Penetration Testing mailing list archives

Re: [PEN-TEST] War Dialers


From: Todd Beebe <todd () SECURELOGIX COM>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 11:23:15 -0500

Gerald,

how do you clients handle outbound modem calls on digital phone lines (using
convertors such as Linestein) or outbound modem calls on analog fax lines?


-----Original Message-----
From: Batten, Gerald [mailto:GBatten () EXOCOM COM]
Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2000 8:08 AM
To: PEN-TEST () SECURITYFOCUS COM
Subject: Re: [PEN-TEST] War Dialers


I agree, in an environment where dial-up modems are allowed, you need proper
penetration testing.  Most of my clients don't allow dial-up lines at all,
except for faxes, which is why ToneLoc is perfect for what I need to do.  If
the list of numbers don't match the list of known fax machines, we just
track down the offending line and cut it.  Most of my clients will just give
me their admin passwords for their dial-ups (after I've signed about a
million legal contracts), and I compare that to their password rules within
their policy.  It's more cost-effective for my client to just give me their
passwords than for me to try to guess the dial-up ones.  I'll do a brute
force on the network accounts, but not the dial-ups.

Just my 2c. worth.

Gerald.

-----Todd's Message-----
From: Todd Beebe [mailto:todd () SECURELOGIX COM]
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2000 7:47 PM
To: PEN-TEST () SECURITYFOCUS COM
Subject: Re: War Dialers


Toneloc is good for finding modems.  But, the value of the commercial
products (both TeleSweep Secure and PhoneSweep) is the
username/password
guessing (read vulnerability testing).

Knowing you have 55 numbers that answer with a tone and
knowing that you
have 55 numbers that answer with tone and have easily guessable
username/passwords are two different things.

The comparison in the IP world is running a port scanner and
a vulnerability
scanner.  You can either receive a list of xxx number of
systems that MIGHT
be running vulnerable services and xxx number of systems that
ARE running
vulnerable systems.

If you use a war dialer or port scanner, someone will need to
manually test
the target systems to find out if they need attention to fix the
vulnerabilities.


Compared to:

2. ToneLoc (tools)
   url: http://www.securityfocus.com/tools/48


Alfred Huger
VP of Engineering
SecurityFocus.com


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