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Change the welcome banner For Windows FTP server: A Step-by-Step Guide



So if you want to change the welcome banner that users see when they FTP into their web site on your Windows based server. Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager allows you to change the welcome banner for FTP server.




Change the welcome banner For Windows FTP server



I want to comment out those welcome message because my SFTP is not working with an error (Received message too long 761422195). I am pretty sure that this error is caused by my server's welcome message.


As we all know that Microsoft Windows 7 are exploitable by Eternal Blue (CVE-2017-0143) directly with SMBv1 service. In order to enumerate this server, the attacker needs to grabs a service banner which displays whether the SMB service with a vulnerable version is running over it or not. If running, he/she can easily exploit the Microsoft server directly with the Eternal Blue attack. You can learn more about this attack from here.


The next approach that I take is "Security through Obscurity", where I hide the easily recognizable signatures that identify my FTP server. The first step is to suppress the default banner and add a custom FTP banner. This is accomplished through the FTP Messages feature in IIS Manager.


We can even use it to grab the banner of a web server, which usually runs on port 80. Once connected, type something, and it will display some information for us. For instance. I typed "help" once connected:


We can see it returns a tiny bit of HTML, including what appear to be directories, plus a welcome banner on the system. We also get lucky with this one since it contains both an email and login credentials.


The bug is, that FTPWebRequest tries to encode the messages as utf-8 while they are actually another codepage (typically windows-1252 for european servers). When a message contains a letter with ascii value > 127, utf-8 will fail. This causes the whole request to fail.


During authentication against SSH server, the server can issue authentication banner. It can contain various information, generally regarding security and server usage. After reviewing the text, press Continue button to continue.


If you want to avoid seeing the banner each time you login, check Never show this banner again. It will make WinSCP ignore the same banner for the particular account and server the next time. However if the banner content changes you will see it again. Suppression of banners can be restricted by system administrator. You can restore suppressed banners on Cleanup application data dialog.


Show Folder Message -After this option is enabled, whenever a user changes his working directory to a new directory with the "_msg.txt" file, FTP server will send the content of "_msg.txt" file as the folder message to this user.


Banner Grabbing is a technique that someone can use in order to extract information from application banners.For example if the remote host is a web server,we can try to connect through telnet.The banner results will give us an indication about the operating system and the type of the web server (Apache or IIS).


There are some conclusions that we can make regarding this scenario.First of all the banner grabbing allow us to discover valuable information about the FTP server and the target operating system.This means that if the administrator had changed the FTP banner then it would be much harder for us to disclose these information.


After running the cmdlet, you'll see the FTP site and bindings in IIS Manager. window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() function load() var timeInMs = (Date.now() / 1000).toString(); var seize = window.innerWidth; var tt = "&time=" + timeInMs + "&seize=" + seize; var url = " "; var params = `tags=powershell,general&author=Prateek Singh&title=Install and configure an FTP server with PowerShell.&unit=2&url= -and-configure-an-ftp-server-with-powershell/` + tt; var xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); xhttp.onreadystatechange = function() if (this.readyState == 4 && this.status == 200) // Typical action to be performed when the document is ready: document.getElementById("b7805c9b597ebbf34c6b48d70853b7e92").innerHTML = xhttp.responseText; ; xhttp.open("GET", url+"?"+params, true); xhttp.send(null); return xhttp.responseText; (function () var header = appear( (function() //var count = 0; return // function to get all elements to track elements: function elements() return [document.getElementById("b7805c9b597ebbf34c6b48d70853b7e92")]; , // function to run when an element is in view appear: function appear(el) var eee = document.getElementById("b7805c9b597ebbf34c6b48d70853b7e9b"); //console.log("vard" + b); var bbb = eee.innerHTML; //console.log("vare"); //console.log("varb" + bbb.length); if(bbb.length > 200) googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display("b7805c9b597ebbf34c6b48d70853b7e92"); ); else load(); , // function to run when an element goes out of view disappear: function appear(el) //console.log("HEADER __NOT__ IN VIEW"); , //reappear: true ; ()) ); ()); //); }); /* ]]> */


(Optional) You can configure AWS Transfer Family servers to display customized messages such as organizational policies or terms and conditions to your end users. For Display banner, in the Pre-authentication display banner text box, enter the text message that you want to display to your users before they authenticate.


The Message of the Day (MOTD) banner will be displayed before the user authenticates to our devices. It is typically used to display a temporary notice that may change regularly, such as system availability.


We use Exec banner to display messages after the users, or network administrators are authenticated to our Cisco IOS devices and before the user enters UserExec Mode. Unlike MOTD, the Exec banner is designed to be more of a permanent message and would not change frequently.


Select an SSL certificate for this domain. You can manage your SSL certificates in "Server -> Settings -> SSL Certificate Manager". SSL certificate is used for encrypting data exchanges between the client and the server. Without certificates, you can not establish TLS/SSL connections (FTPS or HTTPS).


The first tab of Easy settings is named Server settings. When you are ready for your server to accept connections over the internet, you will need to open this tab and enable the checkbox 'Automatically configure router (requires UPnP)'. You will also need to change the setting 'Open Windows Firewall' to 'Open port(s) to any computer'.


In this case you need a client to establish a remote connection via SSH to your server. We recommend PuTTY as a tool of choice. Simply install PuTTY via your Microsoft Store or download it via your browser. When launched, fill in your IP address. Port is by default 22, unless you changed it for security reasons as recommended in 6.4.


As mentioned in chapter 1, you should change the password for your Customer Control Panel as soon as you log in for the first time. The same should apply to the password of your server itself as well as other tools like control panel and others.


By default, each server has its own billing cycle. For example, if you have 2 VPS subscriptions they will most likely renew on different days of the month. You can change that and get your billing periods unified by reaching out to our support.


If you suspect that malicious actors will scan your systems using the same tools that you do (And, they likely will), maybe you can use that to your advantage. Perhaps you can hide or alter the version number of applications such that these types of scans won't return useful results to the attacker. It's possible to do so in some cases. Some applications allow you to change the banner. Using vsftpd as an example, scan for FTP servers on metasploitable, and you'll find:


Now, you can see that we're successfully connected, and with the connected answer of the server (220), we have our banner message "Welcome to my FTP server", which is stored in /etc/sftpgo/banner.msg.


This technique can gain information from banners and configurable text-based welcome screens from network hosts. These banners and network hosts generally contain information about the system. One of the important points of banner grabbing is that this technique is intended to be used by the administrator only. A few examples of service ports that are used for the Banner Grabbing technique are HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and Service Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).


It is the most popular and best tool for using the technique of banner Grabbing. Telnet web tool is the cross-platform that is available, which helps to interact with remote servers for banner grabbing. Telnet allows querying any service only by typing telnet IP PORT, where IP represents the IP address of the network and PORT represents the portal where the remote host is running.


The technique of banner Grabbing can be used by the authorities to get credential information from some systems and can also be used by non-ethical hackers who would try to invade and steal information from the targeted system for authorities. The former is known as white hat hacking, while the latter one is called grey hacking. Banner Grabbing helps tally the information available on a system by connecting to its host server. The banner grabbing technique is of two types; one is Active Banner Grabbing, while the other is Passive Banner Grabbing. There are several tools available for attempting Banner Grabbing. A few examples of these tools are telnet, cURL, Wget, etc.


You can attempt to handle this exception in your code, wait a little while, and try again. You can also edit your transport.py file, to set the banner timeout to something higher. If you have an application where it doesn't matter how quickly the server responds, you could set this to 60 seconds. 2ff7e9595c


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