Ethical Hacking

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 42 today we are discussing about In this section of the course,we're going to talk about software development.When a piece of software is created, it requires a lot of work.Each and every function that's performed by that software has to be written to be able to do its intended role.This often requires the work of dozens of programmers and hundreds of thousands of lines of code.Often, when a bug is found in a piece of software,I hear people ask why that company didn't figure it out before the software was released.Well, there's lots of different ways to conduct software testing,and we're going to talk about them later on in the section.But bugs are still going to find their way into code because our software is so complex these days.Let's take, for example, the Windows 10 operating system.It consists of over 50 million lines of code and took the involvement of hundreds of different programmers.With that much complexity, there's always a chance that an error is going to be introduced into the code base.Now, to try and counteract the complexity of our software development,many models and methods have been introduced,the most common of which is known as the software development life cycle or SLDC.The software development life cycle is an organized process of developing a secure software application throughout its life cycle throughout the project.This process covers everything from the initial idea of the software,through its coding and testing,and even into its deployment and retirement.The software development life cycle is based on a generic Waterfall model of development.Each phase of a life cycle is broken down into smaller portions.As each one is finished, the next one has begun.The reason this model is termed the Waterfall is that information and the software product itself flows from the top stage all the way down to the bottom stage,getting more developed as it progresses downward.Visually, this looks like a waterfall,as shown in this example on the screen.Different organizations use different phases or stages as part of their software development life cycle though,you need to know the seven phases.Now, let's cover each of theses seven phases.The first phase is planning and analysis.During this stage, the goals of the software project are determined, the stakeholder needs are assessed,and all of the high level planning work is conducted.Essentially, this is where things go from a rough idea that someone had for a piece of software into a bit more formalized and well developed concept that we can plan the rest of our development cycle against.Once all the requirements have been gathered,we can move into the phase that's known as software or systems design.It's during this stage that the application or system is defined, outlined, and diagrammed in detail.Essentially, this is where we focus on the overarching inputs and outputs of each function that are going to make up the final software that's going to be released to our customer.At this point, we still haven't created any programming code though.This brings us to the third phase,which is called implementation.During implementation, programmers will begin to code all of the various functions that are needed for the final product.As each piece of the code is developed,the programmers will conduct some basic debugging and testing to ensure that its functionality is working properly.But, at this point,there's been no formal testing completed yet.The fourth phase is reserved for that formalized testing of the application.It's during this phase that we get the code and we check it through a myriad of different testing methodologies.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 41 today we are discussing about Securing applications.By far the most commonly used productivity suitein the world is Microsoft Office.This includes Word for word processing,Excel for Spreadsheets, PowerPoint for slide presentation,Outlook for email, and many others.Now, how can we protect the applications themselves,and the files that they create?Well, that's what we're going to cover in this lesson.First, let's talk about the obvious.If you have a document and you want to protect its content,you should use a password to do it.It's a really simple built in feature across the Office suite.To create a password to protect your files from modification, or even being viewed,you can do this using the password protect feature under the tools menu bar option.As shown here on the screen, this is an example from Microsoft Word, but it works in Word,Excel and PowerPoint.Also, your files can be set to read only if you desire.This will prevent any of your contents from being modified by unauthorized users. Another thing you want to think about when it comes to security is macros.And we talked about that a bit back when we talked about macro viruses.You want to make sure you check your macro settings. You can find this under your preferences or your tools options, and then going to the security tab.By default, you should want to disable macros,with or without notification. This will increase the security of your organization. Now, when it's installed originally by Microsoft, macros are enabled, so you want to take the time to disable this in your baseline image.Most organizations are going to decide to disable macros completely and not even give their user an option to be able to enable them.To do this, you can set that through your group policy inside the Windows server and push that out to all of your clients. Another way to secure your information is to use digital certificates.If your organization is already using digital certificates as part of its organizational security, you should enable your documents to be locked down and only be opened by the person presenting a valid digital certificate. This again is another option that you can find inside of Word.Additionally, you want to think about how you're going to encrypt your documents to protect their contents.This can be done within the Microsoft Office products themselves, or you can use the underlying system capabilities,something like Bitlocker to Go.So at this point, we have some pretty secure files.We've disabled our macros, we've password protected them and we've encrypted them. Let's go and shift our focus over to email for a moment. Inside the Microsoft Office suite,there's a program called MS Outlook. Microsoft Outlook is used for email and if you embed your digital signatures and digital certificate configurations into Microsoft Outlook, you can haveincreased email security.This relies on a PKI or public key infrastructure.We'll talk about that when we get into the cryptography section of this course later on.Now, another thing when we start talking about Microsoft Outlook is that our emails start getting to be overwhelming sometimes,and we have to start saving space by archiving them off.In Microsoft Outlook, the way we do this is by archiving them to a PST file.