BeEF VS rbenv

Ha, fun to see this again! Back before everything was HTTPS, it was fun to use the Browser Exploitation Framework (https://beefproject.com) which had a script included that did this. Though in those cases I wasn't in control of the gateway, so ARP spoofing was required to get other devices to route through me.

For example IOS WebKit has a bunch of vulnerabilities announced recently. and one of those could be used via the Browser Exploitation Framework to install malware on your phone with you just clicking the link.

Motivation is a key part, so those attacks are more theoretical than practically dangerous, however there is a class of attacks that's based on the fact that your browser can make arbitrary network connections, so unprivileged javascript can be used for some scans of your local network - for example, your router's internally accessible admin page or some vulnerability in a printer accessible in local network, as the attacker might guess commonly used models, the internal IP addresses they use by default, etc. For example, you might take a look at https://beefproject.com/

This is something that kind of annoys me; there's even a /r/rails sub-reddit specifically for Ruby on Rails stuff. Understandably Rails helped put Ruby on the map. Before Rails, Ruby was just another fringe language. Rails became massively popular, helped many startups quickly build their Web 2.0 sites, and become successful companies (ex: GitHub, LinkedIn, AirBnB, etc). Like others have said, "Rails is where the money is at". However, this posses a problem for the Ruby community: whenever Rails becomes less popular, so does Ruby. I wish the Ruby ecosystem wasn't so heavily centralized around Rails, and that we diversified our uses of Ruby a bit. There's of course Sinatra, dry-rb, Hanami, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, and a dozen security tools written in Ruby such as Metasploit, BeFF, Arachni, and Ronin.

If you can open any webpage there then I would recommend using BeEF https://beefproject.com/

Perhaps https://beefproject.com/

If you want an example of what exploiting a browser can do, see the capabilities of the Browser Exploitation Framework (BEef): https://github.com/beefproject/beef/wiki/BeEF-modules

Take a look at BeEF framework - https://beefproject.com/ that's pretty much all the things you can do from a browser.

When I was technical blogging on how to learn from open-source code [1], I used it quite frequently to get unstuck and/or to figure out how to tease apart a large question into multiple smaller functions. For example, I had no idea how to break up this long `sed` command [2] into its constituent parts, so I plugged it into ChatGPT and asked it to break down the code for me. I then Googled the different parts to confirm that ChatGPT wasn't leading me astray.

If I had asked StackOverflow the same question, it would have been quickly closed as being not broadly applicable enough (since this `sed` command is quite specific to its use case). After ChatGPT broke the code apart for me, I was able to ask StackOverflow a series of more discrete, more broadly-applicable questions and get a human answer.

TL;DR- I quite like ChatGPT as a search engine when "you don't know what you don't know", and getting unblocked means being pointed in the right direction.

1. https://www.richie.codes/shell

2. https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv/blob/e8b7a27ee67a5751b899215b...

Let’s get started. I prefer to manage my Ruby installations on my development machine with chruby paired with ruby-install. Another outstanding set of tools is rbenv with ruby-build. I highly recommend installing Ruby with one of those two sets of tools. Follow the instructions on their project’s READMEs. For this article, I’ll be running Ruby (MRI) v3.3.0.

By setting up your environment in isolation, you can prevent yourself from a lot of issues when experimenting with code. It makes your code behave more predictable due to the defined state of the runtime environment you are working with. This article should provide you with enough information to get started, but obviously, there is a lot more power embedded in NVM, Virtual Environment and RBEnv. So make sure to check their documentation.

There is this good resource that also talk about different ruby version manager from the Rbenv repository. With some links to benchmarks of ASDF and Rbenv.

rbenv (my personal favorite)

One suggestion would be to setup your install based on a development environment using git and a Ruby version manager like rvm or rbenv to allows you to setup a user controlled gemset and execution path.

rbenv for Ruby

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv

On MacOS, I haven't had a problem with character encodings in the terminal in ruby for a while, but used to. When I used to, it had to do with how ruby had been installed, in particular that it needed to be compiled linking against an appropriate readline library. Are you trying to use the ruby that came with debian? You might have more luck installing ruby yourself, and using a ruby version manager. rbenv might be the simplest for you.

For my local machine, I use RVM (head). Other options are rbenv and asdf.