**Exploring the World of Browser Exploits with Beef**

Have you ever wondered what happens when a browser is compromised and an attacker gains access to it? Beef, a tool designed for browser exploitation, provides a unique insight into this world. With Beef, users can take control of a victim's browser and execute various exploits, making it a valuable tool for security experts and developers alike.

**Hooking a Victim and Accessing the UI**

To start using Beef, one needs to plug in the browser and hook it up to the tool. This process is relatively straightforward, and once successful, Beef can access the victim's browser and begin to execute various commands. The user interface is designed to be intuitive, making it easy for users to navigate and understand what's happening.

**Logging and Monitoring**

One of the most interesting features of Beef is its ability to log everything that happens in the browser. This includes keyboard input, mouse movements, and even the state of the browser itself. By analyzing these logs, attackers can gain a comprehensive understanding of the victim's behavior and make informed decisions about their next move.

**Automated Exploits**

Beef comes with a range of automated exploits that can be used to test various aspects of a browser. These exploits are designed to simulate real-world attacks, allowing developers to identify vulnerabilities in their applications and strengthen security measures. With the ability to automate testing, developers can save time and resources while ensuring their applications remain secure.

**Color-Coded Exploits**

Beef uses a color-coded system to differentiate between various exploits. This system provides users with valuable insights into what each exploit is capable of and whether it's likely to be detected by the victim. By understanding this system, developers can better tailor their tests to specific scenarios and avoid detection.

**Combining Beef with Other Tools**

Beef can be combined with other tools, such as Metasploit, to create a powerful security testing platform. This allows users to access a wide range of exploits and test various aspects of a browser in one go. The ability to combine tools expands the capabilities of Beef and makes it an even more valuable resource for developers and security experts.

**Security Concerns**

When exploring browser exploits like Beef, it's essential to consider the potential risks involved. These tools can be used to launch attacks against unsuspecting users, making them a double-edged sword. However, when used responsibly, these tools can also help identify vulnerabilities in applications and strengthen overall security measures.