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 40 today we are discussing about In the last lesson, we covered a lot of the basics of web browser security.In this lesson, we're going to go a bit more in depth and talk about some additional concerns that you need to think about within your organization when we start talking about web browser security.And the first one is cookies.Cookies are text files that are placed on a client's computer to store information about the user's browsing habits,their credentials, and other data.Cookies are used for authentication into websites,session tracking, your shopping carts,and many other purposes.Most organizations these days, though,will block the storage of cookies because they're concerned about privacy and security.You should know there are two different types of cookies,though, that are asked about on the exam.There are tracking cookies and session cookies.Now, a tracking cookie is usually used by spyware to gather details on you.They're trying to learn what websites you go to,for how long, and what type of things you click on.Now, session cookies, on the other hand,are used to keep track of users and their preferences and maybe even the things that they're putting into their shopping carts.This is being used not as much to track you but instead to maintain the connection and the session between you and the server versus me and the server. Now, many sites are realizing that cookies are not something that people like anymore, and so they're starting to migrate over to what's called server-side tracking instead.This allows them to do the same types of tracking for your shopping carts and things of that nature while allowing you to block cookiee and not have to have them on your machine,because again, you might be afraid that your cookies are going to get stolen and people will get personal information about you.The second thing we want to cover in this lesson is locally shared objects, or LSOs.These are also known as Flash cookies, and they're stored in your Windows user profile under the Flash folder inside your roaming AppData folder.This is used by Adobe's Flash Player and it's less of an issue these days because Adobe Flash is being phased out in favor of HTML5.LSOs can be disabled within your Flash Player settings if you're still using Flash, and this is also found inside the local settings manager in most of today's operating systems.Next we have add-ons, and add-ons are small browser extensions or plugins that'll provide you additional functionality.Now, there are some examples of this,would be things like Adobe Flash or Adobe Shockwave that allow you to run active content within your browser.You might have a browser extension for a password manager that will load in your password when you visit a site.Now, these add-ons are not necessarily bad, but any time you're adding additional code,there could be some malicious code being added.Or if you're downloading an untrusted add-on, you could be installing malicious code into your browser as well.Organizations, for this reason, most of the time,will block additional add-ons,and they try to keep their browser as slimmed down as possible, because that eliminates some of the additional issues that you might have.The last concern we're going to talk about is advanced security options. Every browser has a way for you to configure it and set the different settings you want for the security of your browser.For example, do you want to use an SSL or TLS to be able to make your secure connection? How about your local storage or cache sizes? How big or small do you want those to be? Do you want your browsing history to be kept or deleted once you turn off the browser?Each of these things are things you can configure through the browser through its own tool and through group policy.I'm going to show you both of these in the next lesson.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 39 today we are discussing about Web Browser Security.Your web browser is your gateway to the internet and all of the wonders that it has,but it's also your gateway to the internet and all of the dangers that are out there lurking for you. This is why web browser security is really important.And in our organizations it's becoming more and more important everyday. In the old days when I first got started,if there was a custom application that need to be built,a company would hire a software firm and they would create something specifically for the Windows operating system that we could use inside our organization.Those days are pretty much gone, instead most people are going to use web apps instead, and this allows us to do quicker deployment as well as cross-platform functionality because it'll work on either Linux, Mac, or Windows, but it does rely on having a good secure web browser, so it makes this lesson even more important when your company uses web apps.So how do we ensure that our web browser is secure?The first thing you need to do is ensure your web browser is always up to date with the latest security patches.If an attacker has found a way to exploit a browser, you know that the manufacturer is going to figure that out, create a security patch and deploy it out into the environment. For us, that means we want to get that patch tested and then install it throughout our network. But when you're installing these patches, I want you to remember I said the patches. I don't want you to jump on and be the first to upgrade to a new browser,instead let other people upgrade to the newest browser immediately while they can figure out what all the bugs are and the issues,while you're staying on a nice stable browser.What do I mean by this? Well, for example, let's say there was Internet