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Pentesting: Twelve Caesars – Community Tools for Offensive Security

27 October 2026 at 13:12

Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

Recently a new project was released by Praetorian. Praetorian is open-sourcing the offensive tools their red team actually uses on engagements. They call it 12 Caesars and their team is planning to release one tool a week for twelve weeks. Every tool is written in Go and ships as a single binary with zero external dependencies.

Each tool is assigned a Caesar name and a blog post, where you can learn more about these tools.

We’ll look at four of these tools, including the basic ones, to make this article suitable for everyone. Before we proceed, it’s important to remind you that you can only test systems you own or have explicit written authorization to test. We will use our lab for it.

Titus

Our first tool is Titus. Titus finds credentials, API keys, and tokens in source code, files, git history, container images, and more. The tool has 487 detection rules covering AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub, Slack, databases and hundreds of other services. Similar to TruffleHog, it can validate credentials as it finds them by calling the provider APIs.

It’s also available as a Burp Suite extension and a Chrome extension.

kali > curl -sL -o titus https://github.com/praetorian-inc/titus/releases/latest/download/titus-linux-amd64
kali > chmod 777 titus
kali > ./titus --help

Let’s start by pointing it at test keys released by Truffle Security.

It found all the keys in the repo. Companies often publish their secrets by accident. Some live in the repositories for years, so it’s good to do regular checks to prevent unnecessary leakage.

Nerva

Nerva is a fingerprinter supporting 170 protocols across TCP, UDP, and SCTP, plus dozens of HTTP technology fingerprinters. You can feed it with open ports from naabu, nmap or other tools and it’ll tell you what’s actually running with its version.

kali > curl -sL -o nerva.tar.gz https://github.com/praetorian-inc/nerva/releases/download/v1.70.3/nerva_1.70.3_linux_amd64.tar.gz
kali > tar --no-same-owner -xzf nerva.tar.gz
kali > chmod 777 nerva
kali > ./nerva --help

Now let’s use our Ubuntu to show a basic test.

kali > ./nerva -t 192.168.131.9:22,11434

It will be way more useful when you work with big lists of corporate assets during a pentest.

Brutus

Brutus is a modern Hydra alternative. It supports more than 40 protocols including SSH, RDP, MySQL, PostgreSQL and a lot more. Brutus was built to work with Nerva or naabu output.

kali > curl -sL -o brutus.tar.gz https://github.com/praetorian-inc/brutus/releases/latest/download/brutus-linux-amd64.tar.gz
kali > tar --no-same-owner -xzf brutus.tar.gz
kali > chmod 777 brutus
kali > ./brutus --help     

Each command has its own help menu to make it easy to work with.

kali > ./brutus creds --help

Now once again lets use our Ubuntu to spay passwords. 

kali > ./brutus creds --target 127.0.0.1:22 --protocol ssh “admin:admin”

It was easy. As mentioned before, this tool chains with Nerva, and that’s how it becomes useful to test the entire infrastructure against common password and detection.

Julius

With AI services proliferating inside corporate environments, we want to know what LLM infrastructure is running on our hosts. Julius will fingerprint more than 60 AI services including Ollama, vLLM, LiteLLM, LocalAI, Hugging Face TGI, AWS Bedrock and AnythingLLM. It can also list available models from endpoints.

kali > curl -sL -o julius.tar.gz https://github.com/praetorian-inc/julius/releases/download/v1.5.1/julius_1.5.1_linux_amd64.tar.gz

kali > tar --no-same-owner -xzf julius.tar.gz
kali > ./julius --help

You can list all the AI services Julious can fingerprint: 

kali > ./julius list

We will take a look at our machine.

kali > ./julius probe http://192.168.131.7:11434

Ollama sits on port 11434, and it’s important not to leave it exposed publicly, because everyone can use your models without authentication.

Summary 

There are more tools available in this project. Most of them are meant to be chained together and work well this way. The company says its team is actively using these same tools during their engagements. While you won’t need everything at once, experiment with those tools and see what fits you best.

