But They Were Wrong

BUT THEY WERE WRONG



So for as there are men, there have been wars and there will be. Although molded their shapes. From wars in the gulf to wars over cyber spaces now. As human beings keep moving in science, these wars are now pulled in different ways. Scary-looking face to face wars have now become more stealthy and scary.                       

--Johny

It was 0500 at 11th of  November. The whole city was in their beds warmy, asleep and alive. A soft beep woke me up and I cheked my phone. The message received was, 

"A security breach is carried out at our National Forces website. They have gone into our about hundred of systems and slurped blue prints and some other important stuff"



         I was an Australian citizen, a loyal and worthy. After completing my computer hacking education, I was recruited by an Intelligence Organization to work for the savage of our country men life. It was cold November, I woke up and after getting prepared I was going  to the head quarters, I was there on time.



"Hey Johny! You look in little hurry." Kamphius said receiving me.

"And I think we all are here for a purpose, a purpose you know ....." I Said and a voice heard

"Mr. Johny, Admiral Olaf  want to see you there in, come." Adams said.

I followed Adams and went to Admiral Olaf meeting room. When I reached, Sven and Brravo were already there.

"My boy! have a seat." Admiral Olaf said politely.



Admiral: "So, my boys you are here to know what happened last night? A U.S. hired cult has hacked into our about one hundred secret computer systems and we have lost our blueprints. Ah! How easy is to say this.

Oh Mr. Brravo! Where were your security defenses sleeping? Do you have any idea, they have put our toes in hell. I need my stuff back."

Brravo: "Sir, I've gone through all systems. The message hackers left says that those were D-Force hackers. This D-Force works for American Intelligence Federation which hires such criminal hackers to investigate into other counrties internals. They are no longer feelng thmeselves secure. So they breach into securities. This organization is purely funded and they are more likely be invadors rather than hackers."

Admiral: " They did what the wanted to. But it's a matter of national security. I want to kick them back. You guys make your team and you must report me within two days."

Sven: "The mission needs open facts I want to tell but..."

Admiral: "Oh come on Sven say whatever you gonna say don't  put like this"

Sven: "Sir, what the hell help we are doing? We got D-Force guys stuck to our systems and we can just sit here. I mean why is all this over news?  Why isn't President on the phone with You makes sure that no system in the world is safe? Why just two days? While you better know its all not easy."

Admiral: " It's a complicated situation and you soldiers are trained for times like this. Thats why I am pushing you guys so hard. You guys can make coffee through, Desert Storms. When no one else get to fight but you guys. Sven you tell me have you ever shoot some one?"

Sven:"No Sir."

Admiral: " Then it's a time to shoot'em up at their docks."

"Any Question?"

--a slience arose in room for some time.



         This short meeting was ended up, Admiral Olaf had great expectations from us. Tomorrow we were to meet at Tom's home, Tom was our special agent providing us with all the facilities in complete stealth and somehow with coffee."

         Next day we all guys Sven, Brravo and I were at Tom's home. Sitting around a desk to plan, to fire. Brravo was our back tracker. Who was able to find even a lillte cranny from a vast desert. Start was his turn to make investigate and to know where we have to reach and breach.

Tom comes in the room and as usual starts with personal confusions.

Tom: "Guys, I've heard that you gonna get a ticket to beach party?

"Are you kidding us?" I said to Tom.

"I remember those days when my father used to spend his most of time at beach parties. He was a cruel man." Tom turned half around and his left hand swished across his face.

"While in nights on my bed, I had been plannig damn things and thinking about to kill my father." He spoke in utter sad voice.

" Once I thought to hire three professionals to commit a crime then." Sven stopped him, saying.

"We are aslo three professionals by the way, are you gonna talk about us?"

"Jokes apart guys, then I remember I consulted Dr. Harley for my own treatment. I called him and asked for meeting. He invited me to his consulting rooms, for he had now become psychiatrist with a little practice." He stopped for a while. He didn't give us a chance and continued,

"But guys, beside from all kind of cruelities, my father always go to send us a mail, and I get to the mailbox in the morning before my mom in case there's a letter for her from my dad. Mom would tear it up on the spot if she got there first. They are now very old country men but never changed but my dad has given up parties." He stopeed.

"Oh Tom, we have heard out, can you get me a cup of coffee and a pen?" I said him.

He went back to the room without any word and I addressed Brravo.

"So man, what your research says?" I asked interestingly.