**The Future of Browser Exploits**

As we look into the future of browser exploits, it's clear that tools like Beef will continue to play a significant role. With the rise of new technologies and threats, developers must stay vigilant and adapt their strategies accordingly. By staying ahead of the curve and using tools like Beef, they can ensure their applications remain secure and protected against emerging threats.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, Beef is an incredibly powerful tool for exploring browser exploits. Its intuitive interface and range of automated tests make it an ideal resource for developers and security experts alike. While there are risks involved, these tools can also be used responsibly to identify vulnerabilities in applications and strengthen overall security measures. As the world of browser exploits continues to evolve, tools like Beef will undoubtedly remain at the forefront of this exciting and rapidly changing field.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou have heard us talk a lot about lenode i've heard there's some new stuff little node yeah i'm trying to talk about it oh sorry there's like new one clicks you can just one click you don't have to know what yeah i tried one of them i'm trying to tell people about it which one you try i tried beef which by the way is a terrible name for a programming project because i had to try to google some documentation guess what comes up when you google beef where's the beef not beef software beef stands for browser exploitation something framework something like that yeah you can test your browser and the amazing thing about it and the amazing thing about lenode is it is a one-click install actually you do have to run a script too not just one click but it's super convenient and if you head over and take a look at the beef installation page you'll see how much time they're saving you it's a lot of time it's kind of annoying and it's pretty cool because we talk a lot about using the node to get into a new job and if you're just getting into penetration testing and security seems like a great place to start yes the part that's exciting for me was the stuff we talked about on the level one news and it really crystallized for me playing with it how much stuff advertisers have access to with things like browser fingerprinting and stuff like that you're going to talk a lot about that do you remember we figured out there was some magic number for the fingerprint there's only like four or five dimensions shockingly low and beef will show you a lot of dimensions it knew exactly what my gpu was which is kind of unique because it's in a virtual environment it's like oh they know who i am and your local directory that you're running the file from in your browser which had your name in it that's not considered privileged information your active directory username or your local username so this is a really cool one click it's pretty easy to get started and it's really easy to use it's kind of like chess there's stuff in here you're not going to understand but if you don't understand it great way to learn right i would say even if you're not planning on being a security professional if you just work in a corporate environment and you want to show your corporate overlords what kind of risk they're taking well this will let you do it and it embeds in any website as just a one-line javascript include which is why you've got to work on making your web security web properties as secure as possible you could use this for malicious purposes too but we don't recommend it yeah don't do that it's great it's pretty easy to detect if it's being used maliciously too yeah actually it gives you those nice little gooey warnings about when they might be able to notice when you're doing something and when you don't have to worry about that ah we're gonna install beef and check it out and a lot of people are gonna be angered by me saying this but let's be honest installing things on linux can be very very annoying if you just head over to the beef github and look at the standard installation process it's just it's not as convenient as other operating systems i'm sorry i know many of you wear that like a badge but i do not i find it very annoying and when i just want to try something out and see what it can do i really appreciate services like lenode you know we love the node because they have the beautiful one-click marketplace and the one-click marketplace has just been expanded they have a lot of cool new stuff we're going to be checking out a couple of new things they've got on here and one of those is beef beef is a browser exploit tool that will test your browsers and uh luckily there is a one-click install in the marketplace here so we're gonna check that out and we're gonna check it out for free and so can you by using the free lenode credit with our promo code you can also check out any of these other things that you want by using that code it's a very simple process get your one click started you're gonna choose a password for the beef user and you're going to put in your email address there are advanced options if you want to set this up correctly you will probably set up ssl you might set up an actual domain for it uh you do various things to harden it that's certainly something that i would recommend but i'm not going to do that because i just want to try it out i'm going to install this i'm going to access it directly via the ip i'm going to install it as root i'm not going to have a domain i'm not going to use ssl i'm going to do a variety of things you probably shouldn't do here just to check it out so keep that in mind if you were doing a production version of this i'll do a cheap lenode it probably doesn't even need this much to be honest that's uh one cent per hour ten dollars monthly i think we can afford that and we'll call this be video and we'll set a root password not gonna bother with ssh keys either because again i just want to demo this make sure everything is correct selected beef all the required options let's create arlen ode oh i didn't choose a region we'll go with atlanta there we go now it's provisioning once this is done we simply need to log in with the account we set up using this ip address as soon as you log in with your root user you will have some scripts prepared