Finding some users

At this point we have a partial idea of the structure of the members table, but we only know of one username: the random member who got our initial "Here is your password" email. Recall that we never received the message itself, only the address it was sent to. We'd like to get some more names to work with, preferably those likely to have access to more data.

The first place to start, of course, is the company's website to find who is who: the "About us" or "Contact" pages often list who's running the place. Many of these contain email addresses, but even those that don't list them can give us some clues which allow us to find them with our tool.

The idea is to submit a query that uses the LIKE clause, allowing us to do partial matches of names or email addresses in the database, each time triggering the "We sent your password" message and email. Warning: though this reveals an email address each time we run it, it also actually sends that email, which may raise suspicions. This suggests that we take it easy.

We can do the query on email name or full name (or presumably other information), each time putting in the % wildcards that LIKE supports:

Keep in mind that even though there may be more than one "Bob", we only get to see one of them: this suggests refining our LIKE clause narrowly.

Ultimately, we may only need one valid email address to leverage our way in.

Brute-force password guessing

One can certainly attempt brute-force guessing of passwords at the main login page, but many systems make an effort to detect or even prevent this. There could be logfiles, account lockouts, or other devices that would substantially impede our efforts, but because of the non-sanitized inputs, we have another avenue that is much less likely to be so protected.

We'll instead do actual password testing in our snippet by including the email name and password directly. In our example, we'll use our victim, bob@example.com and try multiple passwords.

This is clearly well-formed SQL, so we don't expect to see any server errors, and we'll know we found the password when we receive the "your password has been mailed to you" message. Our mark has now been tipped off, but we do have his password.

This procedure can be automated with scripting in perl, and though we were in the process of creating this script, we ended up going down another road before actually trying it.