Enumerating SMTP
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Lets Get Started
Before we begin, make sure to deploy the room and give it some time to boot. Please be aware, this can take up to five minutes so be patient!
Enumerating Server Details
Poorly configured or vulnerable mail servers can often provide an initial foothold into a network, but prior to launching an attack, we want to fingerprint the server to make our targeting as precise as possible. We're going to use the "smtp_version" module in MetaSploit to do this. As its name implies, it will scan a range of IP addresses and determine the version of any mail servers it encounters.
Enumerating Users from SMTP
The SMTP service has two internal commands that allow the enumeration of users: VRFY (confirming the names of valid users) and EXPN (which reveals the actual address of user’s aliases and lists of e-mail (mailing lists). Using these SMTP commands, we can reveal a list of valid users
We can do this manually, over a telnet connection- however Metasploit comes to the rescue again, providing a handy module appropriately called "smtp_enum" that will do the legwork for us! Using the module is a simple matter of feeding it a host or range of hosts to scan and a wordlist containing usernames to enumerate.
Requirements
As we're going to be using Metasploit for this, it's important that you have Metasploit installed. It is by default on both Kali Linux and Parrot OS; however, it's always worth doing a quick update to make sure that you're on the latest version before launching any attacks. You can do this with a simple "sudo apt update", and accompanying upgrade- if any are required.
Alternatives
It's worth noting that this enumeration technique will work for the majority of SMTP configurations; however there are other, non-metasploit tools such as smtp-user-enum that work even better for enumerating OS-level user accounts on Solaris via the SMTP service. Enumeration is performed by inspecting the responses to VRFY, EXPN, and RCPT TO commands.
This technique could be adapted in future to work against other vulnerable SMTP daemons, but this hasn’t been done as of the time of writing. It's an alternative that's worth keeping in mind if you're trying to distance yourself from using Metasploit e.g. in preparation for OSCP.
Now we've covered the theory. Let's get going!
First, lets run a port scan against the target machine, same as last time. What port is SMTP running on?
Okay, now we know what port we should be targeting, let's start up Metasploit. What command do we use to do this?
If you would like some more help, or practice using, Metasploit, Darkstar has an amazing room on Metasploit that you can check out here:
Let's search for the module "smtp_version", what's it's full module name?
Great, now- select the module and list the options. How do we do this?
Have a look through the options, does everything seem correct? What is the option we need to set?
Set that to the correct value for your target machine. Then run the exploit. What's the system mail name?
What Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is running the SMTP server? This will require some external research.
Good! We've now got a good amount of information on the target system to move onto the next stage. Let's search for the module "smtp_enum", what's it's full module name?
We're going to be using the "top-usernames-shortlist.txt" wordlist from the Usernames subsection of seclists (/usr/share/seclists/Usernames if you have it installed).
What option do we need to set to the wordlist's path?
Once we've set this option, what is the other essential paramater we need to set?
Now, set the THREADS parameter to 16 and run the exploit, this may take a few minutes, so grab a cup of tea, coffee, water. Keep yourself hydrated!
Okay! Now that's finished, what username is returned?
Seclists is an amazing collection of wordlists. If you're running Kali or Parrot you can install seclists with: "sudo apt install seclists" Alternatively, you can download the repository from .