Unless you were living under the rock for the last 2 weeks or so, you probably heard about a vulnerability in Bourne Again Shell (BASH), aka “Shellshock” (who comes up with those names?!) aka “Bash bug” aka “OMG! Internet is coming to an end” aka… you get the idea :)

Working in security field, I have heard about it a lot, maybe even too much in the last couple weeks and, after it has been publicly announced, I saw lots of failed exploitation attempts hitting Internet facing servers under my jurisdiction.

I have researched the vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271 and other flavours of it) a fair bit, saw heaps of malicious traffic, but actually never seen a successful exploit (well, that’s a good thing I guess…) and never had a chance to play with it on an actual vulnerable machine.

And yet, here it comes vulnhub.com again with a tiny VM created specifically for this purpose - to get your hands dirty with this particular vulnerability. So… let’s get started, shall we?

Persistence was a new VM available at vulnhub.com provided by sagi and superkojiman and there was actually an entire competition going on for a whole month based around it.

I decided to try myself and see how far I will be able to get to… and because I’m the type who doesn’t give up easily, I managed to finally get a root shell and learn A LOT all the way throughout the challange. I wanted to document everything I did as it could be a good reference point for me in the future and maybe some people will also be able to benefit from it. So… let’s get to it!

First test post with Octopress and at the same time, first post on my first ever blog!

I plan to use this blog as a bit of a brain dump of my ideas, tools and views, mainly focused on IT security.

I will try to post variety of things, ranging from code snippets, tools and techniques useful in penetration testing or security incident response, various CTF competition writeups (one coming up very soon!) and some other random, geeky stuff… at least that’s a plan… :)