I was working on a client a week ago or so and we completely compromised their network. It’s a fairly common occurrence during an audit (given there are logistical reasons that make many common techniques off limits). It was mission accomplished for showing the vulnerabilities in the client. However, I started thinking about the firewall egress filtering, or lack thereof. Granted, creating a reverse shell is fairly straight forward, but what if the situation was slightly different. What if there was egress filtering and I ended up rooting a web server? And in this situation let’s pretend that it was set up so that all that’s allowed out is port 80 and 443. What now? I can’t kill the web server, or people will certainly notice, and I can’t tunnel out on any other ports which are already locked up by the web server, so what alternative do I have?

Sure, I could use some of the modern rootkits that talk outside of the TCP by sending single packets but some anti-DDoS boxes out there stop that sort of connection from even hitting a box. They do this for flood protection. They wait for a full TCP state to be initiated before they connect to the web server behind them (similar to a proxy server actually).

Here’s where some programming skill could come into play. Why not re-program a web-server to also listen as if it were an IRC server or telnet or something else for back and forth real-time communication. We already have root access, so it’s easy enough to start and stop the process. It’s also fairly easy with some programming to create a switch in the code, to look for a different string and jump into a different mode. It could be a clever way around a fairly complex set of circumstances. Anyway, yet another odd thought.