Explorer 11,and there's all these security bugs in Internet Explorer 11, there's patches that have been released, those are good, you want to get those, test those, and install those in your network.But if they decide to jump up to version 12,you want to let that go out for a little while into the open market first before deploying that in your organization because new browsers tend to be a little bit more buggy and they're not very stable.So we want to make sure that we have something stable and reliable,and let other people be out on the bleeding edge with the latest technology. Now the next thing we want to look at is updating our browsers. Whenever you're going to update your browser,if you're doing it in a home environment, you're probably going to be doing this through Windows Update.You're going to get the latest security patche and install them on your machine. But if you're going to be doing this in an enterprise environment, you're more likely going to be downloading that patch separately,testing it in your lab, and then deploying it through your patch management system. Either way you do want to make sure that your web browsers are getting those security fixes though,they are really important to have.The other question I get a lot from students is which web browser should I actually use?Well, this is a great question.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 38 today we are discussing about Welcome to application security.In this section of the course,we are going to move up into the software realm and start looking at the different applications that are used on our desktop devices.These applications bring to us a world of functionality,whether that's browsing the internet,conducting productivity by creating Word documents and spreadsheets, or by doing a host of other things.But each piece of software does introduce additional vulnerabilities to our system,and we're going to talk about that throughout this section.First, we'll spend some time talking about web browsers.When we talk about web browsers, this is really important,because web browsers are a conduit to the internet.That gives us a lot of capability,but it also brings a lot of vulnerability and all of those dangers from the internet,such as malicious websites, web apps, and more.As we go through this section, we're going to cover the various different types of web browsers that are used,how we can best secure them, and any other concerns that we should be thinking about as we're dealing with web browsers.Then we're going to get into the productivity space,and we're going to talk about the world's most popular productivity applications, specifically the Microsoft Office suite of tools.This includes things like word processing with Microsoft Word, spreadsheets with Microsoft Excel,and presentations using things like Microsoft PowerPoint.But we won't stop there.We'll move into the other category, which is going to cover all of the other applications out there.Now, obviously, we're not going to be able to cover each application in depth, but instead, we're going to talk about the best way to set up the right permissions and the right way to conduct application white  listing and black listing to ensure that your computer is safe from the different types of software that you may wish to install.So let's get started with application security.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 37 today we are discussing about So, now that I scared you with all of the threats that exists against virtual machines let's talk about how we can best secure them.Most of the things that we need to do to secure a virtual machine are very similar to things we need to do to secure a regular physical server too.This includes things like updating your operating system in your applications.Also, you need to ensure that each virtual machine has a good anti-virus solution installed.With its own software firewall, good strong passwords and good policies and all of the other security features that we're going to discuss throughout this course.For this lesson, let's focus specifically on how to secure virtual machines though.First, remember that the hypervisor whether it's a type one,type two or application containerization based model,needs to be updated and secured whenever the manufacturer releases a new security patch.For example, if an export have been discovered then you can now conduct a VM escape against VM ware, you can be certain that accompanying like VM ware is going to quickly release a patch to fix this critical vulnerability. Next you want to ensure that you limit the type of connections that is existing between the virtual machine and the physical machine.This can be represented by a virtualized network card,or even as network shares.As I'm going to demonstrate in the next lesson.Remember if a virtual machine gets infected with malware it should remain isolated from all the other virtual machine hosted by the same hypervisor. But only if you implement your configurations for isolation correctly.Just like a physical server anytime there is a connection between a virtual machine and a shared resource, something like a network file server. This is an opportunity for data to be passed between the different virtual machines, and this would break down the isolation that you may be achieving.Just like we discussed back in handling our operating systems we want to minimize and remove any features that are not needed to support our operations.When dealing with the virtual machine,remember that hardware is emilated and it can be removed just like a piece of softare would be under normal machine.If don't your virtual machine to have an emilated flappy disk or CD drive for example,you can simply remove those features.This in turn will minimize your text surface and remove potential vulnerabilities.All of your virtual machines are hosted on physical computers or servers.And so if you had many virtual machine residing on a same physical server,and an attack is able to compromise one of those virtual machines,they maybe able to force it to use a large amount of physical server resources.If they do this can affect the other virtual machines hosted on that same server.In fact this could result and denial servers for one or more of the virtual machines being hosted.To minimize this threat you should consider spreading out your virtual machines among several physical servers. In steady of relying on one single physical server to host every single virtual machine.As assessment administrator,its also important to keep tracking your virtual machines and where they are being deployed.