want to have problems with the law, and I was short on ressources (money, boxes, bandwidth), so I limited myself to keeping tracks of new vulnerabilities and understanding how they worked without actually having the opportunity to try them on a real machine. So when I got this job and they asked me to try to hack these networks, I was really anxious at what I could really do. After all, I can't be worse than a script kiddie, can I?
This document is presented to anyone who has interests in computer security, network intrusion, hacking, viruses and Trojan horses, network administration and computing in general.