Hacking Gmail account using GX cookie

Disclaimer: This post is only for education purpose. 

Introduction

Hacking web application was always curious for the script kiddies. And hacking free web email account is every geek first attempt. The method which I will describe in this post is not new; the same method can be applied to yahoo and other free web email services too.

The method we will be using is cookie stealing and replaying the same back to the Gmail server. There are many ways you can steal cookie, one of them is XSS (Cross site scripting) discussed by other is earlier post. But we won’t be using any XSS here, in our part of attack we will use some local tool to steal cookie and use that cookie to get an access to Gmail account.

Assumption:

• You are in Local Area Network (LAN) in a switched / wireless environment : example : office , cyber café, Mall etc.
• You know basic networking.

Tool used for this attack:

• Cain & Abel
• Network Miner
• Firefox web browser with Cookie Editor add-ons

Attack in detail:

We assume you are connected to LAN/Wireless network. Our main goal is to capture Gmail GX cookie from the network. We can only capture cookie when someone is actually using his gmail. I’ve noticed normally in lunch time in office, or during shift start people normally check their emails. If you are in cyber café or in Mall then there are more chances of catching people using Gmail.

We will go step by step,
If you are using Wireless network then you can skip this Step A.

A] Using Cain to do ARP poisoning and routing:

Switch allows unicast traffic mainly to pass through its ports. When X and Y are communicating eachother in switch network then Z will not come to know what X & Y are communicating, so inorder to sniff that communication you would have to poison ARP table of switch for X & Y. In Wireless you don’t have to do poisoning because Wireless Access points act like HUB which forwards any communication to all its ports (recipients). 

• Start Cain from Start > Program > Cain > Cain
• Click on Start/Stop Snigger tool icon from the tool bar, we will first scan the network to see what all IPs are used in the network and this list will also help us to launch an attack on the victim.
• Then click on Sniffer Tab then Host Tab below. Right click within that spreadsheet and click on Scan Mac Addresses, from the Target section select

All hosts in my subnet and then press Ok. This will list all host connected in your network. You will notice you won’t see your Physical IP of your machine in that list. 
How to check your physical IP ?
> Click on start > Run type cmd and press enter, in the command prompt type 
Ipconfig and enter. This should show your IP address assign to your PC.
It will have following outputs:


Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : xyz.com
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
Main thing to know here is your IP address and your Default Gateway.

Make a note of your IP Address & default gateway. From Cain you will see list of IP addresses, here you have to choose any free IP address which is not used anywhere. We assume IP 192.168.1.10 is not used anywhere in the network.

• Click on Configure > APR > Use Spoof ed IP and MAC Address > IP

Type in 192.168.1.10 and from the poisoning section click on “Use ARP request Packets” and click on OK.

• Within the Sniffer Tab , below click on APR Tab, from the left hand side click on APR and now click on the right hand top spreadsheet then click on plus sign tool from top. The moment you click that it will show you list of IP address on left hand side. Here we will target the victim IP address and the default gateway.

The purpose is to do ARP poisoning between victim and the default gateway and route the victim traffic via your machine. From the left side click on Victim IP address, we assume victim is using 192.168.1.15. The moment you click on victim IP you will see remaining list on the right hand side here you have to select default gateway IP address i.e. 192.168.1.1 then click on OK.

• Finally, Click on Start/Stop Sniffer tool menu once again and next click on Start/Stop APR. This will start poisoning victim and default gateway.

B] Using Network Miner to capture cookie in plain text

We are using Network miner to capture cookie, but Network miner can be used for manythings from capturing text , image, HTTP parameters, files. Network Miner is normally used in Passive reconnaissance to collect IP, domain and OS finger print of the connected device to your machine. If you don’t have Network miner you can use any other sniffer available like Wireshark, Iris network scanner, NetWitness etc.

We are using This tool because of its ease to use.

• Open Network Miner by clicking its exe (pls note it requires .Net framework to work).
• From the “---Select network adaptor in the list---“ click on down arrow and select your adaptor If you are using Ethernet wired network then your adaptor would have Ethernet name and IP address of your machine and if you are using wireless then adaptor name would contain wireless and your IP address. Select the one which you are using and click on start.

Important thing before you start this make sure you are not browsing any websites, or using any Instant Mesaging and you have cleared all cookies from firefox.

• Click on Credential Tab above. This tab will capture all HTTP cookies , pay a close look on “Host” column you should see somewhere mail.google.com. If you could locate mail.google.com entry then in the same entry right click at Username column and click on “copy username” then open notepad and paste the copied content there.
• Remove word wrap from notepad and search for GX in the line. Cookie which you have captured will contain many cookies from gmail each would be separated by semicolon ( GX cookie will start with GX= and will end with semicolon you would have to copy everything between = and semicolon

Example : GX= axcvb1mzdwkfefv ; ßcopy only axcvb1mzdwkfefv

Now we have captured GX cookie its time now to use this cookie and replay the attack and log in to victim email id, for this we will use firefox and cookie editor add-ons.

C] Using Firefox & cookie Editor to replay attack.

