At our reoccurring Hacklab days, we at Compass get the chance to hack some stuff of our own choice together for a day. For example playing with GSM in an attempt to send fake SMS or eavesdrop on voice data, comparing Encase capabilities to Unix command line forensic tools or cloning door entry badges in an attempt to gain unauthorized access to buildings or elevators.

During the Hacklab I gathered a few colleagues to create “team NoSQL” and toyed around with some of the example applications. Our project was based on a VM with several instances of “state of the art” web technologies, most of them involving a NoSQL database.

As a first task we performed a NoSQL injection on a self-developed PHP frontend with a MongoDB backend, as discussed in Hacking NodeJS and MongoDB. Additionally we wrote a python script which extracts cleartext password from the MongoDB with a binary search algorithm using the same vulnerability.

We also spent some time analyzing and exploiting race conditions in web applications, as for example described in Race Conditions on Facebook  and Hacking Starbucks for unlimited coffee. Using just the Linux command line, it was possible to generate arbitrary amount of money in a mockup Bitcoin website by sending a large amount of HTTP requests in parallel.

The slides of our presentation and the MongoDB bruteforcer script can be downloaded here: