1106, 2016

BSidesLND2016 Rookie Track Review

René Pfeiffer/ June 11, 2016/ Discussion, Security, Stories

Sitting through the Rookie Track at BSidesLondon is something we really enjoy. This year the quality of the presentations was amazing. Of course, the rookie’s mentors take a part of the blame for that. Good training gives you always a head start. Nevertheless someone has to stand in front of the crowd and fill the 15 minutes slot with content. All rookies did a good job. It was hard to pick a clear winner. The jury took more than three iterations to find a conclusion. Locard made it, and we welcome him to DeepSec 2016 in November. Honourable mentions go to @Shlibness, @Oxana_Sereda and @callygarr. For you we have some thoughts on the presentations we saw and on the methods being used. Think of your presentation as code. Make it lean and mean. It’s

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0406, 2016

BSides London 2016 – Schedule

René Pfeiffer/ June 4, 2016/ Conference, Security

In case you haven’t noticed, the London BSides schedule is up. The Rookie track starts right with the most important part of information security – opsec. Behaviour is on a par with expensive security hardware and your favourite protection software. Wearables, video games, hidden data, malware mythbusting, and more follow next. The main schedule features presentations about the impact of TOR/I2P traffic to your servers (think or best forget about CloudFlare), methods used by options advanced attackers, attacking Low Powered Wide Area Network (LPWAN) devices used for smart / IoT stuff, malicious software, static code analysis, threat analysis, the temptation of containers, and honey pots. There’s ample of content for everyone looking for new ideas. Don’t miss the opportunity!

2005, 2016

BSidesLondon 2016 – Rookie Track Edition

René Pfeiffer/ May 20, 2016/ Conference, Discussion

The Security BSides London 2016 is coming up. Next month you will have the chance to see presentations all around topics in information security. The schedule will be published soon. Gathering from the talks of past events you will not be disappointed. We will be present to watch over the Rookie Track. Young talents in terms of presentation experience will tell you about selected subjects covering security issues on software, administration, policies, hardware, or social interaction. The Rookie Track is unique among InfoSec events. It is a stage where the presenters can tell their ideas to an audience. They are supported by mentors who guide the content and the presenter from idea to the 15 minutes on stage. The Rookie Track was born out of the fact that a lot of people in information

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1805, 2016

The Didactic Side of Information Security

René Pfeiffer/ May 18, 2016/ Discussion, High Entropy

Explaining complicated topics with a lot of dependencies is hard. Even the operation of devices such as computers, telephones, or cloud(ed) applications can’t be described in a few sentences. Well, you can, if you use the tried and true lie-to-children method coined by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. If you really want to dive into a subject, you need a good start and a tour guide who knows where the terrain gets rough and helps you through it. Information technology and its security is hard to learn. The basics are surprisingly simple. Once you get to the implementation and the actual parts that need to be touched, it gets a lot more complicated. Modern IT combines various technologies, most taken from computer science, others taken from other fields of research. The starting point defines

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1504, 2016

DeepSec 2016 Call for Papers is officially open!

René Pfeiffer/ April 15, 2016/ Call for Papers, Conference

DeepSec 2016 is coming! We have set up the Call for Paper manager to accept your submissions for talks and workshops. Keep the „cyber“ distractions low, maximise content. DeepSec is all about hard facts and solid research. The Internet of Stuff/Things has gained momentum. Given the current IoT security designs, this technology will keep security researchers busy for decades  to come. Tell us how to break the smart home of the future. The Crypto Wars are on again. Forget quantum computers! Think about how crypto will work in the age of golden keys and backdoor privileges. Of course you can also talk about the state of cryptography and post-quantum algorithms. DeepSec has always had a decent crypto content. We will give you some more ideas on what to submit in the course of the

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1404, 2016

Thoughts on Lawful Malicious Software and its Impact on IT Infrastructure

Sanna/ April 14, 2016/ Interview, Press, Security

During the premiere of „A Good American“ we had a chat with journalists. Markus Sulzbacher of Der Standard wanted to know what the implication of the so-called Bundestrojaner (litterally federal trojan, the colloquial German term for the concept of inserting government malware in order to extract information from a suspect’s computer and telephone devices). The idea is to infect a computer system with malicious software that sits in the background and to siphon off the hard-to-get data connected to communication (i.e. messengers, Skype, emails, etc.). We have translated the interview from German to English for you. You can find the original on Der Standard web site. Der Standard 12.04.2016 “The federal Trojan is governmental malware” Police praise the software as a “wonder weapon against terror”. But for IT expert René Pfeiffer the planned introduction

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0504, 2016

Return of the Penguin Challenge – ELF (?) Binary (?)

René Pfeiffer/ April 5, 2016/ High Entropy

Our friends from BSidesLondon have set up a challenge for you. It’s a little ELF binary with some odd properties. That’s all we will tell you. Have a look for yourself. In case you are forensically inclined, we might have a little Call for Papers email for you. There is a lot of strange code around in the Internet and other networks. Decoding what code does without getting your san(d)box blown apart is a fine art. We are interested in getting in touch with researchers in the field of malicious software and digital forensics. Software developers need to know what you have seen. So if you got some ideas, research, or interesting content, drop us your email address.

0104, 2016

FBI, NSA, DoD and CDC join forces to combat Cyber Pathogens

René Pfeiffer/ April 1, 2016/ Discussion, High Entropy

The world economy is threatened by a new strain of microorganisms. These so-called cyber pathogens spread via networks and the touch of digital devices. They can also lie dormant for days and months, only to spring to life when the victim’s immune system is at its weakest point. It is widely believed that cyber pathogens can infect the population of a whole country and wipe it completely off the grid of the Earth. Current antidotes can only treat the symptoms. The best way to get rid off the pathogens is to resort to physical means and destroy every surface it can cling to. Amputation of infected tissue also works. Unless security researchers will find a suitable vaccination soon, every single one of us is at risk. The cyber pathogen threat is the reason for

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1503, 2016

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

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1103, 2016

“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!

1103, 2016

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.

0303, 2016

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,

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0203, 2016

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

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0103, 2016

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

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2602, 2016

DeepSec Video: IntelMQ

René Pfeiffer/ February 26, 2016/ Conference, Security

Handling incidents means that you have to handle information quickly. Collecting, collaboration, and getting the right piece of intel in crucial moments is the key. CERTs know this, and this is why there is IntelMQ. IntelMQ is a solution for collecting and processing security feeds, pastebins, and tweets using a message queue protocol. It’s a community driven initiative called IHAP (Incident Handling Automation Project) which was conceptually designed by European CERTs during several InfoSec events. Its main goal is to give incident responders an easy way to collect & process threat intelligence, thus improving the incident handling processes of CERTs. Get your messaging right before you run into a (security) incident.