Welcome back, my amateur hackers!
In this tutorial, we will follow up on a previous tutorial on MySQL.
In that tutorial, I showed you the basics of running a MySQL server on
BackTrack. In addition, you might want to take a look at my tutorial on
the basics of databases,
if you are not familiar with databases and DataBase Management Systems
(DBMS). Since MySQL is SO important in so many web applications, I will
be doing more MySQL tutorials in the future. The more you know about
MySQL, the better you can hack MySQL!
Generally,
MySQL is teamed up with PHP and an Apache web server (often referred to
as LAMPP or XAMPP) to build dynamic, database driven web sites. Such
development packages as Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Ruby on Rails and
others all use MySQL as their default database. Millions of websites
have MySQL backends and very often they are "homegrown" websites,
without much attention on security.
In this tutorial, we will
looking to extract information about an online MySQL database before we
actually extract information from the database. Once again, I'll repeat,
the more we know, the more successful we will be in hacking and the
less chance you will be detected.
Here, we will be using one of the best database hacking tools available, sqlmap.
Sqlmap can be used for databases other than MySQL, such Microsoft's SQL
Server and Oracle, but here we will focus its capabilities on those
ubiquitous web sites that are built with PHP, Apache and MySQL.
Step 1Start Sqlmap
First, fire up BackTrack and go to BackTrack, then Information Gathering, then Database Analysis, then MySQL Analysis and finally, sqlmap as shown in the screenshot below.
Step 2Find a Vulnerable Web Site
In
order to get "inside" the web site and ultimately, the database, we are
looking for web sites that end in "php?id=" where XXX represents some
number. Those who are familiar with google hacks/dorks can do a search
on google by entering:
inurl:index.php?id=
inurl:gallery.php?id=
inurl:post.php?id=
inurl:article?id=
...among others.
This
will bring up literally millions of web sites with this basic
vulnerability criteria. If you are creative and ambitious, you can find
numerous web sites that list vulnerable web sites. You might want to
check these out.
For our purposes here and to keep you out of the long reach of the law, we will be hacking a website designed for this purpose, www.webscanhost.org.
We can practice on this web site and refine your skills without
worrying about breaking any laws and having to make bail money for you.
Step 3Open Sqlmap
When
you click on sqlmap, you will be greeted by a screen like that below.
Sqlmap is a powerful tool, written as a Python script (we will be doing
Python tutorial soon) that has a multitude of options. We will just be
scratching the surface of its capabilities in this tutorial.
Step 4Determine the DBMS Behind the Web Site
Before
we begin hacking a web site, we need to gather information. We need to
know WHAT we are hacking. As I have said many times before, most
exploits are very specific to the OS, the application, services, ports,
etc. Let's begin by finding out what the DBMS is behind this web site.
The start sqlmap on this task, we type:
./sqlmap.py -u "the entire URL of the vulnerable web page"
When
we do so, sqlmap will return results like that below. Notice where I
highlighted that the web site back-end is using MySQL 5.0
Step 5Find the Databases
Now
that we know what the database management system (DBMS) is MySQL 5.0,
we need to know what databases it contains. sqlmap can help us do that.
We take the command we used above and append to it --dbs, like this:
search_get_by_id.php?id=4" --dbs
When run this command against www.webscantest.com we get the results like those below. Notice that I have highlighted the two available databases, information schema and scanme.
Information schema is included in every MySQL installation and it
includes information on all the objects in the MySQL instance, but not
data of interest. Although it can be beneficial to explore that database
to find objects in all the databases in the instance, we will focus our
attention on the other database here , scanme, that may have some valuable information. Let's explore it further.
Step 6Get More Info from the Database
So,
now we know what the DBMS is (MySQL 5.0) and the name of a database of
interest (scanme). The next step is to try to determine the tables and
columns in that database. In this way, we will have some idea what data
is in the database, where it is and what type of data (numeric or
string). All of this information is critical and necessary to extracting
the data. To do this, we need to make some small revisions to our
sqlmap command. Everything else we have used above remains the same, but
now we tell sqlmap we want to see the tables and columns from the
scanme database. We can append our command with --columns -D and the name of the database, scanme such as this:
When we do so, sqlmap will target the scanme database and attempt to enumerate the tables and columns in the scanme database.
As
we can see below, sqlmap successfully was able to enumerate three
tables; (1) accounts, (2) inventory, and (3) orders, complete with
column names and datatypes. Not Bad!
Note that the orders table below includes credit card numbers, expiration dates and CVV. The hacker's "Golden Fleece"!!
As
you can see, sqlmap can be very versatile and useful tool for MySQL, as
well as SQL Server and Oracle database hacking. We will plan on coming
back to sqlmap in the near future to explore more of its extensive
database hacking capabilities.
Keep coming back, my amateur hackers, for more adventures in Hackerland
