0509, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Talk: Defense Informs Offense Improves Defense – How to Compromise an ICS Network and How to Defend It – Joe Slowik

Sanna/ September 5, 2018/ Conference, Security

Industrial control system (ICS) attacks have an aura of sophistication, high barriers to entry, and significant investment in time and resources. Yet when looking at the situation – especially recent attacks – from a defender’s perspective, nothing could be further from the truth. Initial attack, lateral movement, and entrenchment within an ICS network requires – and probably operates best – via variations of ‘pen tester 101’ actions combined with some knowledge of the environment and living off the land. Only after initial access is achieved and final targets are identified do adversaries need to enhance their knowledge of ICS-specific environments to deliver disruptive (or destructive) impacts resulting in a potentially large pool of adversaries capable of conducting operations. Examining concrete ICS attack examples allows us to explore just what is needed to breach and

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0409, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Talk: Can not See the Wood for the Trees – Too Many Security Standards for Automation Industry – Frank Ackermann

Sanna/ September 4, 2018/ Conference, Discussion, Security

“Plant operators and manufacturers are currently faced with many challenges in the field of automation.”, says Frank Ackermann. “Issues such as digitization, Industry 4.0, legal requirements or complex business processes that connect IT and OT are paramount. Related security problems and risks need to be addressed promptly and lastingly. Existing and newly created industry security standards (such as 62443, 61508 and 61511, 27001, …) are designed to help to improve security. But do the different approaches of these standards fit together? Are managers of the companies and manufacturers supported or rather confused by them? The presentation provides an overview of the key security industry standards, discusses the dependency and coverage of the standards, and aims to encourage discussion about if the standards optimize general security in industrial control systems.” We asked Frank a few

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0309, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Talk: Who Watches the Watcher? Detecting Hypervisor Introspection from Unprivileged Guests – Tomasz Tuzel

Sanna/ September 3, 2018/ Conference, Development, Security

Over the last decade we have seen a rapid rise in virtualization-based tools in which a hypervisor is used to gain insight into the runtime execution of a system. With these advances in introspection techniques, it is no longer a question of whether a hypervisor can be used to peek inside or even manipulate the VMs it executes. Thus, how can we trust that a hypervisor deployed by a cloud provider will respect the privacy of their customers? While there are hardware-based protection mechanisms with the goal of guaranteeing data privacy even in the presence of such an “introspecting” hypervisor, there are currently no tools that can check whether the hypervisor is introspecting when it shouldn’t. We have developed a software package that analyzes instructions and memory accesses on an unprivileged guest system which

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3108, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Talk: Open Source Network Monitoring – Paula de la Hoz Garrido

Sanna/ August 31, 2018/ Conference, Security

“I’d like to offer an introduction into Network System Monitoring using different open tools available in Linux.”, says Paula. “The talk is a technical approach to identify the best sniffing points in a network and how to orchestrate a full analysis of the content to secure the network, as well as showing ideas of collaborative and distributed hacking. Also, for a better performance, the talk includes a brief guide into configuring a Raspberry Pi for creating a simple Network Capture Probe. The main point of the talk is to show how open source tools are a nice option for this kind of security assessment.” We asked Paula a few more questions about her topic of expertise: Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. First of all, this talk is not solely

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3008, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Talk: Building your Own WAF as a Service and Forgetting about False Positives – Juan Berner

Sanna/ August 30, 2018/ Conference, Internet, Security

When a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is presented as a defensive solution to web application attacks, there is usually a decision to be made: Will this be placed inline (and risk affecting users due to outages or latency) or will it be placed out of band (not affecting users but not protecting them either). In his talk Juan Berner will cover a different approach you can take when deciding how to use any WAF at your disposal, which is to try and get the best of both worlds, making the WAF work in passive mode out of band detecting attacks and in active mode by selectively routing traffic through your WAF to decide if it should block the request or allow it. To achieve this you will have to abstract the WAF around a

