The following is a checklist and set of information for use when attempting CTF or Hackfest style challenges. This checklist was created by using Stephen McNabb's Dark Soul Cheat Sheet code along with the initial content dump from Orangepeelbeef's hacking_ctf_tools, and my own limited ctf experience.


Generic Tools

Cyberchef

This tool works in many categories, Encode/Decode, file detection, file carving, etc. Very very very handy

Strings

extract all strings from a file

strings myfile

strings myfile -n10 (get all strings with length at least 10)

File

unix file command, determine file type

file Templeton_Peck.jpg

Templeton_Peck.jpg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.02, aspect ratio, density 100x100, segment length 16, baseline, precision 8, 224x280, components 3

Hex editor

there are a lot of good hex editors out there, and sometimes examining a file manually is enough to find the data you need

bless is pretty good, but 010 editor knows binary file signatures so it's pretty much the best

File carving

foremost

foremost myfile -o outputdir

binwalk

binwalk -e myfile

Ports/Nmap

syn scan all tcp ports

nmap -sS -p1:65535 somehost

scan all TCP & UDP ports

nmap -sU -sT -p- somehost

Fuzzing

Hydra

Wfuzz

wfuzz -z file,${WORDLIST} -b cookie=value -d "title=FUZZ&body=FUZZ" --sc 500 https://host/api/entry

Vulnerability Scanners

nessus

nikto (web app vuln scanner)

Images

  • Image Data Collection

a small list of tools that may help you look at images differently

Image Data Collection Tools


Examples

exiftool myfile

hexdump -C myfile

strings myfile

Passwords & Wordlists

  • Wordlists to scan

Wordlists for pw cracking and fuzzing

  • rockyou
  • dirb
  • CeWL takes a webpage and makes a wordlist out of it (seems buggy in testing, especially with unicode characters)
  • wyd takes a file and makes a wordlist
  • cupp gather osint data and make a wordlist, or expand an existing wordlit
  • crunch make wordlists from character sets
  • SecLists

Password Tools

  • John the Ripper
  • Hashcat

Examples

crunch 3 3 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ (all combinations of uppercase letters of length 3)


john itself is pretty good at cracking although a bit slow, however it comes with a ton of great tools for getting hashes out of files

john filename


hashcat is generally much faster than john because it uses GPU instead of CPU, it is a lot more complicated and has a ton of modes and rules. hashcat can use the hashes gathered with office2john, etc

ex cracking word 2013 document pw:

hashcat -a 0 -m 9600 --username office_hash.txt rockyou.txt -O


ex usage of rules, you can use multiple

hashcat -a 0 -m 0 cracklist.db wordlist.txt -r /usr/share/hashcat/rules/best64.rule -O

ex combination attack left and right wordlists (change the order if you want to try them flipped)

hashcat -a 1 -m 0 cracklist.db biology rockyou.txt


ex incremental mask attack (adds digits and symbols to the end of everything in wordlist)

hashcat -a 6 -m 0 cracklist.db francais.txt -1 ?d?s ?1?1?1?1?1 -i


ex incremental mask attack (add digits and symbols to the front of everything in wordlist)

hashcat -a 7 -m 0 cracklist.db -1 ?d?s ?1?1?1?1?1 francais.txt -i


Proxies

  • burpsuite (usually runs on 8080)
  • fiddler (runs on 8888)
  • parosproxy (runs on 8080)

Crawlers

  • gobuster
  • dirbuster
  • dirsearch
  • dirb

Specialized tools

Images

  • Image Data Collection

a small list of tools that may help you look at images differently

Image Data Collection Tools


Examples

dnsrecon -d somehost

dnsrecon -d somehost -t brt wordlist.txt

fierce somehost


fldigi

you can get data straight from the sound card with fldigi

gqrx

reads from an SDR or recorded SDR files and can do a lot of things

can also output to a network stream for piping into multimon-ng

dirsearch

dirb

multimon-ng

decoders for a ton of different signal types

  • morse
  • pocsag
  • very nice chained from gqrx via sox

Fuel

  • Don't forget to fuel your brain

Don't forget to fuel your brain and take care of yourself

Fuel

  • Don't forget to fuel your brain

Advanced fuel