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 36 today we are discussing about When using virtualization, each emulated server runs its own operating system inside of a virtual machine, but the virtual machines are run on top of what's known as a hypervisor.A hypervisor may adjust the distribution of the physical resources of the server to the virtual machines.This includes the processor, the memory and the hard disk space.Hypervisors come in two distinct flavors,Type 1 and Type 2. A Type 1 hypervisor is known as bare metal, or native,since it runs directly on the host hardware and functions as a type of operating system.Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's XenServer and VMWare's ESXi,and vSphere are all considered Type 1 hypervisors.A Type 2 hypervisor runs from within a normal operating system,something like Windows, Mac or Linux. For example, in the next lesson I'm going to demonstrate how we can install Windows 10 as an emulated desktop computer inside of a virtual machine that's being run by the software virtual box on my personal computer.Now, my personal computer is a Mac OS X desktop.But we're still going to be able to run windows inside of it.That's the power of using something like virtual box,because virtual box is an example of a Type 2 hypervisor.Another good Type 2 hypervisor is known as VMware.A Type 1, or a bare metal, hypervisor is faster and more efficient than a Type 2, or hosted, hypervisor.This is because a bare metal hypervisor doesn't have to waste any of the physical computer's resources by running a full desktop operating system,like Windows or Mac, first.Instead, a Type 1 hypervisor acts as a stripped-down, specialized operating system to provide the physical resources to the virtual machines that it hosts.Now, I know I said there's only two types of hypervisors.But there is a third type of virtualization that's becoming popular in our networks today.This is called Application Container-Based Virtualization.With this type of virtualization,the operating system kernel is shared across multiple virtual machines,but the user space for each of these virtual machines is uniquely created and managed.Often called Application Containerization, this allows an organization to deploy and run distributed applications without launching a resource-heavy, full virtual machine with a full operating system.This makes Application Containerization much more efficient than either a Type 1 or a Type 2 hypervisor,if it can meet the needs of your business and your organization.Container Virtualization is commonly used with Linux servers, and some examples of Container-Based Virtualization software include things like Docker,Parallels Virtuozzo,and the OpenVZ project.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 35 today we are discussing about While virtualization brings with it a lot of capability to add separations inside of our servers and bring in some additional security,there are some unique vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackerswhen it comes to virtualization.These include VM escape, data remnants,privilege elevation and live VM migration.Virtual machines are segmented and separated by default so if an attacker is able to exploit the operating system being run inside one virtual machine,it doesn't necessarily mean that they can get into the other virtual machines being hosted by the same physical server.Virtual machine escape, or VM escape,occurs when an attacker is able to break out of one of these normally isolated virtual machines and they can begin to interact directly with the underlying hypervisor.From this position, the attacker could migrate themselves out, and into another virtual machine being hosted on the same physical server.Now VM escape techniques are extremely difficult to conduct.They rely on exploiting the physical resources that are shared between the VMs.But it is still a vulnerability you need to be aware of.To mitigate this vulnerability,virtual servers should be hosted on the same physical server as other virtual machines in the same network or network segment based on its classification. One of the main benefits of using virtualized servers within a cloud-based environment is their ability to rapidly scale up and scale down.This is known as elasticity.While operationally, this is a wonderful thing,it does lead to a vulnerability that has to be addressed and this is called data remnants.When a server is scaled up, a new virtual instance is created on a physical server.This instance takes up some hard drive space for all those files that represent the virtual hard disk and the configurations. When this is no longer needed because the load has decreased the virtual machine can be deprovisioned,which means it's shut down and the files are deleted.When this occurs, the confidential files from that virtual machine are left on the physical server.This is known as a data remnant.These data remnants could be recovered by an attacker,and therefore it could breach the confidentiality of that data.For this reason, cloud infrastructures that rely upon virtualization can introduce a data remnant vulnerability to your company,since the physical servers are not controlled by your organization.Privilege elevation occurs when a user is able to grant themselves the ability to run functions as a higher-level user, such as the root or the administrator.While this can be bad on a single server,it can be catastrophic on a physical server if the attacker is able to perform this on the hypervisor itself.A few years ago VMwear had a flaw on their hypervisor and this allowed a user to escalate privileges into any of the guest operating systems hosted by that hypervisor.To prevent this, it's important to remain current on your hot fixes and your service packs for your virtualization software.Another vulnerability to consider is one associated with live migration of virtual machines.When a virtual machine needs to move from one physical host to another,this is called a live migration.If an attacker can gain a foothold into your network and place themselves between these two physical machines they can implement a form of a man in the middle attack where they can capture the data being sent between the two physical servers.If this data has not been encrypted,this can allow the attacker to breach the confidentiality of the servers being hosted as virtual machines when they're transmitted over the network.Finally, when we're specifically relying upon application containerization as our virtualization method it's important to realize that the containers are all sharing a single common operating system.