• Open Firefox and log in your gmail email account.
• from firefox click on Tools > cookie Editor.
• In the filter box type .google.com and Press Filter and from below list search for cookiename GX. If you locate GX then double click on that GX cookie and then from content box delete everything and paste your captured GX cookie from stepB.4 and click on save and then close.
• From the Address bar of Firefox type mail.google.com and press enter, this should replay victim GX cookie to Gmail server and you would get logged in to victim Gmail email account.
• Sorry! You can’t change password with cookie attack.

How to be saved from this kind of attack?
Google has provided a way out for this attack where you can use secure cookie instead of unsecure cookie. You can enable secure cookie option to always use https from Gmail settings. 
Settings > Browser connection > Always use https



Source(s) - http://www.go4expert.com

How to Copy Text from any Restricted Copying Site?

NOTE - The methods illustrated here are for educational purposes only. It is not advised to copy any copyrighted material in any webpage for commercial purposes. The methods illustrated are STRICTLY for non - commercial, personal use only. 

1. Using Firefox - 

1. Like Opera, Firefox allows you to configure JavaScript on any web. If you want to turn if of, just hit the Tools menu on the top bar and click Option.

2. Accessing Content panel, here you can easily control JavaScript by enable it (check it in the box) or disable it (uncheck the box option). Hit the OK button to finish.

Now, you can easily select and copy text from any web site.

2. Using Chrome - 

1. Open Your Chrome Browser 

2. In the Tools Menu  - 

(Image © Scott Orgera)

Click on the Chrome "wrench" icon, located in the upper right hand corner of your browser window. When the drop-down menu appears, select the choice labeled Settings.

3. Chrome Settings

(Image © Scott Orgera)

Chrome's Settings page should now be displayed in a new browser tab or window, depending on your browser's configuration. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Show advanced settings... link, circled in the example above.

4. Content Settings

(Image © Scott Orgera)

The Settings page should now be expanded to display more options. Locate the Privacy section and click on the Content settings... button, circled in the example above.

5. Disable JavaScript

(Image © Scott Orgera)

Chrome's Content Settings should now be displayed. Locate the JavaScript section, containing two options each accompanied by a radio button. To disable JavaScript, select the option labeled Do not allow any site to run JavaScript. After making this selection, click on the OKbutton to return to the previous screen.

Source(s) - 1. http://www.about.com

                   2. http://starblogger.net

Fixing the IE 8 warning – ‘Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?’

In IE 7 and ealier, this dialog would cause annoyance to users but generally didn’t cause any other significant problems. This was because it was worded in such a way that most users would click on the Yes button and allow non-secure content to be downloaded.

However, the wording in the IE 8 version of this dialog has changed:

To download the content a user would now have to click on the No button. As we know, most people using the web onlyscan text and avoid reading it if at all possible! They will usually go for the Yes button if there is not an OK button.

Some sites are going to find that their secure pages in IE 8 have the following problems:

• Any non-secure HTTP image beacons used for analytics data gathering will often be ignored
• The page may not display or even work correctly if it relies on non-secure images, CSS or Javascript

Therefore, avoiding mixed content on HTTPS pages is even more important now that IE 8 has been released. It often becomes an issue when using third party services such as analytics or Content Delivery Networks (CDN). For example, weavoided the use of Google hosted Ajax libraries on our site until Google added HTTPS support.

As mention in the previous blog post, an IE user you can disable this warning by:

1. Going to Tools->Internet Options->Security
2. Select the Security tab
3. Click on the Internet zone icon at the top of the tab page
4. Click the Custom Level button
5. In the Miscellaneous section change Display mixed content to Enable
6. Repeat steps 1 – 5 for the Local intranet and Trusted sites zones

However, if you are developing a web site you can’t expect your visitors to do this. It is better to fix the cause of the problem so that the warning is not displayed by default in IE 8. The only way to do this warning is to ensure that your HTTPS pages only access embedded resources using the HTTPS protocol. You can do this by following these steps:

1. Use a sniffer like HttpWatch that supports HTTPS and shows files being read from the browser cache. The free Basic Edition is sufficient for this because you only need to see the URLs being accessed.
2. Access the page causing the problem and click No when you see the security warning dialog.
3. Any HTTP resources shown in the HttpWatch window are the source of the problem; even if they loaded directly from the browser cache and didn’t cause a network round trip:
4. If you don’t initially see any HTTP based resources, try refreshing the page because a non-secure image may have been retrieved from the IE or Firefox image cache

EDIT #1: If you are a web developer trying to track down why your page causes this warning please also take a look athttp://blog.httpwatch.com/2009/09/17/even-more-problems-with-the-ie-8-mixed-content-warning/ where we cover some javascript snippets that can also trigger this warning. The comments section of both of these posts also contain useful information where people have found and solved related issues.

EDIT #2: Updated instructions to apply the change to all network zones

Why is insert equation editor greyed out in word 2007?

Because we are working the old 1997-2003 .DOC format. The file should be saved as a 2007/2010 .DOCX format and all will be well.