Are you looking to leverage some of the same capabilities offered by Kali Linux,
but on the Windows operating system, including cracking passwords?
Hello, and welcome to Credential Access with Cain and Abel.
I'm Jeff Stein,
and in this course I will take you through how you can use Cain and Abel
to take advantage of valid credential sets to impersonate legitimate
users and move laterally through a network.
Additionally,
I will walk you through how you can use the tooling to manipulate
network traffic and use the collected data to further your red
teaming objectives towards exploitation,
credential access, and lateral movement.
Before we get started, let's jump into a quick overview of what Cain and Abel is.
Cain and Abel is a tool for the Windows operating
system created by Massimiliano Montoro,
and I want to thank him for his work in developing the software.
It has many different features, but originally was developed for simple
password cracking. Over time as more features have been added,
the main purpose of the software has continued to be to
take advantage of different hacking techniques to exploit
poor computer security practices,
with the end goal focused on password recovery for ethical purposes.
The tool is offered as a freeware,
and while the product hasn't been updated since 2014 and the home page of
the site hosting Cain and Abel went offline in mid‑2019,
you can still find the software for download at the
site archive on the Wayback Machine.
In addition to the password cracking capabilities,
which is arguably Cain and Abel's bread and butter, some of the
features which we will cover in this course,
which I think make the software special,
are the ability of the tool to perform a man‑in‑the‑middle
attack, as yet another way to access credentials,
as well as the ability to extend Cain's functionality by using
Abel on a vulnerable system to enable remote access and
execution of commands on the system.
Another thing to keep in mind with Cain and Abel is that while its
creator has always advocated its use for ethical purposes,
many antiviruses have classified the tools as malware,
which you should keep in mind while running it on a system. You may need
to bypass your antivirus software in order to take full advantage of the
tools or even to install the software.
Now that we have a good idea of how we will utilize Cain and Abel,
let's take a look at where the software falls on the kill chain.
If you are familiar with the cyber kill chain,
you will see that the features of Cain can be used starting at the recon phase
to identify potential networks and continue through exploit and onto the
escalate phase where credentials are accessed by the tool.
Additionally,
you can extend your progress initiated by Cain into lateral movement by
taking advantage of Abel's remote access capabilities.
If we map the techniques we will learn during this course to the
MITRE ATT&CK framework, we'll be covering two of the attack
framework categories of credential access,
including discovery and brute force with the password cracking sub‑technique,
as well as command and control with remote access software.
Now let's quickly review how our attack scenario will look with Cain and Abel.
We will start by connecting to our victim network.
In our scenario,
this will be the network of Globomantics, an evil corporation
which we will target for credential access.
After performing some network reconnaissance,
we will execute a man‑in‑the‑middle attack to gather credentials against a
victim system connecting to the Globomantics internet server.
Once we have exploit credentials,
we will move laterally across our victim network,
targeting additional assets on the network to control with Abel and continue
accessing additional credentials to further our attack.