How I Hacked My College Attendance Portal Hello! I know many of the readers are students interested in techie blogs. It’s going to be quite interesting for you. Hello, my name is <b>Darshan</b>, a.k.a. <a href="https://linktr.ee/darshanhackz">darshanhackz</a>. Today, I’m going to share my experience of how I identified a vulnerability in my college attendance portal within the organization and reported it to the creator or developer responsible for the website designed to streamline attendance records for the college’s teachers. Our college has a centralized server where all the data is stored properly. Additionally, the college has a firewall — now, how do you bypass such a thing? Don’t worry; I’ll explain how this firewall works. The college firewall controls internet access. Students are provided with credentials for internet access, and due to a loose policy, anyone can access the internet. Professors and HODs have different credentials for internet access. With a universal credential, anyone can access the internet. Now that you have internet access, the next step is to find out the IP address where the website is hosted. I discovered this through dumpster diving, a common and basic principle of cybersecurity. Wiretapping was also part of this activity. I obtained the IP when the developer of the website shared the information with me. I informed him that I had enough information, i.e., the <b>IP address</b>, as I wanted to perform VAPT with Blackbox Testing skills. This marked the beginning of the actual Penetration Testing. Following the hacking principle, the first step is reconnaissance, which I had already done. The above paragraph covers the reconnaissance phase. The next step is scanning and enumeration, for which I used the nmap tool to scan the IP and the network. I discovered various ports used for the attendance portal of each branch. Each branch has its own port for attendance, and, being an IT guy, my target was our own branch — Computer Science. Here, we completed the scanning phase and enumeration. Now, the favorite phase — Attack After observing the data from scanning and enumeration, I found out that the backend of the website uses SQL. Yes, you got it — <b>SQL Injection. </b> I opened our favourite framework for WAPT, Web Application Penetration Testing — <b>Burp Suite</b>. With Burp Suite, I fetched the request, sent it to the intruder, selected the parameter within the payload set, uploaded the wordlist of all the payloads for SQL Injection from GitHub (Open Source, man, Open Source), and then boom! I gained admin access to the Attendance Portal, where I could manipulate the entire attendance for the college. As an ethical hacker, I needed to follow some rules and ethical hacking policies. So, I prepared a well-maintained report and submitted it to the server administration and the developer. This is how I hacked the college attendance Web Application. You can check out my LinkedIn post where you will find out the screenshot and the payload of the SQL Injection: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/darshan-naik-73b870204_diems-burpsuite-sqlinjection-activity-7065236335237709825-FT_C?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/posts/darshan-naik-73b870204_diems-burpsuite-sqlinjection-activity-7065236335237709825-FT_C?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop</a> Some of Proofs : The Burpsuite One: a I Hope you liked and enjoyed the finding as well as the methodology that i followed for the real account takeover with the help of the SQL Injection bypass. If you really wanted to know more about the hacking follow me on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/darshan-naik-73b870204/">LinkedIn</a> , <a href="https://x.com/darshanhackz">X</a>. Thank You !!!
