Pearson 312-50v13 New Attempt

Operational Threat Intelligence provides insights into specific attacker methodologies, motivations, and campaigns. It involves gathering contextual information from real-world attacks, open-source intelligence (OSINT), social media, dark web forums, chat rooms, and human intelligence (HUMINT).

As per CEH v13 Official Courseware:

Operational intelligence is primarily used by security teams to anticipate specific incoming attacks.

It helps provide actionable information such as:

Who is attacking?

Why are they attacking?

What methods are they using?

What infrastructure is involved?

Incorrect Options:

A. Strategic Threat Intelligence is high-level, focusing on long-term trends and business risks.

B. Tactical Threat Intelligence is focused on TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) of known threats, primarily for defenders and analysts.

D. Technical Threat Intelligence includes IoCs like IPs, hashes, and URLs, often short-lived and used for detection systems.

Reference – CEH v13 Official Courseware:

Module 01: Introduction to Ethical Hacking

Section: "Types of Threat Intelligence"

Table: “Strategic vs Tactical vs Operational vs Technical Intelligence”

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Key observations in the packet capture:

Repeated 0x90 values indicate a NOP sled (No Operation instructions), commonly used in buffer overflow payloads to guide execution to the malicious shellcode.

The presence of "/bin/sh" in ASCII indicates that the attacker intends to launch a shell (command-line access) on the victim’s system once the overflow is successful.

The payload likely contains shellcode that spawns a shell, giving the attacker command-line access.

From CEH v13 Official Courseware:

Module 6: Malware Threats

Module 9: Denial-of-Service

Module 5: Vulnerability Analysis

CEH v13 Study Guide states:

“A buffer overflow exploit typically involves injecting a NOP sled followed by shellcode. The string '/bin/sh' is a tell-tale sign of shell-spawning code that aims to give the attacker command access.”

Incorrect Options:

A: There's no evidence the IDS blocked the attack—only that it logged it.

B: Creating a directory would not involve a NOP sled or spawn a shell.

C: We cannot confirm success; only the intent and method are clear.

The attacker has most likely used RST hijacking, which is a type of network-level session hijacking technique that exploits the TCP reset (RST) mechanism. TCP reset is a way of terminating an established TCP connection by sending a packet with the RST flag set, indicating that the sender does not want to continue the communication. RST hijacking involves sending a forged RST packet to one or both ends of a TCP connection, using a spoofed source IP address and a guessed acknowledgment number, to trick them into believing that the other end has closed the connection. As a result, the victim’s connection is reset and the attacker can take over the session or launch a denial-of-service attack12.

The other options are not correct for the following reasons:

A. TCP/IP hijacking: This option is a general term that refers to any type of network-level session hijacking technique that targets TCP/IP connections. RST hijacking is a specific type of TCP/IP hijacking, but not the only one. Other types of TCP/IP hijacking include SYN hijacking, source routing, and sequence prediction3.

B. UDP hijacking: This option is not applicable because UDP is a connectionless protocol that does not use TCP reset mechanism. UDP hijacking is a type of network-level session hijacking technique that targets UDP connections, such as DNS or VoIP. UDP hijacking involves intercepting and modifying UDP packets to redirect or manipulate the communication between the sender and the receiver4.

D. Blind hijacking: This option is not accurate because blind hijacking is a type of network-level session hijacking technique that does not require injecting RST packets. Blind hijacking involves guessing the sequence and acknowledgment numbers of a TCP connection without being able to see the responses from the target. Blind hijacking can be used to inject malicious data or commands into an active TCP session, but not to reset the connection5.

A salt is random data that is used as an additional input to a one-way function that hashes data, a password, or passphrase. Salts are used to safeguard passwords in storage. Historically a password was stored in plaintext on a system, but over time additional safeguards were developed to protect a user's password against being read from the system. A salt is one of those methods.

A new salt is randomly generated for each password. In a typical setting, the salt and the password (or its version after key stretching) are concatenated and processed with a cryptographic hash function, and the output hash value (but not the original password) is stored with the salt in a database. Hashing allows for later authentication without keeping and therefore risking exposure of the plaintext password in the event that the authentication data store is compromised.

Salts defend against a pre-computed hash attack, e.g. rainbow tables. Since salts do not have to be memorized by humans they can make the size of the hash table required for a successful attack prohibitively large without placing a burden on the users. Since salts are different in each case, they also protect commonly used passwords, or those users who use the same password on several sites, by making all salted hash instances for the same password different from each other.