4-running-scripts

Running Scripts

Difficulty: Basic

Time: Approximately 5 minutes

In this exercise you will run existing scripts against remote nodes using bolt.

• Test Linux nodes for ShellShock
• Test Windows external connectivity

Prerequisites

For the following exercises you should already have bolt installed and have a few nodes (either Windows or Linux) available to run commands against. The following guides will help:

1. Installing Bolt
2. Acquiring nodes

It is also useful to have some familiarity with running commands with bolt so you understand passing nodes and credentials. The following exercise is recommended:

1. Running Commands

Test Linux nodes for ShellShock

You likely already have a set of scripts which you run to accomplish common systems administration tasks. bolt makes it easy to reuse those scripts without modification, and to run them quickly across a large number of nodes. Feel free to use an existing script of you have one in mind, if not let's use the excellent bashcheck script for checking on ShellShock and related vulnerabilities.

You can download bashcheck using wget or similar like so:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hannob/bashcheck/master/bashcheck

Next we run the script using bolt script run <script-name>. This will upload the script specified to all specified nodes, ensure it's executable and finally run it, returning the output to the console. An example of running that with bashcheck looks like:

$ bolt script run bashcheck -n <nodes>
node_1:

Testing /bin/bash ...
Bash version 4.3.11(1)-release

Variable function parser pre/suffixed [%%, upstream], bugs not exploitable
Not vulnerable to CVE-2014-6271 (original shellshock)
Not vulnerable to CVE-2014-7169 (taviso bug)
Not vulnerable to CVE-2014-7186 (redir_stack bug)
Test for CVE-2014-7187 not reliable without address sanitizer
Not vulnerable to CVE-2014-6277 (lcamtuf bug #1)
Not vulnerable to CVE-2014-6278 (lcamtuf bug #2)

Ran on 1 node in 0.64 seconds

bashcheck is a bash script, but bolt will happily upload and run any script which is runnable on the specified nodes. Just set the shebang line correctly and you can run Python scripts, Ruby scripts, Perl scripts or anything else.

Test Windows external connectivity

You likely already have a set of scripts which you run to accomplish common systems administration tasks. bolt makes it easy to reuse those scripts without modification, and to run them quickly across a large number of nodes. Feel free to use an existing script of you have one in mind, if not we'll create a simple PowerShell script to test our connectivity to a known website.

Save the following as testconnection.ps1:

Test-Connection -ComputerName "example.com" -Count 3 -Delay 2 -TTL 255 -BufferSize 256 -ThrottleLimit 32

Next we run the script using bolt script run. This will upload the script to all specified nodes, ensure it's executable and finally run it, returning the output to the console.

$ bolt script run testconnection.ps1 --nodes winrm://<node> --user <user> --password <password>
node_1:

Source        Destination     IPV4Address      IPV6Address                              Bytes    Time(ms)
------        -----------     -----------      -----------                              -----    --------
DESKTOP-G9... example.com     93.184.216.34                                             256      83
DESKTOP-G9... example.com     93.184.216.34                                             256      85
DESKTOP-G9... example.com     93.184.216.34                                             256      86

Next steps

Now you know how to run existing scripts with bolt you can move on to:

1. Writing Tasks