"Well, these files I crawled from a private U.S. Millitary network a couple of months ago. The D-Force sells all the files to Federal Reserve Bank Of New York." He turned his eyes to Sven.

"A Bank?" Sven wondered and asked.

"Yeah, a Bank. This bank keeps more than a quarter of the world's gold which is stashed away in just a single bank vault 80 ft below the streets of New York City, USA, inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY).

Inter-countries money and gold is bought and sold in billions of dollars just in black secret." He turned a page a continued

"Now whats the game? The criminal hacker mafia steals important national files of different courties who are working at nuclear weaponary and these file are sent to to a more secreat vault of this bank and in return this mafia is heavily paid." He stopped.

In the mean while Tom came with two cups of tea and a coffee for me and my desired pen.

"By the way tom where you got this fancy pen?" I asked tom.

""I kept it hiding in my old toy chest in the attic that mama hasn't touched for years." He said.

"Oh God, this sad soul." Sven whispered.

Tom: "What?"

Sven: "Nah! Nothing" Sven smiled.

Tom took a side and sat on a chair and looking out at the half-naked willows stooped over the river and the fading hump of hill beyond, seeing nothing but his past.

"Brravo you were telling about some sort of vaults?" Sven addressed Brravo.

"The main vault that is used to keep gold contains another vault, means a vault inside vault. That inner vault is connected to a chamber that is of a secret agency which hold the data but the backup is at inner vault too."

We were listening to him.

"The Federal Reserve Bank of New York contains more than 8,000 tons (7,250 metric tons) of gold. The exact amount is not known because some countries do not release details of how much gold they have. Most of the gold in the bank is in the form of bricklike bars. Each is worth at least $160,000, weighing 400 troy ounces a 27 lb/12.4 kg. A troy ounce is a

unit of weight used for measuring precious metals."

"Oh interesting, I am gonna fly out this bank guys." Sven said.

"What about our chocolates? I mean security? I asked him.

"Every time a gold bar is brought into the vault, it is weighed and checked by bank officials to ensure it is pure gold. Bank officials enter the vault through a door in a narrow passage in a giant 100-ton (90-metric ton) steel cylinder, which rotates to block off the passage and seal the vault.

No one person knows all the combinations for the eight bolts that secure the cylinder. Eight people have to be present to add the code they know in order to open it."

He stopped as he thought it would be impossible than harder instead.

Sven: "Keep Moving Brravo"

"So for as physical security is concerned we are not gonna get eight people to mask and get there in. When exactly the code is entered, door of vault is opened, security cameras monitor 24x7. When doors are opened then here it comes the inner vault, its nothng but a secure computer system which is controlled by another computer ."

The code which is entered at bolts actually goes to eight computer systems that are located in security room hnadled by security cops.

These computers are interconnected and after getting a code it is verified and then passed out to initiate permission. Or might be something else can happen at this phase. But if we by any means get into those eight computers we can get our job done."

This is all I found in while I did reconnaisance. He ended saying this.

Now it was the time to scan and find out their internal networks. Option one was to check through their official website.

Then I said,"Well, gear up guys, and get ready. Sven you are going to perform secreat scan. Find out what their internal network is but be very carefull we can't go far long.

It might even be fun, D-Force did their thing and we got to do cover them."

"Hey Tom, you might as well take dope and beer instead."

Tom shocked and said, "What! Beer?".

"Keys dude, get me keys, you are not going to need that, dude. We are not out there long enough." I said and smiled.

He threw keys to me and we were going to our secret lab. The lab was equipped with latest technologies, my favorite black boxes and a suit of exploiters. We have grabbed the gears and now it was our turn after those D-Force guys.

Sven nailed in his scanner and started an intense scan. Initaillay we wanna know about any little clue of their network from their website. It was scanned in all all ways but we could get nothing.

"Well Sven, initialte the BiLE (Bi-Directional Link Extractor) scan." I said.

When the scanner came to statistical weighting algorithm. It returned an unexpected thing. We got a network communication between this website and an unknown network resource. The point was the links took place after when our own systems were hacked. It might be a clue that some transaction was made between these two internet systems.



We started scanning off that unknown network resource but it was not responding because possibly admin had dissalowed TCP-ACK pings. Because its server was filtering external Ips. Our next job was spoof the official bank's ip to get to the that resource. Brarvo was expert at this. He took his black box and without bothering with that site he interacted with DNS servers the bank site was using.

