Imagine your computer system is a house. In your house you keep valuables such as TVs, jewelry, family heirlooms, and so on. In computer terms, think of these things as files and other data. In order to steal your valuables, crooks snoop for the weakest access point to your house, which is often the back door.
Imagine your computer system is a house. In your house you keep valuables such as TVs, jewelry, family heirlooms, and so on. In computer terms, think of these things as files and other data. In order to steal your valuables, crooks snoop for the weakest access point to your house, which is often the back door.
In the hacker world, a backdoor (one word) is a technique in which a system’s security is bypassed without being detected in order to access a computer (your house) and download, copy, or delete its data (your valuables); a backdoor gives a hacker access to your computer whenever it’s on the Internet, as well as full access to all of its contents. In other words, a backdoor allows the bad guys to walk in and out of your house, taking whatever they want, whenever they want.
If you don’t know a backdoor exists in your system or how hackers deploy one, then how can you possibly protect your system and your data? In this quick video, viewers will learn the basic technique of how to use a Meterpreter Script to create a Netcat backdoor in a vulnerable VM. This exploit can be applied to an organization’s system – by an experience and qualified security professional – in order to see if their clients on their network are susceptible to a backdoor attack. But be careful, even backdoors installed by security administrators can pose security risks, because they can be exploited if discovered during testing.
As you’ve witnessed, it’s easy to grab valuable data through a backdoor attack. Again, this is not a hacking that should be taken lightly. In addition to leaving your system vulnerable, a penetration test, as well as the hacking tools and exploits like the ones used here, can rattle the stability of your network. Testing should only be done on a closed network.
It’s obviously important to avoid getting your system backdoored. There are a couple of simple, but very important ways to prevent this. First, use a competent virus protection program. Most of these will stop backdoors getting through – or slam them shut. Secondly, you can prevent a backdoor attack by not allow incoming network connections; only allow connections that have to be established from the internal network out.
Have you checked for backdoors on your system? If you have some additional tools and techniques for backdoor attack testing and prevention, I’d love to hear from you.
