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Published on: 11/23/2001
Last Visited: 8/24/2002
The "phone home" technique presented by Aaron Higbee of Foundstone and Chris Davis from RedSiren Technologies at the Black Hat Briefings here takes advantage of the fact that firewalls effective in blocking entry into a private network, are generally permissive in allowing connections the other way around.
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Higbee and Davis perform penetration tests, and developed their game box ***** attack tool after finding themselves more than once with physical access to a client's facilities -- posing as an employee in once case, crawling through a drop ceiling in another -- but without a way to leverage that access into remote control of the company's network.
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"It's not that hard to get into an organization for one or two minutes," said Higbee.
They chose the Dreamcast for its small size, availability of an Ethernet adapter, and affordability -- the console was discontinued last year, and now sells used for under $100 on eBay.Loaded with custom Linux-based software and covertly plugged into a spare network port under a desk or above a ceiling, the harmless-looking toy becomes the enemy within, probing the company firewall for a way out to Internet.
The box cycles through the ports used for common services like SSH, Web surfing, and e-mail, which tend to be permitted by firewall configurations.Failing that, it tries getting "ping" packets out to the Internet, and finally looks for proxy servers bridging the network to the outside world.