for you in the root directory there the home directory for the root user and you simply need to run this stack script that is prepared for you this will take a long time this is going to install all of ruby and all the requirements and the web server and everything and it's going to set up beef expect this to take five to six minutes because it also installs a lot of documentation and that'll take a very long time if you ever lose track of what your urls are or you're not sure if beef is running you can go to slash home slash beef and just colon slash beef to run the beef start up again if it's already running it won't be a big deal it will tell you that but it will still print all of your urls and everything so this is convenient if you don't remember how to get to the the ui or the hook or anything you can always just run this command and it's going to let you know hey it started you'll also get a running logs if anything goes wrong here so you can see we've got some we're connecting without ssl so we're spawning some areas here but we can get our hook and ui url right here for the rest of this process and we can get a lot of error output now that we have confirmed that beef is running on our lenode we should get the login url from the output of that attempt to run beef that told us we were already running if you don't want to do that you can just use the ip address colon 3000 slash ui authentication uh you can see here i'm accessing via localhost i'm not actually accessing via localhost i'm just hiding my ip address so you would go to directly to the lenode ip address then we log in with beef and whatever password you set up during the beef install if you don't remember what that is you can see it and change it in config.yaml in your slash home slash beef folder so here we are we're logged in to beef now one thing that we need to do for this immediately is we need to get a browser hooked so that we can start looking at it so the way this thing works is you must take your browser that you want to test and you must visit a url so that the browser hook can be sunk into that browser you know just like a phishing attack you would get somebody to fall for your phishing url and then you have this kind of information about them you'll be monitoring the things that do and we can look at some of the things that you can monitor so let's go ahead and if we go back to our ssh we can get the hook url now we need to get a browser to visit and accept this javascript payload so that beef can start spying on them and we can start using the interface and checking out that browser now if you look back here when you started b from the command line you have the hook url given to you now you need you can't just visit that url you need to embed it you need to include that and some html that you create but if you don't want to bother with that if you're just trying this out like i am you can also instead of going to the directly to the javascript there are demos installed with your beef install if you go to slash demos slash basic.html in place of hook.js this will be a demo page that includes hook.js as part of the demo so you see right here you should be hooked into beef when you go to this page you this browser will now be hooked in you can head back to the interface and start doing your audit and you know trying to do horrible things and spy on this browser so let's take a look at that we go back to our beef ui we log in and we should have some browsers to take a look at and push around a little bit here and we do now normally you would see some external ip addresses here we have taken some steps to hide that from you so just keep in mind that this is a little abnormal but we can click through to one of these and we can see some interesting stuff in here do you have quicktime installed do you have webgl installed these are all important things if you wanted to try to you know do some penetration testing what what are you telling me about it i know what browser you're using and so forth i know c drive slash users slash wendell i know who this is so there's something that you might not think about he is uh accessing the file on his desktop this would normally be a web address that's part of the workaround for the javascript uh we see hardware stuff like that he's running windows 10 that could certainly tell me something security related i can see his resolution these are the kinds of things that can help you build one of those uh unique identifiers for a person like you know if you put all of these things together into a unique identifier this is kind of the kind of thing that very few people will share and so you can really drill down just based on this information as a fingerprint but in the logs tab we got even cooler stuff we've got whether or not they are currently connected sometimes the tab seems to go to sleep which is interesting you can lose your hook uh we've got browser focus whether or not they're actually looking at the browser when that happened when mouse clicks happened and where we could using this information completely redraw the user's clicks and overlay them on the website because we know the url which is interesting i'm not sure if it's got the scroll information in here but still a host of stuff in these logs that's really cool that you can go through and this is just by default you don't have to do anything you just have to plug in the browser and all of a sudden it's pulling all this stuff and keeping logs of it so now that we have our victim and or test browser hooked and we have them in the ui we can begin to actually uh you know beyond the logs telling us exactly what they're up to at any given time in their browser double clicks clicks browser focus and things like that we also have these commands and these are automated ways to try a variety of exploits now the color codes here you see we have green ones and red ones there is a color coding system uh that you can read about in the documentation that will tell you like could you could the victim be aware of this could the victim see this is this going to be visible it tells you what basically you can expect to get away with here without someone noticing which is very convenient so for example the webcam html5 that's a red or an orange so you know that's somebody's gonna know something's up there but some of