DeepINTEL 2018 Talk: Risk Management in Complex Scenarios – Oscar Serrano

Sanna/ November 8, 2018/ Conference, DeepIntel, Security

ICT risk management is a well-stabilized practice and as such is supported by international security standards and guidelines. But, despite advances in the legal and policy areas and the maturation of standardized frameworks for efficient risk management, it has still not become a controlled, systematic process in the cyber security domain of most organizations. One of the problems preventing organizations from having an enterprise approach to cyber security risk management is that these efforts have not been supported by commensurate investment to produce robust, technical implementations of suitable risk management methodologies and supporting systems. Although some tools do exist, such as PILAR, CRAMM, Ebios, Mehari, or Octave, they all implement different risk management methodologies and all of them are implemented to satisfy the need of specific users. None of them is a truly enterprise

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Binary Blob Apocalypse – Firmware + Cryptography = less Security

René Pfeiffer/ November 6, 2018/ High Entropy, Security

A couple of years ago we had a chat with one of our sponsors, Attingo. They are specialised in data recovery from all kinds of media and in all kinds of conditions. Since vendors keep secrets from the rest of the world, the data rescuers do a lot of reverse engineering in order to decode the mysteries of firmware blobs. Guess what they recommend: Don’t trust important tasks to firmware code! It’s the worst software written on this planet. If software gets something wrong, firmware is the best candidate for big SNAFUs. Solid state disks (SSDs) have recently joined the gallery of failures. Carlo Meijer and Bernard van Gastel have published an article titled Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives (SSDs). They analysed the implementation of hardware full-disk encryption of

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DeepSec 2018 Training: Advanced Infrastructure Hacking – Anant Shrivastava

Sanna/ November 5, 2018/ Conference, Training

Whether you are penetration testing, Red Teaming or trying to get a better understanding of managing vulnerabilities in your environment, understanding advanced hacking techniques is critical. This course covers a wide variety of neat, new and ridiculous techniques to compromise modern Operating Systems and networking devices. We asked Anant a few more questions about his training. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your training. Constantly evolving course: Every year each iteration has something new added to it. (Minimum 25%, maximum 50% of the course gets an upgrade every year). Developed by Practitioners: The course is developed by regular pentesters deriving challenges from real life pen-testing scenarios. All of our trainers are full time pentesters and part time trainers. Covers a whole breadth of infrastructure: From IPv4/v6 to databases, to OSINT, Windows, Linux,

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DeepINTEL 2018 Talk: Cyber Threat Intelligence – The Next Era of Cyber Security? – Markus Auer

Sanna/ November 5, 2018/ DeepIntel, Security Intelligence

The DeepINTEL security intelligence conference focuses on threats, indicators of compromise, and strategic counter measures. Information security is more than superficial. This is why we have asked Markus Auer to hold a presentation at DeepINTEL (28 November 2018). He explains his ideas in short: We are tired of adding new products to our ever-growing security structure. Although this has been a common practice for years, it does not bring lasting success. Attacks continue to occur – faster, more comprehensively and with much greater impact and rising costs. Despite all protection levels and measures, the current security approach fails. We want to stop the expansion and purchase of more reactive products that are targeted to the recent attack. Instead, security operations should be improved by aligning existing security technologies and teams and using the information

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DeepINTEL 2018 Security Intelligence Event – Preliminary Schedule is available

René Pfeiffer/ November 3, 2018/ Conference, DeepIntel

It took us longer than anticipated, but the schedule for DeepINTEL 2018 is final and available. The topics covered are ICT risk assessment in interconnected and complex environments, drone threats (to critical infrastructure), drone countermeasures, assessment of digital black markets (you can call them darkweb/crypto markets if you must), live threats to the information industry (based on finding and working with reliable sources in the field), framing HUMINT as an information gathering technique, and how to get started in modern cyber threat intelligence. The speakers will bring in-depth examples from their field of expertise. Given the format of DeepINTEL, the presentation are meant to turn into dialogues where you can directly ask questions and hopefully get answers helping you to understand how to detect and counter threats, and how to collect meaningful data for

