Cyber Security & Ethical Hacking

What is Gophish?

Gophish is a phishing framework that makes the simulation of real-world phishing attacks dead-simple. The idea behind gophish is simple – make industry-grade phishing training available to everyone. “Available” in this case means two things –

Affordable – Gophish is open-source software that is completely free for anyone to use.

Accessible – Gophish is written in the Go programming language. This has the benefit that gophish releases are compiled binaries with no dependencies. In a nutshell, this makes installation as simple as “download and run”!

Installing Gophish Using Pre-Built Binaries

Gophish is provided as a pre-built binary for most operating systems. With this being the case, installation is as simple as downloading the ZIP file containing the binary that is built for your OS and extracting the contents.

Installing Gophish from Source

One of the major benefits of having written gophish in the Go programming language is that it is extremely simple to build from source. All you will need is the Go language and a C compiler (such as gcc).

To install gophish, simply run go get github.com/gophish/gophish. This downloads gophish into your $GOPATH. Next, navigate to $GOPATH/src/github.com/gophish/gophish and run the command go build. This builds a gophish binary in the current directory.

Understanding the config.json

There are some settings that are configurable via a file called config.json, located in the gophish root directory. Here are some of the options that you can set to your preferences:

Key	Value (Default)	Description
admin_server.listen_url	127.0.0.1:3333	IP/Port of gophish admin server
admin_server.use_tls	false	Use TLS for admin server?
admin_server.cert_path	example.crt	Path to SSL Cert
admin_server.key_path	example.key	Path to SSL Private Key
phish_server.listen_url	0.0.0.0:80	IP/Port of the phishing server – this is where landing pages are hosted.

Be careful: Since the config.json file contains database credentials, you will want to ensure it is only readable by the correct user. For Linux users, you can do this using chmod 640 config.json.

Exposing Gophish to the Internet

By default, the phish_server.listen_url is configured to listen on all interfaces. This means that if the host Gophish is running on is exposed to the Internet (such as running on a VPS), the phishing server will be exposed to the Internet.

If you also want the admin server to be accessible over the Internet, you will need to change the entry for the admin_server.listen_url to 0.0.0.0:3333.

Be careful: Exposing the admin server to the Internet should only be used if needed. Before exposing the admin server to the Internet, it’s highly recommended to change the default password.

Creating SSL Certificate and Private Keys

Note: As of 0.3, Gophish will by default create a self-signed certificate for the admin panel, so this steps would be optional.

It’s a good idea to have the admin server available over HTTPS. While automatic SSL cert/key generation will be included in a later release, for now let’s take a look at how we can leverage openssl to generate our cert and key for use with gophish (this assumes you already have openssl installed!)

We can start the certificate and key generation process with the following command:

openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout gophish.key -x509 -days 365 -out gophish.crt

Then, all we have to do is answer the CSR process that asks for details such as country, state, etc. Since this is a local self-signed cert, these won’t matter too much to us.

This creates two files, gophish.key and gophish.crt. After moving these files into the gophish root directory (in the same folder as config.json), we can have the following in our config.json file:

“admin_server” : {

“listen_url” : “127.0.0.1:3333”,

“use_tls” : true,

“cert_path” : “gophish.crt”,

“key_path” : “gophish.key”

}

Now when we launch gophish, you’ll connect to the admin server over HTTPS and accept the self-signed certificate warning.

Using MySQL

The default database in Gophish is SQLite. This is perfectly functional, but some environments may benefit from leveraging a more robust database such as MySQL.

Support for Mysql has been added as of 0.3-dev. To setup Gophish for Mysql, a couple extra steps are needed.

Update config.json

First, change the entries in config.json to match your deployment:

Example:

“db_name” : “mysql”,

“db_path” : “root:@(:3306)/gophish?charset=utf8&parseTime=True&loc=UTC”,

The format for the db_path entry is username:password@(host:port)/database?charset=utf8&parseTime=True&loc=UTC.

Update MySQL Config

Gophish uses a datetime format that is incompatible with MySQL >= 5.7. To fix this, Add the following lines to the bottom of /etc/mysql/mysql.cnf:

[mysqld]

sql_mode=ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

The above settings are the default modes for MySQL, but with NO_ZERO_IN_DATE and NO_ZERO_DATE removed.

Create the Database

The last step you’ll need to do to leverage Mysql is to create the gophish database. To do this, log into mysql and run the command

CREATE DATABASE gophish CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;.

After that, you’ll be good to go!

Running Gophish

Now that you have gophish installed, you’re ready to run the software. To launch gophish, simply open a command shell and navigate to the directory the gophish binary is located.

Then, execute the gophish binary. You will see some informational output showing both the admin and phishing web servers starting up, as well as the database being created. This output will tell you the port numbers you can use to connect to the web interfaces.

gophish@gophish.dev:~/src/github.com/gophish/gophish$ ./gophish

time=”2020-06-30T08:04:33-05:00″ level=warning msg=”No contact address has been configured.”

time=”2020-06-30T08:04:33-05:00″ level=warning msg=”Please consider adding a contact_address entry in your config.json”

time=”2020-06-30T08:04:33-05:00″ level=info msg=”Please login with the username admin and the password 1178f855283d03d3″

time=”2020-06-30T08:04:33-05:00″ level=info msg=”Starting phishing server at http://0.0.0.0:80“

time=”2020-06-30T08:04:33-05:00″ level=info msg=”Starting IMAP monitor manager”

time=”2020-06-30T08:04:33-05:00″ level=info msg=”Starting admin server at https://127.0.0.1:3333“

time=”2020-06-30T08:04:33-05:00″ level=info msg=”Background Worker Started Successfully – Waiting for Campaigns”

time=”2020-06-30T08:04:33-05:00″ level=info msg=”Starting new IMAP monitor for user admin”

Running Gophish as a Service

Linux Distributions

To run Gophish as a service in Linux distributions, you will need to setup a service script. You can refer to this Github issue for an example implementation.

Windows

To run Gophish as a service in Windows, you can use nssm.

Running Gophish

Now that you have gophish installed, you’re ready to run the software. To launch gophish, open a command shell and navigate to the directory the gophish binary is located.

If you’re running a version of Gophish after v0.10.1, then temporary admin credentials are printed in these logs which you can use to login.