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Blatherings of a security addict.

MSFConsole Prompt Fiddling

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In @carnal0wnage and my presentation at DerbyCon 2011 we talked about using SCREEN and SCRIPT to keep connections live / use them across SSH sessions, and log everything that happens. What we didn’t cover is the fact that there isn’t a time stamp for those logs. Now, Metasploit has multiple ways of creating logs:

  • cat ~/.msf4/logs/framework.log
    • This log automatically logs all of the error data that is great for trouble shooting when something is working, but doesn’t record what you are doing inside of msfconsole
  • msf> spool ~/myclient.log
    • The spool command is great for logging output from anything you do in either consoles or sessions, even when you drop to a shell. My one gripe about this one is that it doesn’t log the actual command you issued. *
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msf> set ConsoleLogging true  
msf> set LogLevel 5  
msf> set SessionLogging true  
msf> set TimestampOutput true
  • These combined essentially do the same thing as spool except that they go into different logs, but do actually log the command you issued

Plenty of logging right? But none of them really ‘log everything’ and time stamps are not a regular occurrence in them. Cool, but we need both. We’ve got the ‘log everything’ with the Linux ‘script’ command, we just need a way to inject time stamps into our log.

Enter the ever mutable ‘msf>’ prompt:

A lesser known variable in MSFConsole is ‘PROMPT’. You can set this pretty much like any other OS can, however there are some metasploit specific things you can add. Using a three letter abbreviation you can even add color to it.

For example lets add our hostname to our prompt:

msf> set PROMPT %H

changes msf> to myhostname>

And you can combine and add things that you wish:

set PROMPT %H Just more text %U

changes the prompt to: myattackmachine Just more text mubix> (%U is username)

For reference here are the other working % variables that I know of:

  • %D = Current local directory (not sure if this changes when in meterpreter or not for the victims dir, that would be cool)
  • %H = Host name (again, would be cool if this changed when in meterpreter)
  • %J = Current number of jobs running
  • %L = Local IP (makes it easy to remember what to put in LHOST)
  • %S = Currently number of sessions open
  • %T = Time stamp
  • %U = Username (yes, would be awesome if this changed in meterpreter too)

Now if you wanted to add colors to that, all you would do is use something like %grn%T to make the time stamp green. You’ll have to play around with the color’s names as I don’t know them all. %red %blu %blk etc…

Combine all of that with script and you’ve got something awesome. I set my PROMPT to:

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msf> set PROMPT %T S:%S J:%J
1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 S:0 J:0>

This gives me the number of jobs and sessions and has the time stamp every time I throw a command, so in my logs I can very easily narrow down the exact time when I did or didnt’ do something. The number of sessions and jobs are just good to know items.

Throw in one more trick to make the whole thing a cake walk:

In your ~/.msf4 directory, if you haven’t already, create a file called ‘msfconsole.rc’. This magical file will run every time you start msfconsole (with the express exception of when you specify a resource file to run from the command line using the -r argument). Throw your ‘set PROMPT %blah %blah %blah’ in there formatted however you like, and now whenever you start msfconsole you’ll have your handy dandy timestamp.

Shout out to @egyp7 for showing me this.

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