Reminder: DeepINTEL 2016 – Call for Papers – Beat Big Data and Full Take with Brains

René Pfeiffer/ March 15, 2016/ Call for Papers, Conference, Security Intelligence

We already published a Call for Papers for the upcoming DeepINTEL 2016. Here are some thoughts to get your creativity going. Standard solutions and off-the-shelf products to solve your security needs are remains from the 1990s. Everything else has gone smart, and that’s how you have to address security problems in the future. NSA director Admiral Michael Rogers told the audience of the RSA Conference 2016 that the NSA cannot counter the digital attacks it faces on its own. GCHQ, the NSA’s British counterpart, has publicly stated that the £860m budget to counter digital adversaries is not sufficient to defend Britain’s digital assets. Modern digital defence needs a sound foundation of data to base decisions on. You can neither combat a forest fire or an infectious disease by blindly throwing money at it. You

Read More

“A Good American” opens next Week in Austrian Theatres

René Pfeiffer/ March 11, 2016/ Administrivia, Discussion, High Entropy, Security, Security Intelligence

For everyone attending DeepSec 2015 we organised a private screening of the film “A Good American”. Everyone else now gets the chance to see this film in theatres beginning on 18 March 2016. Next week there will be the premiere in Vienna, Linz, and Innsbruck here in Austria. Bill Binney will be present himself, and he will answer questions from the audience. We highly recommend “A Good American” to everyone dealing with information security, regardless of the level. Full take and Big Data is not always the answer to your security challenges. Every gadget around is turning smart, and so should you. We hope to see you at the premiere here in Vienna next week!

Wanted: Great Content™ for BSidesLondon! Can you help out?

René Pfeiffer/ March 11, 2016/ Call for Papers, Conference

BSidesLondon is coming up. Grab your calendar, mark the dates, and think about content to submit! The Call for Papers runs until 28 March. BSidesLondon is a community-driven event, so it’s up to the infosec community to fill it with decent talks about all things cyber, shiny, and broken (by design). We are looking forward to see a great schedule after the CfP ends. Make it happen! And for all you graphic geeks out there, BSidesLondon needs a logo. The deadline was yesterday, so check out the submissions and have a vote.

DeepSec Video: Visualizing Wi-Fi Packets the Hacker’s Way

René Pfeiffer/ March 3, 2016/ Communication, Conference, Security, Stories

Like the Force wireless data/infrastructure packets are all around us. Both have a light and a dark side. It all depends on your intentions. Lacking the midi-chlorians we have to rely on other sources to get a picture of the wireless forces in and around the (network) perimeter. At DeepSec 2015 Milan Gabor held a presentation about visualisation of wi-fi packets: Today visualizing Wi-Fi traffic is more or less limited to console windows and analyze different logs from an aircrack-ng toolset. There are some commercial tools, but if we want to stay in the Open/Free Source Code (FOSS) area we need to find better solutions. So we used ELK stack to gather, hold, index and visualize data and a modified version of an airodump tool for input. With this you can create amazing dashboards,

Read More

DeepSec Video: Remote Browser-Based Fingerprinting of Local Network Devices

René Pfeiffer/ March 2, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Security

Reconnaissance is first, then comes the attack. This is why fingerprinting devices is the first step. Manfred Kaiser (Josef Ressel Zentrum) explained at DeepSec 2015 how this can be done by the local web browser(s) in the locally connected network segment. Manfred discusses remote device fingerprinting techniques for SOHO routers and other network-connected devices offering a browser-based configuration interface. While consumer network devices provided to customers by their ISPs are typically based on very few different hardware platforms, they are equipped with highly customized firmwares and thus contain different vulnerabilities. The knowledge of a specific device’s vulnerabilities is vital to the success of a remote attack. In a live demo Manfred shows how a remote attacker can exploit the feature-richness of modern web technologies (HTML5, WebRTC, JavaScript, CSS) to perform device discovery and fine-grained

Read More

DeepSec Video: Revisiting SOHO Router Attacks

René Pfeiffer/ March 1, 2016/ Conference, Security

Routers are everywhere. If you are connected to the Internet, your next router takes care of all packets. So basically your nearest router (or next hop as the packet girls and guys call them) is a prime target for attackers of any kind. Since hard-/software comes in various sizes, colours, and prices, there is a big difference in quality, i.e. how good your router can defend itself. Jose Antonio Rodriguez Garcia, Ivan Sanz de Castro, and Álvaro Folgado Rueda (independent IT security researchers) held a presentation about the security of small office/home office SOHO routers at DeepSec 2015. Domestic routers have lately been targeted by cybercrime due to the huge amount of well-known vulnerabilities which compromise their security. The purpose of our publication is to assess SOHO router security by auditing a sample of

Read More