In my April webinar, I showed how you could both attack and defend a vulnerable web application, using Manish Kishan Tanwar’s capture the flag system, “Billu B0x.” In the attack, I chained together exploits against three vulnerabilities: SQL injection, local file inclusion, and a kernel vulnerability. It took all three to get “root” administrative privilege. Once I got root, it was time to put on the defensive white hat, where we had at least four different ways that we could break the attack.
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Each of these defenses are things you could do proactively, as hardening measures you take before you even know that you have a vulnerability. Here’s what you could do:
- Use rate-limiting with iptables to break the web scanning that helped the attacker find the vulnerable web pages.
- Use ModSecurity, a free web application firewall, to catch and break the SQL injection attack.
- Use AppArmor to contain the attacker once he compromises the web application.
- Use a best practices iptables egress rule set to break the attacker’s reverse shell.