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Suricata and XDP, Performance with an S like Security – Eric Leblond

Sanna/ November 2, 2018/ Conference, Security

extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) and eXtreme Data Path (XDP) technologies are gaining in popularity in the tracing and performance community in Linux for eBPF and among the networking people for XDP. After an introduction to these technologies, this talk proposes to have a look at the usage of the eBPF and XDP technology in the domain of security. A special focus lies on Suricata that uses this technology to enhance its performance and by consequence on the accuracy of its network analysis and detection. We asked Eric a few more questions about his talk. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. Packet loss really matters. A threat detection engine like Suricata is losing 10% of IDS alerts if it misses 3% of traffic. And there are 10% of incomplete file

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DeepSec2018 Talk: Manipulating Human Memory for Fun and Profit – Stefan Schumacher

Sanna/ October 31, 2018/ Conference, Discussion

Manipulating the Human Memory for Fun and Profit, or: Why you’ve never met Bugs Bunny in DisneyLand Hacking is not limited to technical things — like using a coffee machine to cook a soup — but also makes use of social engineering. Social engineering is the (mis)use of human behaviour like fixed action patterns, reciprocity or commitment and consistency. Simple social engineering attacks like phishing mails do not require much preparation, but more complex ones do so. Especially when one wants to set up some kind of advanced persistent threat in the psychological domain. So, besides the psychological fundamentals of social engineering we also did research on human memory, how it works, how it pretty much fails to store what really happened, and how it can be misused for a sinister purpose. The fundamental

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Mapping and Tracking WiFi Networks / Devices without Being Connected – Caleb Madrigal

Sanna/ October 30, 2018/ Conference

Sure, WiFi hacking has been around for a while, and everyone knows about tools like airmon-ng, Kismet, et al. But what if you just want to view a list of all networks in your area along with all the devices connected to them? Or maybe you want to know who’s hogging all the bandwidth? Or what if you want to know when a certain someone’s cell phone is nearby? Or perhaps you’d like to know if your Airbnb host’s IP Camera is uploading video to the cloud? For all these use-cases, I’ve developed a new tool called “trackerjacker”. In this talk we’ll use this tool to explore some of the surprisingly informative data floating around in radio space, and you’ll come away with a new skill or two adding to your radio hacking skill

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Drones, the New Threat from the Sky – Dom (D#FU5E) Brack

Sanna/ October 29, 2018/ Conference, Security

I will talk about drones (not military ones). Drone risks and countermeasures. Drones have become an inherent risk not just for critical infrastructure, but also public events (sports, concerts) and privacy. I will speak about the exclusive risk catalogue I have developed for a small highly specialised start-up called DroneGuard. The catalogue contains over 140 detailed drone related risks. From payload of drones (explosives, chemical etc.) to cyber risks like Signal Hacking & Disruption (WiFi, GSM, Bluetooth, RFID, etc.). Since Deepsec is a more technically oriented event I will highlight the risk management frame work, my experience with our personal payload drone and the cyberrisks. This talk will help you if you have to protect critical infrastructure from a physical perspective, or if you have to protect yourself or your company from privacy implications.

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ROOTS Schedule almost ready, mind your DeepSec Training Tickets, DeepINTEL Schedule is coming up

René Pfeiffer/ October 19, 2018/ Administrivia, Conference

The review process for ROOTS has been completed a few days ago. Proper reviews are hard, this is why it took a bit longer. The accepted papers will be in the schedule at the beginning of next week for we need the redacted abstracts of all presentations. The research topics are worth it, so make sure to check the schedule next week. For all of you looking for in-depth knowledge and hands-on training – please book tickets for our trainings as soon as possible! This is not meant to rush you. We just want to make sure that you get the training you want. Booking last minute is a sure way of making it hard to plan ahead. Furthermore the first courses are filling up. You might not get a seat if you wait

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Security Response Survival Skills – Benjamin Ridgway

