Penetration Testing mailing list archives

Re: Enumeration of NAT'ed computer names


From: Byron Sonne <blsonne () rogers com>
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:23:32 -0500

I have a need to enumerate computer names i.e. \\elvis and \\winbox in a SOHO NAT'ed network. The basic idea here is that \\elvis was
used to commit a crime, but in order to tie \\elvis the offender,
I have to prove that \\elvis exists on the network.
I have to do it legally, and I can't actively penetrate the network
to enumerate the names. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Well, you're really kinda hamstrung here if you can't actively penetrate the network. Sounds like your best bet is going to be passively sniffing the outgoing traffic looking for anything containing those names.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you're not law enforcement, so good luck getting the target's provider to give you a span port or otherwise let you get your mitts on their traffic. If 'legal' wasn't a requirement, I'd say you might be able to tap their wire.

Since you prepended '\\' to the hosts I'm guessing you're working in the windows world, which will complicate matters, as the netbios protocol doesn't make it out of the current subnet by design (unless you've piggybacked it on TCP/IP or netware or something). So, as you're outside the nat'd network, you're probably gonna be stuck looking at just IP addresses, which probably doesn't help, since I'm guessing you're after hostnames. Of course, it could be a *nix box running Samba...

Those papers and ideas about counting nat'd hosts via timestamps or clock skew are neat, but not particularly accurate or useful in the real world, even less so since you're not gonna be able to map them to hostnames on the target network. Best you'll get is an idea of the number of hosts behind the nat.

The only other thing I can think of is to run a wireless sniffer (kismet or netstumbler, etc.) near the target's physical location and see if they're leaking anything that way. Even if \\elvis isn't wireless, you might get lucky and stumble across another computer in the target network that *is* wireless and is attempting communications to \\elvis.

Make sure you keep track of MAC addresses whatever you're approach, that's a better indicator of unique identities than IP addresses or hostnames are for correlation purposes. If you can associate a MAC to \\elvis, then just look for that MAC elsewhere; it's probably gonna be the same host.

I don't think you're going to have much luck at all, but please let me (us?) know if you make any headway. You're in an interesting situation that I'd like to hear more about.

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