Adversaries may configureHISTCONTROL
to not log all command history. TheHISTCONTROL
environment variable keeps track of what should be saved by thehistory
command and eventually into the~/.bash_history
file when a user logs out.HISTCONTROL
does not exist by default on macOS, but can be set by the user and will be respected.This setting can be configured to ignore commands that start with a space by simply setting it to "ignorespace".
HISTCONTROL
can also be set to ignore duplicate commands by setting it to "ignoredups". In some Linux systems, this is set by default to "ignoreboth" which covers both of the previous examples. This means that “ ls” will not be saved, but “ls” would be saved by history.Adversaries can abuse this to operate without leaving traces by simply prepending a space to all of their terminal commands.
Disables history collection in shells
Supported Platforms: Linux, macOS
Name | Description | Type | Default Value |
---|---|---|---|
evil_command | Command to run after shell history collection is disabled | String | whoami |
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
#{evil_command}
The HISTCONTROL variable is set to ignore (not write to the history file) command that are a duplicate of something already in the history and commands that start with a space. This atomic sets this variable in the current session and also writes it to the current user's ~/.bash_profile so that it will apply to all future settings as well. https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-bash-history-more-efficiently-histcontrol
Supported Platforms: macOS, Linux
- export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
- echo export "HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth" >> ~/.bash_profile
- ls
- whoami > recon.txt