I worked with a guy who went onsite to install a router with information he was given from the local Internet Service Provider (ISP).  When he arrived onsite and he attempted to install the router, he was unable to connect to the Internet.  He and I went back and forth about the possible issues and after a few minutes, I asked him to text me the information he was given by the ISP.  When I looked at the message, it became immediately clear as to what was causing the problem. 

Not using the actual IP information, this will suffice:

IP Address:  255.255.255.0
Subnet:  192.168.168.10
Gateway:  192.168.168.1

You could look at this information and the problem might be completely obvious to you – or perhaps not.  The point being that to call this post a primer on pentesting would be to ignore the entire foundation where the majority of this work exists – the network. 

In my last post, I wrote about creating a basic WordPress Plugin that executes a reverse shell.  Neither particularly impressive about the plugin or the method I used for executing the shell but creating a plugin was new to me and I was working on something completely different when that idea just popped into my head.  After wrapping that up, another idea popped into my head -- what would it take to create a port scanner using PHP?  I did some hunting around and I found a few different ideas and then I started to cobble those ideas together.  

I iterated through different versions until I came up with the following:

I'm working on project which involves creating a WordPress plugin and it got me to thinking about how easy it would be to create a plugin that's sole purpose is a reverse shell.  To get a shell from a WordPress UI, I've used plugins that allow for inclusion of PHP and I've also edited embedded PHP such as the footer.php file.  But until now, I didn't occur to me to write a plugin to perform the task.  

I started tinkering around and I initially used Pentest Monkey's reverse shell and even though it tossed back a shell, it also killed the WordPress site.  I literally had to go into the /wp-content/plugins directory to manually remove the plugin before the site would function correctly again.  Not ideal for a number of reasons.