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2908, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Special Training: Bug Hunting Millionaire – Mastering Web Attacks with Full-Stack Exploitation

René Pfeiffer/ August 29, 2018/ Conference, Security, Training

How do bugs in software get fixed? Well, first of all you have to find them. All code has bugs. Most probably, that is. Usually developers and users of applications find bugs. The history of information security has taught us that now attackers also look for bugs in software. Therefore flaws in code leading to security vulnerabilities have a higher priority for both developers and adversaries. The problem is that software testing finds all kinds of bugs and not always the important ones. Where is the incentive to go and debug software? Well, there is quality assurance, there is full disclosure, and now there are bug bounties. Bug bounties are rewards for bugs in software that have an impact on security. Companies offer these bounties as a means of software quality testing. Bug bounties

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2808, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Training: Hunting with OSSEC – Xavier Mertens

Sanna/ August 28, 2018/ Conference, Training

“OSSEC is sometimes described as a low-cost log management solution but it has many interesting features which, when combined with external sources of information, may help in hunting for suspicious activity occurring on your servers and end-points”, says Xavier Mertens, who’s giving a training called “Hunting with OSSEC” at this years DeepSec. “During this training, you will learn the basic of OSSEC and its components, how to deploy it and quickly get results. Then I will demonstrate how to deploy specific rules to catch suspicious activities. From an input point of view, we will see how easy it is to learn new log formats to increase the detection scope and, from an output point of view, how we can generate alerts by interconnecting OSSEC with other tools like MISP, TheHive or an ELK Stack

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2708, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Talk: DNS Exfiltration and Out-of-Band Attacks – Nitesh Shilpkar

Sanna/ August 27, 2018/ Conference, Security

“The Domain Name System or DNS is one of the most fundamental parts of the Internet”, says Nitesh Shipkar. “It is crucial for a billion of users daily to help us build presence on the internet using names humans can understand rather than IP addresses. However, DNS comes with security issues organizations should be aware of and take into consideration. Attackers are abusing the DNS to redirect traffic to malicious sites, communicate with command and control (C&C) servers, steal data from organizations and conduct massive attacks that cause harm to organizations. Many organizations are not prepared to mitigate, or even detect, the problems DNS might bring. Due to the criticality of DNS to maintain an Internet presence, access applications, connect to a network or simply send an email, everyone has the potential to be

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2708, 2018

ROOTS 2018 Call for Papers – Deadline extended

René Pfeiffer/ August 27, 2018/ Administrivia, Call for Papers

ROOTS‘ deadline for abstract submissions has been extended. The new deadline is the 17 September 2018. Authors will be notified by 30 September 2018. We need your camera-ready papers until 13 October 2018. Please spread the word. The Reversing and Offensive-Oriented Trends Symposium 2018 still accepts your research. We are looking forward to the results of your work. Information security is all about well-researched facts and reproducible findings. If you need some more time to prepare your submission, this is the time. Let us know if you need help when submitting. The first European symposium of its kind, ROOTS aims to provide an industry-friendly academic platform to discuss trends in exploitation, reversing, offensive techniques, and effective protections. Submissions should provide novel attack forms, describe novel reversing techniques, or effective deployable defences. Submissions can also

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2408, 2018

DeepSec and Tor Tickets – Update

René Pfeiffer/ August 24, 2018/ High Entropy, Internet

We wrote about the German Tor operator relay organisation Zwiebelfreunde e.V. a while ago. They were raided on 20 June 2018 by the German police in five different locations. The police was investigating a German left-wing blog and was trying to find the author of articles published there. As many of you know, Tor exit relay operators are the last hop in a chain of communication channels, so the origin of the operator’s servers can be seen. However Tor exit relays bear to relation to the real origin of the transmission. This is the essence of the Tor anonymity network. Zwiebelfreunde e.V. is a non-profit organisation that runs Tor nodes for anyone donating money (realised by the Torservers.net project). Their nodes have a combined bandwidth of 5000 Mbit/s. They know what they are doing,