the others maybe not so for example detect activex and we go down here and click execute let that run and then we take a look at the the the data that comes back activex equals no so we know that activex is not running in this browser and as you can see there's a lot of different things that we can run here out of the box there's more that you can add if you add additional modules to beef you can also combine this with other stuff like uh metasploit for example if you have metasploit set up in conjunction with beef then you can do the browser browser auto pwn which is cool so as you can see there's a lot to explore there and some of these take no inputs and some of them take quite a few inputs that you're going to have to try to understand so you can kind of go from no knowledge poking here to high knowledge you know real serious testing with this thing you've got the proxy and the xss raise tab we don't really have anything to demo with that but the network tab is also pretty cool because it will try to visualize how the the browser and the network is currently hooked up here and how we are connected to it which again is very cool we can look at their hosts and services there is a lot to explore here and again we're just trying to do a high level look at it but it certainly seems like something that is worth your time to explore if you're interested in this kind of testing all right so you're up and running with beef now but this is actually really just scratching the surface you can do a lot more with this there's another framework called the metasploit framework and you can get plug-ins for that there's really a lot you can do there's a lot of modules and not all of them are on by default and you can write your own modules for beef yeah what you gotta understand is that beef itself isn't really anything crazy or malicious these are actually exploits that are just sort of packaged up in a neat easy to test way this is really made like if you're an application developer you could use this to test different things on your on your website to make sure that it's as secure as it can be otherwise you're going to be able to let somebody insert this kind of thing or whatever it's really uh it's really scary what's possible when you've got you know the command and control infrastructure for these browsers i mean you were pushing commands to live connected browsers after the fact and all they have to do is visit a url and stay there yeah they do have to stick around there but you get constant logging yeah did they lose focus did they click where did they click on the screen is the dev tools open yeah and oh did they maybe minimize the browser did somebody go to right-click inspect hide everything so hey if they minimize the browser we've got time to work so this is really kind of scary that this is because you know that advertise like blue kai oracle stuff and like the adobe cloud like they're all in here doing this as part of their ad model here's what you have to think about because we look at that hook.js right and think about what size file that is and then think about how much javascript all these new sites are serving us every day it's a lot more than that what are they doing and that's just one of the one clicks they have a ton of them on there we might look at a couple of other ones but i never heard of beef and now this is a great way to go into something new we're not really big security experts but this was easy to use and i'm actually kind of interested in learning about more of these exploits yeah this is this is a really awesome thing thanks lenode for making the one click and thanks lenovo for sponsoring this video we'll see you lateryou have heard us talk a lot about lenode i've heard there's some new stuff little node yeah i'm trying to talk about it oh sorry there's like new one clicks you can just one click you don't have to know what yeah i tried one of them i'm trying to tell people about it which one you try i tried beef which by the way is a terrible name for a programming project because i had to try to google some documentation guess what comes up when you google beef where's the beef not beef software beef stands for browser exploitation something framework something like that yeah you can test your browser and the amazing thing about it and the amazing thing about lenode is it is a one-click install actually you do have to run a script too not just one click but it's super convenient and if you head over and take a look at the beef installation page you'll see how much time they're saving you it's a lot of time it's kind of annoying and it's pretty cool because we talk a lot about using the node to get into a new job and if you're just getting into penetration testing and security seems like a great place to start yes the part that's exciting for me was the stuff we talked about on the level one news and it really crystallized for me playing with it how much stuff advertisers have access to with things like browser fingerprinting and stuff like that you're going to talk a lot about that do you remember we figured out there was some magic number for the fingerprint there's only like four or five dimensions shockingly low and beef will show you a lot of dimensions it knew exactly what my gpu was which is kind of unique because it's in a virtual environment it's like oh they know who i am and your local directory that you're running the file from in your browser which had your name in it that's not considered privileged information your active directory username or your local username so this is a really cool one click it's pretty easy to get started and it's really easy to use it's kind of like chess there's stuff in here you're not going to understand but if you don't understand it great way to learn right i would say even if you're not planning on being a security professional if you just work in a corporate environment and you want to show your corporate overlords what kind of risk they're taking well this will let you do it and it embeds in any website as just a one-line javascript include which is why you've got to work on making your web security web properties as secure as possible you could use this for malicious purposes too but we don't recommend it yeah don't do that it's great it's pretty easy to detect if it's being used maliciously too yeah