Ethical Hacking 04: Computer File Location

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Another fascinating stealing trick that utilizes an operating system against itself is a computer file location stunt known as "relative versus absolute". In heritage variants of Windows 7, and prior, assuming you composed in a computer file name and hit Enter, or on the other hand in the event that the operating system went searching for a record for your sake, it would continuously begin with your folder or registry location first, prior to looking somewhere else.

This style could appear to be effective and adequately innocuous, yet hackers and malware utilized it for their potential intention.


For example:

Type in calc.exe and hit Enter.

Assume you needed to run the underlying, innocuous Windows calculator "calc.exe". It's sufficiently simple and frequently quicker than using a few mouse clicks to open a folder, 

In any case, malware could make a malicious file called calc.exe and conceal it in the addressing directory or folder; when you attempted to execute calc.exe, it would run the fake duplicate, all things considered. I loved this issue as a penetration tester. Periodically, after I had broken into a PC and expected to raise my access to Administrator, I would take an unpatched adaptation of a known, beforehand weak piece of programming and spot it in a directory folder.

More often than not all I needed to do was place a solitary defenseless executable DLL while leaving, completely, the recently introduced fixed program alone. I would type in the program executable's filename in my impermanent folder, and Windows would stack my helpless, Trojan executable from my transitory organizer rather than the more than of late fixed rendition. I loved it - - I could take advantage of a completely fixed framework with a solitary awful computer file. Linux, Unix, and BSD frameworks have had this issue fixed for over 7 years.

Microsoft fixed the issue in 2017 with the arrival of Windows 8, albeit the issue stays in inheritance forms as a result of reverse similarity issues.

Microsoft has also been cautioning and training programmers to utilize outright (instead of relative) record/way names inside their own projects for a long time. In any case, a huge number of heritage programs are helpless against location hacks.

Programmers understand this better than anybody.


Hacking Tips

Use the updated operating system that upholds absolute file directory and folder address, and search for records in the default system location first prior to whatever else.



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