Over the last few days, I have been playing with WinScanX, a free command-line tool for querying Windows service information over SMB. WinScanX combines many of the essential tools used during a penetration test into a single utility. One of the more interesting features is the "-y" flag, which instructs WinScanX to save a copy of the remote registry hives for SAM, SECURITY, and SYSTEM.

The Metasploit Meterpreter has supported the "hashdump" command (through the Priv extension) since before version 3.0. The "hashdump" command is an in-memory version of the pwdump tool, but instead of loading a DLL into LSASS.exe, it allocates memory inside the process, injects raw assembly code, executes its via CreateRemoteThread, and then reads the captured hashes back out of memory. This avoids writing files to the drive and by the same token avoids being flagged by antivirus (AV) and intrusion prevention (HIPS) products.

On December 1st, Rapid7 announced the Community Edition of the NeXpose vulnerability management product. At the same time, we released version 3.3.1 of the Metasploit Framework, which contains the first step towards full integration between NeXpose and Metasploit.

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of version 3.3 of the Metasploit Framework. This release includes 446 exploits, 216 auxiliary modules, and hundreds of payloads, including an in-memory VNC service and the Meterpreter. In addition, the Windows payloads now support NX, DEP, IPv6, and the Windows 7 platform.

Among the coolest features in metasploit is the ability to pivot through a meterpreter session to the network on the other side. The route command in msfconsole sets this up but requires a bit of typing to get right.

Many database servers helpfully provide version number, platform, and other salient details to just about anyone who asks, authenticated or not, which makes fingerprinting these applications a snap. However, Postgres is a little more coquettish about revealing such personal information about itself to just anyone. The best way to determine Postgres' version is to log in and just ask with a "select version()" query, but what if you don't (yet) have credentials?

Lucky for unauthenticated types, it turns out that Postgres is pretty forthcoming in its authentication failure messages.

Update: This module, just like the original exploit, only works on IE6 at this time. IE7 requires a slightly different method to reuse the object pointer and IE8 enables DEP by default.