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1708, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Conference “Smart is the new Cyber” – Preliminary Schedule published

René Pfeiffer/ August 17, 2018/ Conference, Schedule, Security

The preliminary schedule for DeepSec 2018 has been published. It took us some time to select and review all submissions. We cracked the 100 submissions mark, thus we are pleased that you made it very difficult for us this year. The number of slots for presentations and workshops has been constant. The number of content being submitted is steadily growing. So we hope we did a good job and that you find a pleasant mixture of topics (as pleasant as information security can get). All speakers have been informed. There may be some changes to the schedule which we will announce on our blog. The abstracts of every presentation and workshop will be discussed in-depth here on the blog as well. We have asked the trainers and speakers some questions. As soon as we

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1008, 2018

New date, same Location: DeepINTEL 2018 has been moved

René Pfeiffer/ August 10, 2018/ Administrivia, Call for Papers, Security Intelligence

The DeepINTEL 2018 has been moved in time, not in space. DeepINTEL 2018 will take place on 28 November 2018. The day is the second day of trainings at DeepSec. DeepINTEL will be in parallel, and it will be for one day instead of the original two days. We had to moved because of organisational constraints. By moving DeepINTEL we hope to create a better placement for the security intelligence platform. In addition the DeepINTEL Call for Papers is easier, allowing trainers and speakers at DeepSec to contribute to the aspect of DeepINTEL with specific content. In case you have some content for us: he focus for 2018 are stealthy and persistent attacks. This is the classic espionage attack vector, only with modern means. Ubiquitous networking, complex trust-relationships, and the increased flow of information

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0808, 2018

DeepSec Call for Papers Ended – Review Process – Melting Brains – Hard Facts

René Pfeiffer/ August 8, 2018/ Administrivia, Conference

Year by year it is getting harder to review the growing numbers of submissions. Thanks a lot for your contribution! It’s always a pleasure to read what you sent us. We have started to review as soon as you submit, but given the heat and the sheer number of submissions, it will take a few more days. We only have two days of trainings and two days of conference – which isn’t nearly enough. We will try to come up with a schedule that covers current events, science, and threats of tomorrow. Speaking of science, the Call for Papers for ROOTS 2018 is still running! We like to see more solid research in information security. It’s easy to get headlines or flourish on social media, but information security needs to do its homework. This

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3107, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Call for Papers – Deadline today!

René Pfeiffer/ July 31, 2018/ Call for Papers, Conference

Sadly the climate does not extend deadlines. The Call for Papers of DeepSec In-Depth Security Conference 2018 ends today at midnight. Please make sure that you send us your submission in time. All submissions reaching us before the deadline ends have priority over any later submissions! We will leave the submission form online for a while longer in order to compensate for the heatwave currently rolling over Europe. Don’t forget that the Call for Papers for ROOTS 2018 (the Reversing and Offensive-oriented Trends Symposium) is still open and accepts submissions! Please spread word about ROOTS. We would like to feature „Science first!“ again in 2018. A big thank you for all who already sent us their content! As always we will have a hard time sorting through everything and selecting the presentations and trainings.

1707, 2018

New in the DeepSec Ticket Shop: Tor Tickets for Early Birds and InfoSec Minds

René Pfeiffer/ July 17, 2018/ Administrivia, Discussion, High Entropy, Security

We have a new category in the DeepSec ticket shop. We now have Tor tickets! Why is that? Well, information security relies heavily on the tools of the trade and the knowledge to use them. Tools can be created and used, knowledge can be shared and used. This is not a new insight. The special Tor tickets are a way to help the German non-profit registered association Zwiebelfreunde e.V. for rebooting their infrastructure. They run Tor nodes and provide the necessary infrastructure to do this. Members of Zwiebelfreunde have been speakers at DeepSec in the past because they are also active security researchers. The difference between the Tor ticket and the normal ticket price will be given to them to recover the damage to their infrastructure. Security tools such as Tor are widely used

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