Banner Grabbing with IsmailScript tool

In both the offensive and defensive penetration testing environment, Grabbing a banner is the first and apparently the most important phase to gain information about a computer system on a network and the services running on its open ports.

Table of Content

• Introduction
• Types of Banner Grabbing
• Banner grabbing using Kali Linux
• IsmailScript
• whatweb
• cURL
• wget
• Nikto
• Nmap
• Summary

Introduction

Banner grabbing is essentially a practice that is used to obtain information about services that are being run on a remote computer or client. This method is generally implemented by administrators while inventorying their systems or ethical hackers to run penetration tests to expose any vulnerabilities in a network.

Banners are the welcome screens that provide software version numbers and other system information on network hosts, and this makes it an ideal route for malicious hackers to use and obtain information about the services running on the system.

Banner Grabbing?is often termed as?Service Fingerprinting

Types of Banner Grabbing

• Active Banner grabbing?

In this, the attacker craft or modify his/her own packets and send them to the remote host server and analyses the response data in order to get the operating system information and the services running with their versions.

• Passive Banner grabbing?–

Here the attacker collecting data about our target using publicly available information i.e. by analyzing the server either with the help of “Error Messages” or by “Sniffing up the Network Traffic”.

Up till now, you might have gained a lot of information about what is Banner Grabbing and why it is used ! ??

Let’s continue this journey by exploring the most aggressive and direct methods of grabbing a service banner ?        

Banner grabbing using Kali Linux

• IsmailScript

Is a tool written by using python programming language. Enable a penetration testers to save a time and performing a full Reconnaissance and Information Gathering on any Web Application Server.

Run the below command :

$ sudo python3 IsmailScript.py         

Then type the target host as shown below :

• WhatWeb

A tool used to recognizes websites, which helps us to grab the web-applications banner by disclosing the server information with its version, the IP address, the webpage Title and running operating system.

Type the following command in order to capture the essentials.

whatweb <website URL>        

• cURL

The cURL command includes the functionality for retrieving the banner details from HTTP servers. Just execute the following command, and discover what we grab:

curl –s –I "target IP"        

• wget

We will be using the wget command to capture the?HTTP banner?of the remote server.

wget –q –S "target ip"        

The –q flag will cover-up the progress of our output, while the -S flag will print out the header information of all requested pages.

• Nikto

Nikto is an open-source web-application scanner, which we’ll be using to grab a banner of a website running on an Ubuntu server.

Type the following command in order to capture the installed web server – its version, the configuration index files, the HTTP server options and a list of other useful details.

nikto –h "target URL"        

The –h flag is used to specify the host.

• Nmap

We’ll use Nmap as a simple banner grabber which connects to an open TCP port and prints out anything sent by the listening service within a couple of seconds

Type following command which will grab banner for the?SSH?service running on port?22?in the remote host.

nmap -sV –p22 "target IP"        

The -sV flag prints out the version of the running service.

From the below screenshot, you can read the SSH service and its version, fetched by NMAP as?“OpenSSH 5.5 p1".

Summary

Banner grabbing is the act of capturing the information provided by banners, configurable text-based welcome screens from network host that generally display system information. Banners are intended for network administration.

Banner grabbing is often used for?white hat hacking endeavors like?vulnerability analyze and?Pen-testing?as well as gray hat activities (see:?hacktivism) and?black hast hacking. Other tools for banner grabbing that I've not mentioned in this article are Netcat, Telnet and SuperScan...etc.

# Thanks for reading this article ^_^                           - Ismail Ahmed        

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------#Ismailahmed