actually it gives you those nice little gooey warnings about when they might be able to notice when you're doing something and when you don't have to worry about that ah we're gonna install beef and check it out and a lot of people are gonna be angered by me saying this but let's be honest installing things on linux can be very very annoying if you just head over to the beef github and look at the standard installation process it's just it's not as convenient as other operating systems i'm sorry i know many of you wear that like a badge but i do not i find it very annoying and when i just want to try something out and see what it can do i really appreciate services like lenode you know we love the node because they have the beautiful one-click marketplace and the one-click marketplace has just been expanded they have a lot of cool new stuff we're going to be checking out a couple of new things they've got on here and one of those is beef beef is a browser exploit tool that will test your browsers and uh luckily there is a one-click install in the marketplace here so we're gonna check that out and we're gonna check it out for free and so can you by using the free lenode credit with our promo code you can also check out any of these other things that you want by using that code it's a very simple process get your one click started you're gonna choose a password for the beef user and you're going to put in your email address there are advanced options if you want to set this up correctly you will probably set up ssl you might set up an actual domain for it uh you do various things to harden it that's certainly something that i would recommend but i'm not going to do that because i just want to try it out i'm going to install this i'm going to access it directly via the ip i'm going to install it as root i'm not going to have a domain i'm not going to use ssl i'm going to do a variety of things you probably shouldn't do here just to check it out so keep that in mind if you were doing a production version of this i'll do a cheap lenode it probably doesn't even need this much to be honest that's uh one cent per hour ten dollars monthly i think we can afford that and we'll call this be video and we'll set a root password not gonna bother with ssh keys either because again i just want to demo this make sure everything is correct selected beef all the required options let's create arlen ode oh i didn't choose a region we'll go with atlanta there we go now it's provisioning once this is done we simply need to log in with the account we set up using this ip address as soon as you log in with your root user you will have some scripts prepared for you in the root directory there the home directory for the root user and you simply need to run this stack script that is prepared for you this will take a long time this is going to install all of ruby and all the requirements and the web server and everything and it's going to set up beef expect this to take five to six minutes because it also installs a lot of documentation and that'll take a very long time if you ever lose track of what your urls are or you're not sure if beef is running you can go to slash home slash beef and just colon slash beef to run the beef start up again if it's already running it won't be a big deal it will tell you that but it will still print all of your urls and everything so this is convenient if you don't remember how to get to the the ui or the hook or anything you can always just run this command and it's going to let you know hey it started you'll also get a running logs if anything goes wrong here so you can see we've got some we're connecting without ssl so we're spawning some areas here but we can get our hook and ui url right here for the rest of this process and we can get a lot of error output now that we have confirmed that beef is running on our lenode we should get the login url from the output of that attempt to run beef that told us we were already running if you don't want to do that you can just use the ip address colon 3000 slash ui authentication uh you can see here i'm accessing via localhost i'm not actually accessing via localhost i'm just hiding my ip address so you would go to directly to the lenode ip address then we log in with beef and whatever password you set up during the beef install if you don't remember what that is you can see it and change it in config.yaml in your slash home slash beef folder so here we are we're logged in to beef now one thing that we need to do for this immediately is we need to get a browser hooked so that we can start looking at it so the way this thing works is you must take your browser that you want to test and you must visit a url so that the browser hook can be sunk into that browser you know just like a phishing attack you would get somebody to fall for your phishing url and then you have this kind of information about them you'll be monitoring the things that do and we can look at some of the things that you can monitor so let's go ahead and if we go back to our ssh we can get the hook url now we need to get a browser to visit and accept this javascript payload so that beef can start spying on them and we can start using the interface and checking out that browser now if you look back here when you started b from the command line you have the hook url given to you now you need you can't just visit that url you need to embed it you need to include that and some html that you create but if you don't want to bother with that if you're just trying this out like i am you can also instead of going to the directly to the javascript there are demos installed with your beef install if you go to slash demos slash basic.html in place of hook.js this will be a demo page that includes hook.js as part of the demo so you see right here you should be hooked into beef when you go to this page you this browser will now be hooked in you can head back to the interface and start doing your audit and you know trying to do horrible things and spy on this browser so let's take a look at that we go back to our beef ui we log in and we should have some browsers to take a look at and push around a little bit here and we do now normally you would see some external ip addresses here we have taken some steps to hide that from you so just keep in mind that this is a little