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Windows privilege escalation guide

Security / By / 8 January 2020

Ryan McFarland writes on his blog: “Privilege escalation always comes down to proper enumeration. But to accomplish proper enumeration you need to know what to check and look for. This takes familiarity with systems that normally comes along with experience. At first privilege escalation can seem like a daunting task, but after a while you start to filter through what is normal and what isn’t. It eventually becomes easier to know what to look for rather than digging through everything hoping to find that needle in the haystack. Hopefully this guide will provide a good foundation to build upon and get you started.”

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“How we broke PHP, hacked Pornhub and earned $20,000”

Security / By / 11 March 2020

This is a very interesting read on how Dario Weißer (@haxonaut), cutz and Ruslan Habalov (@evonide) were able to find a PHP unserialize bug to exploit and gain remote code execution on Pornhub. Pornhub’s bug bounty program is at Hackerone In stead of actively attacking Pornhub, they took another road and attacked what Pornhub is built upon: PHP.

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Binary webshell through OPcache in PHP 7

Security / By / 11 March 2020

GoSecure wrote up a new PHP exploitation technique using the default OPcache engine from PHP 7. Using this attack vector, it’s possible to bypass certain hardening techniques that disallow the file write access in the web directory. This could be used by an attacker to execute his own malicious code in a hardened environment.


This new PHP 7 OPcache attack vector is an additional exploitation technique tailored to specific hardened environments. It is not a universal vulnerability affecting PHP applications. With the arrival of PHP 7.0 in major distributions such as Ubuntu 16.04, this attack vector reinforces even more the need to audit your code for file upload vulnerabilities and to be wary of potentially dangerous server configuration.

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Cracking PHP rand()

Security / By / 11 March 2020

Sjoerd Langkemper writes about Cracking PHP rand(): Webapps occasionaly need to create tokens that are hard to guess. For example for session tokens or CSRF tokens, or in forgot password functionality where you get a token mailed to reset your password. These tokens should be cryptographically secure, but are often made by calling rand() multiple times and transforming the output to a string. This post will explore how hard it is to predict a token made with rand().


This is a very interesting read about how PHP rand() works, and how to attack & crack it. The post ends with the following conclusion:

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Joomla websites abused as open proxy for Denial-of-Service attacks

Security / By / 22 October 2019

Joomla websites using the Googlemaps plugin for Joomla are actively abused as open proxy for launching Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Even though the Googlemaps plugin vulnerability plugin_googlemap2_proxy.php was released over one and a half (1,5) years ago, I still see these DoS-attacks happening on a regular basis…

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MySQL sleep() attacks

Security / By / 28 July 2021

MySQL sleep() command injection attacks: how not validating your PHP user input can lead to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against websites and back-end database servers. Simply by putting “AND sleep(3)” in the address bar… Here is how to put a MySQL server to sleep, happy SQL injection!

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How to test SMTP Authentication and StartTLS

Security / By / 15 September 2021

How to test SMTP authentication and StartTLS using the command line?

When investigating SMTP authentication issues, particular over TLS encrypted SMTP connections, it’s always handy if you are able to test the SMTP authentication and StartTLS connection. Preferably from your command line. This post shows you how to test SMTP servers, verify SMTP authentication and StartTLS encrypted connections from the Linux and Windows command line.

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prettyPhoto DOM XSS on Saton.org

prettyPhoto DOM based XSS

Security / By / 16 October 2020

prettyPhoto DOM based XSS on Saotn.org… This evening, after tweeting about preventing cross site scripting vulnerabilities, I received a reply from Olivier Beg. His reply to my tweet contained an image, as you can see above. He alerted me that Saotn.org was vulnerable to a DOM based XSS vulnerability, hidden in prettyPhoto used by my WordPress theme. Whoops! So, I had work to do! But, what is prettyPhoto and what exactly is a DOM based XSS?

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Grep for forensic log parsing and analysis on Windows Server IIS

Security / By / 17 June 2020

How to use GnuWin32 ported tools like grep.exe and find.exe for forensic log file analysis in Windows Server. In this article I’ll give some real live examples of using these ported GnuWin tools like grep.exe for logfile analysis on Windows servers. The article provides three example, as an alternative to LogParser, because finding spam scripts fast is often very important.

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