TryHackMe: Complete Beginner (Supplements)

author: Nathan Acks
date: 2021-11-21

MAL: Researching

Online Sandboxing

Online automated malware analysis sandboxes:

Practical: Calculating & Reporting Checksums

Calculating file hashes with PowerShell!

# Using CertUtil
#
CertUtil -hashfile $FILE_PATH $ALGORITHM

# Using Get-FileHash
#
Get-FileHash -Algorithm $ALGORITHM $FILE_PATH

In both cases, the algorithm can be excluded (in which case SHA1 is used for CertUtil and SHA-256 is used for Get-FileHash). Lots of different hashing algorithms are supported - run help Get-FileHash, etc. to see a list.

MAL: Strings

Practical: Finding Bitcoin Addresses in Ransomware

Blockchain exploration tool (search for hashes):

BlockCypher

(Not a lot of supported blockchains though…)

Fun side-note: PowerShell can use Linux-style redirects (>)!

Google Dorking

Enter: Search Engine Optimization

It looks like all of Google’s optimization tests live at web.dev now.

web.dev: Measure page quality

BeepBoop - Robots.txt

I always forget that the Sitemap directive lives in robots.txt.

It turns out that most web crawlers support regexes in the Allow/Disallow statements. Also, directives for different crawlers can be given by using multiple User-agent directives (apparently a crawler will only use the first block that it matches up until a new User-agent directive).

What is Google Dorking?

Useful Google search modifiers:

site: - Limit results to the provided domain
filetype: - Limit results to the provided file type (PDF, etc.)
intitle: - Require that the page title contain particular keywords
cache: - View the most recent cached version of a particular URL

Wireshark 101

Collection Methods

Ways to gather packets:

(1) Just listen to the packets that you can see normally (really only works on very simple/insecure networks).

(2) Physical taps (Packet Squirrel, LAN Turtle, etc.)

(3) MAC flooding (fill up a switch’s CAM table with bogus requests until it is forced to fall back to acting like a dum hub; somewhat dangerous).

(4) ARP poisoning (falsely advertise yourself as the router or another machine; less dangerous than MAC flooding but harder to successfully pull off).