If you like red teaming, we have our Red Team Operator training, where we cover more tools and techniques to help you emulate real APT work, so you can give a company a realistic stress test and help make it secure.

The post Pentesting: Twelve Caesars – Community Tools for Offensive Security first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Camera Hacking: Testing Cameras with Eyesharvester

25 September 2026 at 08:57

Welcome back, cyberwarriors!

A few weeks ago we published PwnEye, which is a great tool for camera hacking. We talked about the importance of keeping your IoT devices patched to prevent unauthorized access. A less hardened device is a lot more appealing to a hacker, especially when it sits on the same network as other infrastructure.

Cheap devices aren’t really built with security in mind and some of them come with backdoors that sooner or later get discovered and abused by anyone who finds them online.

Today let’s look at a tool that can identify cameras, test credentials and help you harden them.

Eyesharvester

Eyesharvester is a recon tool for IP cameras, DVRs and NVRs. You give it an IP range, it scans common ports, fingerprints the vendor and optionally tries default credentials. It can also show known CVEs associated with a brand and give you basic hardening advice. The tool is mainly for identification and reporting.

Setting Up

Let’s quickly download the repository and install the tool. No dependencies needed to get started.

kali > git clone https://github.com/Exhunterx/eyesharvester.git
kali > cd eyesharvester
kali > bash install.sh

The help menu covers everything the tool can do.

kali > eyesharvester --help

Now let’s look at the ways you can use it.

Testing Cameras

You don’t always get the camera IP ranges from admins, so recon comes first. We need to figure out which IPs belong to cameras.

kali > eyesharvester IP/24

A few cameras were found. Now let’s pipe all those IPs to a text file. The flag below will silence the noise. 

kali >  eyesharvester IP/24 -q  > cameras.txt
kali > cat cameras.txt

You can keep these IPs for future tests, say with PwnEye for example. Or maybe you want to update the spreadsheet of your surveillance infrastructure, as admins often do, though there are better ways to keep a record of everything.

We can also run confirmation checks to make sure these are actually cameras.

kali > eyesharvester IP/24 -c confirmed -v

There’s a confirmed Hikvision camera above. We’ll test it and the rest of those we found for default credentials.

kali > eyesharvester IP/24 --check-creds

Finding a camera with default credentials internally is very common.

Hardening Cameras

Testing cameras is fun, but hardening them is a bigger question that needs to be addressed. Both pentesters and defenders should know how to do it and your report should include recommendations on how to harden these devices.

kali > eyesharvester IP --harden

Based on the vendor and open ports, a hardening checklist is generated along with the CVEs that affect your device. This mainly covers segmenting devices away from business and IT networks, disabling unused services, replacing weak credentials and updating firmware.

It’s very common to find Hikvision cameras vulnerable to CVE-2021-36260. The exploit can give you a shell on the device and lets you run commands.

We tested the same device and it was vulnerable with no patch applied.

This vulnerability is particularly interesting because you can generate a payload with Metasploit for this camera and connect it back to your C2. Then using a Meterpreter proxy or reverse SSH tunnel that camera becomes a proxy for attacking other reachable hosts on the network.

Summary

Testing cameras is definitely fun and PwnEye can help a lot here, but securing them can be part of your job too. Knowing how to both break and fix these devices gives you a better understanding of cybersecurity overall. That’s why you need Eyesharvester.

There are many other attacks on cameras, and it would be a very long article to cover them here. That’s why we created our IP Camera Hacking Training. It’s now part of our Cybersecurity Starter Bundle II. With it you get Wi-Fi Hacking, Python Basics for Hackers, Remaining Anonymous and more. 

The post Camera Hacking: Testing Cameras with Eyesharvester first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Pentesting: Using Grafana to Pentest a Fitness App

10 July 2026 at 09:47

Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

During pentests, it’s not uncommon to find a Grafana somewhere inside an organization’s infrastructure. Sometimes it can even be exposed directly to the Internet. It’s always worth checking Grafana for vulnerabilities, as it has been affected by multiple security issues over the years.

