University Network Vulnerability and Penetration Testing Report BIT354

This report presents an analysis of network vulnerability and penetration testing, focusing on two key challenges: the Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) and the My Tomcat Host. The DVWA challenge explores common web application vulnerabilities, including brute force attacks and SQL injection, providing a practical environment for security professionals and students to test their skills. The report details the setup, vulnerabilities, and potential exploits within DVWA. The My Tomcat Host challenge, designed for beginners, focuses on enumeration techniques to obtain the root flag. The report discusses the enumeration process, the required tools, and the underlying hashing algorithms used. The report also provides an executive summary, references, and figures illustrating the challenges. The assignment was completed to fulfill the requirements of the BIT354 course, focusing on the practical application of penetration testing methodologies and ethical hacking principles.

Running head: NETWORK VULNERABILITY AND PENETRATION TESTING
NETWORK VULNERABILITY AND PENETRATION TESTING
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Executive Summary
Penetration testing also known as the ethical hacking is the preparation of testing of a
system of computer, web application and network in order to find the vulnerabilities of
security that an attacker can take advantage (Baloch 2017). Penetration testing can also be
automated with applications of software or can be executed manually. The goal of penetration
testing is as follows:
 Identify if an attacker can penetrate the defense of a system
 Deciding the affect of breach of security on confidentiality of the private data of the
system
Challenge 1:DAMN Vulnerable Web Application
The damn vulnerable web application is an web application of PHP/MySQL and it is
very vulnerable. The main goal of this application is to help the professionals of security to
test their tools and expertise in an environment that is legal. It helps the developers of web to
had better understand the procedures of securing the applications web and help the teachers
and the students learn about the security of web application in an environment of class that is
controlled (Abdullah 2020). The main objective of the DVWA is to practice many common
vulnerabilities of web with different levels of difficulty with an interface that is simple. The
DVWA is very much vulnerable and it should not be uploaded in any of the public html
folder on any servers of the internet as they will be compromised. It is recommended to
utilise a virtual machine that is set on the networking mode of NAT. In a guest machine, the
XAMPP for the web server and the database can be downloaded and installed. It is free
software and the software cab be redistributed and even it can be modified. The best way to
install the DVWA is to install XAMPP (Sagar et al 2018). XAMPP is very easy to install
Apache Distribution for Linux Windows and other operating systems. The package consists

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of Apache Web Server, MySQL, PHP and many more. First, the database needs to be set up.
The first step is to click of setup DVWA and then click on the create database. This creates
the database with several data.
$_DVWA[‘db_user’]=’dvwa’;
$_DVWA[‘db_password]=supersecretpassword99;
$_DVWA[‘db_database]=’dvwa’;
The configurations of PHP can also be done.
 allow_url_include = on - Allows for Remote File Inclusions (RFI) [allow_url_include]
 allow_url_fopen = on - Allows for Remote File Inclusions (RFI) [allow_url_fopen]
 safe_mode = off - (If PHP <= v5.4) Allows for SQL Injection (SQLi) [safe_mode]
 magic_quotes_gpc = off - (If PHP <= v5.4) Allows for SQL Injection (SQLi)
[magic_quotes_gpc]
 display_errors = off - (Optional) Hides PHP warning messages to make it less verbose
[display_errors]
The default credentials include:
Default username = admin
Default password = password
This can easily be brute forced and can be accessed the web application. However, if
the higher version of PHP is used in order to configure the web application then SQL
injection cannot be used in order to access the web application.
The benefits of DVWA are that it is best for the student and the beginners in order to take the
challenge and then use it in order to sharpen the skills. It can be easily installed and it is the
best place for hacking. This web application is totally legal. There are various kinds of
vulnerabilities that can be tested include the brute force attack, SQL injection, cross side
scripting, file upload and many more (Liu, Wang and Tian 2018). However, the easiest is the
brute force attack that is shown above. The default username is admin and the default

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password is password. Therefore, the web application can be easily accessed using the brute
force attack.
Figure 1: DVWA Website
Challenge 2: My Tomcat Host
The name of the challenge is my tomcat host. This can be downloaded from various
links that will be provided in the screenshots. This boot in order to root the virtual machine is
used for testing the basic enumeration skills and concepts. Enumeration belongs to the first
stage of ethical hacking that is gathering of information. This is the procedure where the
attacker establishes a connection with the victim and then tries to discover the vectors of
attack and then it is used in order to exploit the system of the host. The goal of this challenge
is to get the root flag of the target or the host (Schreuders et al 2017). The difficulty of this
challenge is at the beginner level. The hashing algorithms that are used id MD5 and SHA. In
order to run the tomcat, virtual machine is required that is virtual box-OVA. The operating
system that will be required in order to run the challenge is Linux. The common networking
features of the networking those are required is DHCP. The service of DHCP will be enabled
and the IP address will be assigned automatically.

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Figure 2: List of Challenges
Figure 3: Challenges taken

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References
Abdullah, H.S., 2020. Evaluation of Open Source Web Application Vulnerability
Scanners. Academic Journal of Nawroz University, 9(1), pp.47-52.
Liu, Y., Wang, Z. and Tian, S., 2018, August. Security Against Network Attacks on Web
Application System. In China Cyber Security Annual Conference (pp. 145-152). Springer,
Singapore.
Sagar, D., Kukreja, S., Brahma, J., Tyagi, S. and Jain, P., 2018. Studying open source
vulnerability scanners for vulnerabilities in web applications. IIOAB JOURNAL, 9(2), pp.43-
49.
Schreuders, Z.C., Shaw, T., Shan-A-Khuda, M., Ravichandran, G., Keighley, J. and Ordean,
M., 2017. Security Scenario Generator (SecGen): A Framework for Generating Randomly
Vulnerable Rich-scenario VMs for Learning Computer Security and Hosting {CTF} Events.
In 2017 {USENIX} Workshop on Advances in Security Education ({ASE} 17).