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Part III: Hacking Network Hosts
Figure 8-7:
Using
AlgoSec
Firewall
Analyzer
to uncover
security
gaffes in
a firewall
rulebase.
If Netcat presents you with a new command prompt (that’s what the cmd.
exe is for in Step 3) on the external machine, you’ve connected and can
execute commands on the internal machine! This can serve several purposes,
including testing firewall rules, network address translation (NAT), port forwarding
and — well, uhhhmmm — executing commands on a remote system!
AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer
A commercial tool I’ve been using with great results is AlgoSec’s Firewall
Analyzer (www.algosec.com) as shown in Figure 8-7.
AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer, and similar ones such as Athena Firewall Grader
(www.athenasecurity.net/firewall-grader.html), allows you to perform
an in-depth analysis of firewall rulebases from all the major vendors and
find security flaws and inefficiencies you’d never uncover otherwise. Firewall
rulebase analysis is a lot like software source code analysis — it finds flaws
at the source that humans would likely never see even when performing
in-depth ethical hacking tests from the Internet and the internal network. If
you’ve never performed a firewall rulebase analysis, it’s a must!