He was now going to do zone transfers for all DNS server that website was using.

"Johny can you help me bypass that idiot Intrusion Detector?" He asked me.

An intrusion detector at the DNS server had identified intrusion from Brravo. This was actually being done by firewall. My handy dandy tool WafWoof came into action and after a bit struggle we were able to bypass intrusion detector.

Brravo made zona transfers at their DNS servers and now he was really able to stay there and could send tnasactions as the web owners send.The IP was spoofed, then that unknown resoure was again scanned. This time it replied.

         

The data moving between the resource and official website was obviously encrypted. But we prefer to scan that resource more.

We found that resource was making links with highly profiled private gateway. That gateway was basically a router providing an internal network. The next challenge was to get into the gateway and looking into what computers its routing to.

After quite three hours of crux hardowrk, I was able to get throug the router. Now it was my turn to pull a scan and confirm that we are at right place. And this gateway was a checkpoint for us, we could send any request through this.

Using our private network scanner, we found that there are about eighteen internal computer systems that are just connected to this router. There might be more but we got to eighteen computers "alive".

         The thing I found while doiing operating system fingerprinting was all systems using unix basic framework. I initiated a request to know for possible mac addresses with their host names. One of the system  replied with vlt-shadow.

         This things wondered us because it could be the name of vaullt controller computer.  The intursion detector was already bypassed and all the mess was going legally. I scanned vlt-shadow for possible vulnerabiities. I was hopefull because if we had reached there we could go long. I found an alert that this system could hanged while if it get specific parameters in its hashing scheme. This was a challenging vulnerability which I exploited with my black-box and after a long  time, unbelievably I was in the system!

         And that happened we had thought, is was connected to more eight computers which were named in vlt-bolt-1 to vlt-bolt-8 scheme. The main thing was when eight people used to enter code, each code was first checked at its specific own computer then a collective hash of sixty-four characters was generated and sent to vlt-shadow computer which was the master.

Hashes were decrypted at master computer, if valid an allowance was sent to open the vault.

         The first thing I did was to get superuser privileges and scanned whole system for needed files. A file was found with sec_cam.conf name. It was the file containg configuration of security cameras.

I typed a command in my little genius shell, cat sec_cam.conf

It opened the file and I approached refreshing rate. What I did with the refresh rate I made it bit slow down and reflect the ourput from video buffer to again into buffer. And disallowed the incoming data so that buffer could not get over flow.

         This impacted an interested effect, I made the vault security cameras to work like a cycler which was repeating am image over and over. So the security office were to see the door locked even if they were not.

         The next challenge was to get hashes from those eight computers but it was impossible because they could only send if physically eight personal enteries arrive from bolts to those eights. But because I've already owned the master. I crawled though the hash table and found that it has predefined hash that is matched with incoming combination of eight character hash.

         I sent this hash to authentication proceedure of the master system which identified it and it sent an automated request to open the vault. A positive message retured and vault was now opened. But the magic was those security cops were seeing it closed. As the vault opened, Sven again scanned the master computer which was now connected to nine computers. Obviously the ninth was our target. Sven logged into the computer with persmissions given by the master computer. Sven scanned that computer for possible files, and we got to our files, those were the huge mess, our life.

         "Sven, hurry up, slurp the files and gun that end terminal after this one. Don't leave any thing beside." Brravo hurrily said.

         "Brravo , can you please help me with making a little worm?" Sven addressed Brravo

Now it was the ltime to send a worm to the end teminal, the end terminal was the computer at secret chamber of that agency. And this worm was really gonna delete all the files from that chamber computer and then crashing it. We have taken all our files back and now worm was ready. Sven sent a message to chamber computer to take a secret file. And then the worm was sent where the big mouth of that idiot chamber computer was and this time, 'HE' was fooled away.

         As the worm reached, it poisoned and ruined it from its roots. It was forty five minutes passed at four on clock, it was about to morning. The mission was successful. And until the clock striked six of morning, the official website of bank was defaced with heading up,

         "You People Think Your Secrets Were Safe? But You Were Wrong. Don't Even Try Again To Mess With Us." -ZeenHaxors



I: "Hey Tom! Have you taken dope and beer instead?"

Tom: " What?"

I: "Keys dude, take keys, I already told you we would not out there so long"

Sven: "huh, sad soul."

Tom: "What ?"

Sven: "Nah! Nothing dude nothing."

We laughed and went to report Admiral Olaf.