What is Grafana

Grafana is an open-source monitoring and visualization platform used by organizations to display dashboards containing information collected from servers, applications, databases, cloud services and networking equipment. Administrators rely on it to monitor the health of their infrastructure in real time, making it one of the most widely deployed monitoring apps in enterprise environments. Since Grafana often connects to numerous backend services and contains valuable configuration information, compromising it can sometimes give hackers an excellent foothold into the rest of the network.

Of course, you could manually inspect every Grafana installation looking for known vulnerabilities, but that quickly becomes time-consuming, especially during larger engagements where multiple servers have to be assessed.

Fortunately, there is a Grafana-Final-Scanner. It’s a tool designed specifically to automate this process. Instead of manually checking every instance the scanner performs the work for you by checking whether the target is vulnerable to a collection of publicly known vulnerabilities.

Grafana-Final-Scanner

We’ll begin by downloading the repository and installing its dependencies.

kali > git clone https://github.com/Zierax/Grafana-Final-Scanner.git
kali > cd Grafana-Final-Scanner
kali > python3 -m venv venv
kali > source venv/bin/activate
kali > pip3 install -r requirements.txt
installing grafana

Once everything has been installed successfully, it’s worth taking a quick look at the list of vulnerabilities supported by the scanner.

vulnerabilities grafana scanner can find

At the time of writing, the tool is capable of checking for more than fifteen different Grafana vulnerabilities.

Now let’s point it at our target.

kali > python3 scanner.py -u https://target/grafana/login
scanning for the vulnerabilities

After a short scan, the tool analyzes the target and reports any vulnerabilities it successfully identifies.

results of the scan

In our case, the results were promising. The scanner identified CVE-2024-8118 and an OAuth Authentication Bypass vulnerability. It also gave us the URL. We opened the page and the application asked us for an administrator key that we obviously didn’t have.

login page

Fortunately, web applications don’t always behave exactly as their developers intended. Developers occasionally leave sensitive information inside the application’s front-end code. JavaScript, HTML comments, hardcoded credentials, authorization logic have all been discovered by hackers countless times over the years.

source code

With that in mind, we opened the page’s HTML source code to see exactly how the authorization process was implemented. The comments were written in Russian, but the logic itself was fairly easy to understand.

Instead of verifying a specific administrator key, the application simply checked whether any key existed. So the validation routine wasn’t actually validating the value at all. It simply checked if some key was provided.

The next step was straightforward. We opened the browser’s Developer Console and manually created the expected key.

The application accepted it. 

bypassed the login page

We bypassed the authentication and accessed the admin panel. 

Finding a vulnerability is only part of the pentest. Understanding how the application behaves after exploitation is equally important. Sometimes the scanners get you only halfway there, while manual analysis can help you find the remaining pieces needed to fully demonstrate the impact.

It’s also a good reminder that developers occasionally leave sensitive information hidden inside client-side code. You never know what useful information may have been left behind.

Web Interface

While running the scanner from the command line works perfectly for testing targets, the project also includes a convenient web interface.

This can be useful during larger pentests where dozens of Grafana instances need to be assessed.

You can start it with this command:

kali > python scanner.py --serve --db vulndb.json
web interface

Summary

Grafana is one of the most common monitoring platforms you’ll encounter during internal and external penetration tests. Because it frequently contains sensitive operational data and often communicates with numerous backend systems, compromising it can sometimes provide hackers with an excellent entry point into an organization’s network.

Grafana-Final-Scanner can make it much easier to determine whether your Grafana is exposed to known vulnerabilities.

If you enjoy web application pentesting and would like to improve your skills for bug bounty hunting, we have our Web Application Hacking training. You’ll gain the practical knowledge and skills you need to start finding web application vulnerabilities.

The post Pentesting: Using Grafana to Pentest a Fitness App first appeared on Hackers Arise.

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