abnormal but we can click through to one of these and we can see some interesting stuff in here do you have quicktime installed do you have webgl installed these are all important things if you wanted to try to you know do some penetration testing what what are you telling me about it i know what browser you're using and so forth i know c drive slash users slash wendell i know who this is so there's something that you might not think about he is uh accessing the file on his desktop this would normally be a web address that's part of the workaround for the javascript uh we see hardware stuff like that he's running windows 10 that could certainly tell me something security related i can see his resolution these are the kinds of things that can help you build one of those uh unique identifiers for a person like you know if you put all of these things together into a unique identifier this is kind of the kind of thing that very few people will share and so you can really drill down just based on this information as a fingerprint but in the logs tab we got even cooler stuff we've got whether or not they are currently connected sometimes the tab seems to go to sleep which is interesting you can lose your hook uh we've got browser focus whether or not they're actually looking at the browser when that happened when mouse clicks happened and where we could using this information completely redraw the user's clicks and overlay them on the website because we know the url which is interesting i'm not sure if it's got the scroll information in here but still a host of stuff in these logs that's really cool that you can go through and this is just by default you don't have to do anything you just have to plug in the browser and all of a sudden it's pulling all this stuff and keeping logs of it so now that we have our victim and or test browser hooked and we have them in the ui we can begin to actually uh you know beyond the logs telling us exactly what they're up to at any given time in their browser double clicks clicks browser focus and things like that we also have these commands and these are automated ways to try a variety of exploits now the color codes here you see we have green ones and red ones there is a color coding system uh that you can read about in the documentation that will tell you like could you could the victim be aware of this could the victim see this is this going to be visible it tells you what basically you can expect to get away with here without someone noticing which is very convenient so for example the webcam html5 that's a red or an orange so you know that's somebody's gonna know something's up there but some of the others maybe not so for example detect activex and we go down here and click execute let that run and then we take a look at the the the data that comes back activex equals no so we know that activex is not running in this browser and as you can see there's a lot of different things that we can run here out of the box there's more that you can add if you add additional modules to beef you can also combine this with other stuff like uh metasploit for example if you have metasploit set up in conjunction with beef then you can do the browser browser auto pwn which is cool so as you can see there's a lot to explore there and some of these take no inputs and some of them take quite a few inputs that you're going to have to try to understand so you can kind of go from no knowledge poking here to high knowledge you know real serious testing with this thing you've got the proxy and the xss raise tab we don't really have anything to demo with that but the network tab is also pretty cool because it will try to visualize how the the browser and the network is currently hooked up here and how we are connected to it which again is very cool we can look at their hosts and services there is a lot to explore here and again we're just trying to do a high level look at it but it certainly seems like something that is worth your time to explore if you're interested in this kind of testing all right so you're up and running with beef now but this is actually really just scratching the surface you can do a lot more with this there's another framework called the metasploit framework and you can get plug-ins for that there's really a lot you can do there's a lot of modules and not all of them are on by default and you can write your own modules for beef yeah what you gotta understand is that beef itself isn't really anything crazy or malicious these are actually exploits that are just sort of packaged up in a neat easy to test way this is really made like if you're an application developer you could use this to test different things on your on your website to make sure that it's as secure as it can be otherwise you're going to be able to let somebody insert this kind of thing or whatever it's really uh it's really scary what's possible when you've got you know the command and control infrastructure for these browsers i mean you were pushing commands to live connected browsers after the fact and all they have to do is visit a url and stay there yeah they do have to stick around there but you get constant logging yeah did they lose focus did they click where did they click on the screen is the dev tools open yeah and oh did they maybe minimize the browser did somebody go to right-click inspect hide everything so hey if they minimize the browser we've got time to work so this is really kind of scary that this is because you know that advertise like blue kai oracle stuff and like the adobe cloud like they're all in here doing this as part of their ad model here's what you have to think about because we look at that hook.js right and think about what size file that is and then think about how much javascript all these new sites are serving us every day it's a lot more than that what are they doing and that's just one of the one clicks they have a ton of them on there we might look at a couple of other ones but i never heard of beef and now this is a great way to go into something new we're not really big security experts but this was easy to use and i'm actually kind of interested in learning about more of these exploits yeah this is this is a really awesome thing thanks lenode for making the one click and thanks lenovo for sponsoring this video we'll see you later\n"