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 34 today we are discussing about Welcome to this episode on virtualization.Up to this point in the course,we've talked about a lot of different types of hackers and malicious software that are attempting to affect our systems.Then we started talking about how you can secure your hardware.And in the last section,we discussed securing your operating system.Now, we're going to talk about how you can use virtualization to emulate your physical hardware in order for you to run an operating system in a protected and sandboxed environment. First, let's define virtualization.Virtualization is the creation of a virtual resource.Now, I know that's pretty broad,but that's because virtualization itself is a broad category.We can virtualize anything.This includes servers, desktops, file systems,hard drives, and even an entire network.The most common use of virtualization these days is the use of a virtual machine.A virtual machine is a container that contains an emulated computer that can run an entire operating system inside of it.This includes emulation of all of the hardware that's required to run the system.This means you have the hard drives, the optical drives, video cards, processors,and even the BIOS being emulated.Later in this section, I'm goingto show you in a demonstration how to install Windows 10 inside of a virtual machine that's going to be hosted on a Mac OS X-powered desktop computer.Now, there are two main types of virtual machines:System virtual machines, and processor virtual machines.A system virtual machine is a complete platform that's designed to take the place of an entire computer.That means you can run the entire operating system virtually,just like I'm going to show you with my Windows 10 example later on.A processor virtual machine on the other hand is designed to run a single application. Often, this is used to run something like a web browser or possibly even a simple web server.Virtualization is important to both the security of our on-premise and our virtual servers,because it's heavily used by both of those.Virtualization has continued to increase in recent years,helping to reduce the need for additional power,space, and cooling for our server rooms and our data centers,and thereby reducing the hysical architecture involved in supporting our IT operations.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 33 today we are discussing about File systems and hard drives.Another aspect of hardening your operating system is determining exactly what file system it should utilize.The level of security of your system is effected by its file system type.There are many different file systems available to choose from.We have things like NTFS, FAT32,ext4, the Hierarchical File System Plus,and the Apple File System.Windows systems can utilize either NTFS or FAT32 file systems.It's highly recommended, though,that you use the NTFS file system.NTFS stands for the New Technology File System,and it's the default file system format for Windows because it's more secure than FAT32.It supports, logging, encryption, larger partition sizes,and larger file sizes than FAT32 does.If your Windows system is running FAT32,you can convert it to NTFS without losing any data, though.The easiest method to do this is to open a command prompt,and type convert, the drive letter,and then /FS:NTFS and hit enter.This technique is something you should have learned during your A+ studies. If you're using a Linux system, you should format the hard drive as ext4.If you're using a MacOSX system, you should use Apple's File System, since it is the newest, and most secure one supported by Apple.In addition to choosing the right type of file system, as we just discussed,it's also important to use whole disc encryption.This will help increase the security of your system.It's also important for you to realize that hard drives will eventually fail.But there are five things you can do to help postpone that failure, and ease your recovery from it.First, you should remove any temporary files from your system by using a disc cleanup utility.Second, you should conduct periodic file system checks.If you're running Windows, you can do this by running Check Disc, and the System File Checker.If you're using Linux, you should do a file system check by typing fsck in the terminal.If you're using OSX, you can run first aid from within the disc utility application. The third thing you should do is perform a disc drive defragmentation periodically.On a Windows system, you can use the defrag command from the command line, or run the disc defragmenter from within the graphical user interface.The fourth thing you should do is ensure you have a good backup of you're data. After all, every hard drive will fail one day,so it's important to have a good backup copy.This can be performed using different types of software or cloud solutions, depending on your business needs.The fifth and final thing you should do is ensure that you understand how to use different restoration techniques and actually practice them.This includes restoring from a system restore point within Windows, restoring a system from a tape backup, or backing up a hard drive, and even restoring an individual file from your backups.After all, the only way to truly verify that your backup copy is good, is to attempt a restore from it.In one organization I consulted with,they had years worth of backup tapes.They spent countless hours and a lot of money on this take back of system.But, when they actually need to restore from one of those tape back ups, they weren't able to do it,because the tape that they needed was corrupted.If they had practiced restoring that data to a test server,they would have known earlier that that data wasn't really there, and they didn't have a good backup copy.Thankyou and bye...