Sniper – Automatic Exploiter

We developed Sniper to bridge the gap between results that common vulnerability scanners produce (e.g. Nessus, Qualys, OpenVAS) and the attack methods real threat actors use. While vulnerability scanners generate a high volume of potential issues, which also include a lot of noise and false positives, real attackers commonly focus on a few highly effective and targeted intrusion techniques.

Sniper is a custom tool that implements a set of modules for exploiting the most critical vulnerabilities in high-profile software that the majority of companies in the world use. The tool mimics the exploits and attack techniques found in real world scenarios to determine the truly vulnerable systems.

After a successful exploitation, Sniper automatically runs post-exploitation modules which extract interesting data from the target system as solid proof of intrusion. We call this data artefacts. Here are some artefact examples:

• Current user (e.g. nt authority/system)
• System information
• List of local users
• List of running processes
• Network configuration
• Network neighbors
• Network connections

Security teams and specialists can use all this data to continue their pentesting work into the network (manually, by the pentester) and for vulnerability validation.

When Sniper succeeds in exploiting a vulnerability, system administrators must act straight away, as the risk is real and attackers can exploit it at any given moment. This tool helps you become very effective at filtering out the noise that vulnerability scanners create, eliminating false positives, and helping you focus on the vulnerabilities that matter. Here's how many of them we detect compared to other security platforms.

Exploit Modules

This is the complete list of modules and capabilities currently available in Sniper:

Artefacts

Artefacts are data from the target system which Sniper automatically extracts after one of the exploits succeeds. Their purpose is to provide solid proof that the target is vulnerable and to help in further manual exploitation, if necessary.

The artefacts are extracted by running predefined shell commands on the target, depending on its operating system. For instance, to extract the current user on a Linux system, the extractor will run the command whoami whereas on Windows it will run the command net user.

This is the list of artefacts that Sniper is able to extract:

Parameters

How it works

Sniper runs a number of predefined steps for each target:

1. Scanning for open ports

This is the first phase the attack, which checks if the TCP ports specified as input are open or not. The result of this phase is a list of open ports, together with the protocol, type of service and its version.

2. Fingerprinting web services

Next, Sniper iterates through each port that runs a HTTP/S service and tries to determine what type of web application is running, whether it is a standard app (e.g. Outlook Web Access, VMWare web interface, etc.) and which technology sits behind it. This information is needed to select the appropriate exploit to run against it.

3. Looking for compatible exploits

Based on the fingerprint data about the target system, Sniper then filters a list of possible compatible exploits that match it.

4. Checking if the target is vulnerable

At this stage, the tool runs the check routine for each compatible exploit that determines whether the target is exploitable – without extracting any data.

5. Exploiting and extracting all artefacts

If the previous step succeeds and the target is exploitable, Sniper automatically proceeds to extract all the artefacts and show them in the output report.

6. Cleaning up

Most exploit modules do not create any files or processes on the target system so no cleanup is necessary. However, when they do, Sniper makes sure that they are deleted, so the system is left unaltered and clean.