Assessing Gmail Account Security using GX cookie
- You are in Local Area Network (LAN) in a switched / wireless environment : example : office , cyber café, Mall etc.
- You know basic networking.
- Cain & Abel
- Network Miner
- Firefox web browser with Cookie Editor add-ons
If you are using Wireless network then you can skip this Step A.
- Start Cain from Start > Program > Cain > Cain
- Click on Start/Stop Snigger tool icon from the tool bar, we will first scan the network to see what all IPs are used in the network and this list will also help us to launch an attack on the victim.
- Then click on Sniffer Tab then Host Tab below. Right click within that spreadsheet and click on Scan Mac Addresses, from the Target section select
How to check your physical IP ?
> Click on start > Run type cmd and press enter, in the command prompt type
Ipconfig and enter. This should show your IP address assign to your PC.
It will have following outputs:
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
Main thing to know here is your IP address and your Default Gateway.
- Click on Configure > APR > Use Spoof ed IP and MAC Address > IP
- Within the Sniffer Tab , below click on APR Tab, from the left hand side click on APR and now click on the right hand top spreadsheet then click on plus sign tool from top. The moment you click that it will show you list of IP address on left hand side. Here we will target the victim IP address and the default gateway.
- Finally, Click on Start/Stop Sniffer tool menu once again and next click on Start/Stop APR. This will start poisoning victim and default gateway.
- Open Network Miner by clicking its exe (pls note it requires .Net framework to work).
- From the “—Select network adaptor in the list—“ click on down arrow and select your adaptor If you are using Ethernet wired network then your adaptor would have Ethernet name and IP address of your machine and if you are using wireless then adaptor name would contain wireless and your IP address. Select the one which you are using and click on start.
- Click on Credential Tab above. This tab will capture all HTTP cookies , pay a close look on “Host” column you should see somewhere mail.google.com. If you could locate mail.google.com entry then in the same entry right click at Username column and click on “copy username” then open notepad and paste the copied content there.
- Remove word wrap from notepad and search for GX in the line. Cookie which you have captured will contain many cookies from gmail each would be separated by semicolon GX cookie will start with GX= and will end with semicolon you would have to copy everything between = and semicolon
- Open Firefox and log in your gmail email account.
- from firefox click on Tools > cookie Editor.
- In the filter box type .google.com and Press Filter and from below list search for cookiename GX. If you locate GX then double click on that GX cookie and then from content box delete everything and paste your captured GX cookie from stepB.4 and click on save and then close.
- From the Address bar of Firefox type mail.google.com and press enter, this should replay victim GX cookie to Gmail server and you would get logged in to victim Gmail email account.
- Sorry! You can’t change password with cookie attack.
Google has provided a way out for this attack where you can use secure cookie instead of unsecure cookie. You can enable secure cookie option to always use https from Gmail settings.
Settings > Browser connection > Always use https