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| About the Author Simon Biles is a founder of Thinking Security Ltd., an Information Security and Risk Management consultancy firm based near Oxford in the UK. |
We’ve had two bank holidays in a row here in the UK – first off for Easter, then for the Royal Wedding – time off work coupled with very pleasant weather and plenty of “refreshments” has caused my brain to atrophy! So, rather than pulling one of my usual type of topics from the hat for this article, I thought that I’d do a mini-project for the month.
[ I’ll apologise up front though – I can only just program in both Perl and C, and C isn’t exactly column friendly, so it’ll be Perl. I know that many readers here can program in Perl, and most of you probably better than me – I’d be interested to hear corrections, tips and tricks in the comments so as to improve, as no doubt there are better ways of doing this ! ]
One of my first tasks in the office this morning, after a cup of coffee of course, was to review my server logs [1]. As of yet I’ve not got enough staff to have a minion to do this for me, but to be honest I’d miss the connection to the real world of computing if I did [2]. I run a Linux server in a datacentre in Birmingham as my company’s main web-server and my high bandwidth, static IP’d pen-test machine. For the last few months I’ve been meaning to do something about the 404 errors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_404) that are being reported by Apache – some are my fault for taking pages away that people clearly still cross reference – the others though are clearly the work of automated web vulnerability scanning tools.
Vulnerability scanners (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulnerability_scanner) are the bottom end of the pen-test toolkit – they are to penetration testing what the Windows “find” command is to digital forensics; e.g. superficial and basic. There are various types – but of interest today are those that operate on the application layer over HTTP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_model#Layer_7:_Application_Layer). In the open source market both Nikto (http://www.cirt.net/nikto2) and Nessus (http://www.tenable.com/products/nessus) [ Nessus isn’t open source per se, but is free for home use … ] are examples of products that perform tests against webservers for potentially insecure CGIs and files – the trouble with this is that in order to determine if an insecure CGI script or file is present, the scanner asks Apache for it, and receives a 404 if it isn’t there, each 404 is written to the log, and when Nikto, for example, tests for over 6400 possible vulnerabilities you can imagine what the logs look like ! Sadly, tools like these, as they are available to everyone, are not only used by the kind of people that get written authorisation before testing your web server...Read more at http://www.forensicfocus.com/simon-biles
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