Sanna/ October 17, 2018/ Conference, Security

Jarred awake by your ringing phone, bloodshot eyes groggily focus on a clock reading 3:00 AM. A weak “Hello?” barely escapes your lips before a colleague frantically relays the happenings of the evening. As the story unfolds, you start to piece together details leading you to one undeniable fact: Something has gone horribly wrong… Despite the many talks addressing the technical mechanisms of security incident response (from the deep forensic know-how to developing world-class tools) the one aspect of IR that has been consistently overlooked is the human element. Not every incident requires forensic tooling or state of the art intrusion detection systems, yet every incident involves coordinated activity of people with differing personalities, outlooks, and emotional backgrounds. Often these people are scared, angry, or otherwise emotionally impaired. Drawing from years of real-word experience,

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Translated RadioFM4 Article: Hype about “Chinese Espionage Chips” stems from the Pentagon

Sanna/ October 16, 2018/ Discussion, High Entropy, Press, Security

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the web site of the FM4 radio channel of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation. We have translated the text in order to make the content accessible for our English-speaking audience, because the author raises some important questions.] In the FM4 fact check the sensational report by the business portal Bloomberg about manipulated hardware for cloud computing turns out to be almost completely fact-free. On Friday a long-awaited report from the Pentagon was released warning about electronics manufacturing in China. by Erich Moechel for fm4.orf.at In the US, the “Cyber Security Month” October has begun, related news come thick and fast. The documentary presented on Thursday about a Russian espionage attack that failed miserably was spectacular, but had already taken place in April. England, Holland and Canada have waited

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Translated Press Release: Systemic Errors as Vulnerabilities – Backdoors and Trojan Horses

René Pfeiffer/ October 9, 2018/ Conference, Discussion, Press, Security

DeepSec and Privacy Week highlight consequences of backdoors in IT Vienna (pts009/09.10.2018/09:15) – Ever since the first messages were sent, people try to intercept them. Today, our modern communication society writes more small, digital notes than one can read along. Everything is protected with methods of mathematics – encryption is omnipresent on the Internet. The state of security technology is the so-called end-to-end encryption, where only the communication partners have access to the conversation content or messages. Third parties can not read along, regardless of the situation. The introduction of this technology has led to a battle between security researchers, privacy advocates and investigators. Kick down doors with Horses In end-to-end encryption the keys to the messages, as well as the content itself, remain on the terminal devices involved in the conversation. This is

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: A Tour of Office 365, Azure & SharePoint, through the Eyes of a Bug Hunter – Dr.-Ing Ashar Javed

Sanna/ October 5, 2018/ Conference, Security

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) outbreak has started almost twenty years ago and since then it has been infecting web applications at a concerning pace. It is feared that the influx of programs and bug hunters arriving at bug bounty platforms will worsen the situation given more disclosed cases of bug(s) or public citing and viewing. According to #FakeNews Media, the outbreak engulfed One Microsoft Way in Redmond. This is where a contagious tour starts. The tour guide will convoy you through 50 award winning shattered windows in Office 365, Azure and SharePoint. All reported XSS findings spawned great riches and ended up in The Honor Roll or made their way to a simple acknowledgement entry or several CVE-plated thanks. The goal of this walking tour: an intimate look at Microsoft online or cloud services (Office

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Leveraging Endpoints to Boost Incident Response Capabilities – Francisco Galian, Mauro Silva

Sanna/ October 5, 2018/ Conference, Security

The information technology world is full of terms and acronyms. You got servers, nodes, clients, workstations, mobile devices, lots of stuff talking via the network to even more stuff. And then you got security breaches. How do you detect the latter? Well, you look for things out of the ordinary. Error messages, anomalies in behaviour, activity outside the usual time slots as system is being used, and the like. What’s the best place to look? Answer: The systems directly in touch with all the interactions attackers are interested in – endpoints. Most organisations fail to properly detect or even respond to incidents. A factor that significantly contributes to this fact is the lack of visibility on endpoints. That being said, endpoint logging can be very noisy and most organizations don’t have infrastructure to cope

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