DeepSec2016 Workshop: Offensive iOS Exploitation – Marco Lancini

Sanna/ September 4, 2016/ Conference, Training

If an iPhone gets exploited in the forest and no one is around to 0wn it, does it worry you? This philosophical question has been answered sufficiently by the latest Pegasus incident. All smartphone should worry you. The iPhone and its operating system is no exception. Actually breaking a smartphone give an attacker a lot of advantages. Chances are that you carry the exploited device with you all the time. At last the Age of Mobility has reached information security! In order to develop exploits you need a healthy dose of software development and a (deep) knowledge of the platform being attacked. For those of you who do a lot of penetratoion testing, security analysis, or plain software quality management, we have a shortcut for you: the iOS exploitation workshop. This is an exercise-driven

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Information Warfare: “Breaking News” considered harmful

René Pfeiffer/ August 31, 2016/ Discussion, High Entropy

Eight years ago the stocks of UAL took a dive. Apparently a six year old news article resurfaced via Google. Googlebot, which is used to index news sites, confused one of the most popular web articles of The Sun-Sentinel with breaking news. The story contained the words United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy. Unfortunately a software error turned the date of the original story from 10 December 2002 to 6 September 2008. And so this little piece of misinformation due to the time travel caused a lot of havoc with UAL’s stock price. A little misunderstanding. Fortunately it was not a cyber attack, because the word was used rarely back then. Breaking news can break things, hence the name. It happens with data leaks, password leaks/breaches (depending on which side you are), incomplete reports, social

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DeepSec Video: Continuous Intrusion – Why CI Tools Are an Attacker’s Best Friends

René Pfeiffer/ February 24, 2016/ Conference, Security

Software development has made tremendous progress in the past decades. Tools to develop and to deploy applications have evolved. The trouble is that these tools often lack security design. Attacking software distribution channels such as update servers, package managers, and ISO downloads have been discussed widely in the past. What about the new kids on the bloc? Continuous Integration (CI) tools provide excellent attack surfaces due to no/poor security controls, the distributed build management capability and the level of access/privileges in an enterprise. At DeepSec 2015 Nikhil Mittal looked at the CI tools from an attacker’s perspective, using them as portals to get a foothold in a target’s network and for lateral movement. He showed how to execute attacks like command and script execution, credentials stealing, and privilege escalation; how to not only compromise the

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DeepSec Video: Advanced SOHO Router Exploitation

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

Routers are everywhere. They hold the networks together, Internet or not. Most small office/home office (SOHO) infrastructure features routers these days. Given the development cycles and rigorous QA cycles there have to be bugs in the firmware (apart from the vendor supplied backdoors). Lyon Yang (Vantage Point Security) held a presentation about a series of 0-day vulnerabilities that can be used to hack into tens of thousands of SOHO Routers. Even though the corporate „cloud“ might be „super secure“ against „cyber attacks“, the lonely office router most probably isn’t. Weak links sink ships, or something. We recorded the presentation at DeepSec 2015, and you can watch it online. It’s worth learning MIPS and ARM shell code. x86 (and x86_64) is sooooo 1990s. Happy hacking!

DeepSec 2015 Talk: DDoS – Barbarians at the Gate(way) – Dave Lewis

Sanna/ October 9, 2015/ Conference, Internet, Security

There really is strength in numbers. It’s true for Big Data, high performance computing, cryptography, social media, and flooding the Internet with packets. The latter has been the method of choice for activists, „cyber“ warriors and criminals alike. Network interdiction (as military minds may call it) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can be hard to counter due to the many sources of the attacking devices. Full pipes are full, no matter what you do. While you can deploy reverse proxies or rely on content distribution networks, the attack still persists. Packets keep coming until the sources are shut down. Flooding someone’s network is not a sophisticated attack. It’s gets the job done, it may be complex by nature, but it is not a stealth exploit sitting in your local network without being

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DeepSec 2015 Talk: Continuous Intrusion – Why CI Tools Are an Attacker’s Best Friend – Nikhil Mittal

Sanna/ October 3, 2015/ Conference, Development, Security

In information security pessimism rules. Unfortunately. Extreme Programming might breed extreme problems, too. The short-lived app software cycle is a prime example. If your main goal is to hit the app store as soon and as often as possible, then critical bugs will show up faster than you can spell XCodeGhost. The development infrastructure has some nice features attackers will love and most probably exploit. In his presentation Nikhil Mittal will show you how Continuous Integration (CI) tools can be turned into a Continuous Intrusion. Continuous Integration (CI) tools are part of build and development processes of a large number of organizations. I have seen a lot of CI tools during my penetration testing engagements. I always noticed the lack of basic security controls on the management consoles of such tools. On a default installation, many CI tools

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DeepSec 2015 Workshop: PowerShell for Penetration Testers – Nikhil Mittal

Sanna/ September 29, 2015/ Conference, Security, Training

The platform you are working with (or against) determines the tools you can use. Of course, everyone loves to boot the operating system of choice and hack on familiar grounds. Occasionally you have no choice, and you have to use what’s available. This is especially true for penetration testing. You get to use what you find on the systems of your digital beachhead. And you are well advised to get familiar with the tools you most definitely will find on these systems. This is a reason to look at the PowerShell. It is available on the Microsoft® Windows platform, so it’s the way to go. In his workshop at DeepSec 2015 Nikhil Mittal will teach you all you need to know about the PowerShell. PowerShell is the ideal tool for penetration testing of a

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DeepSec 2015 Talk: Revisiting SOHO Router Attacks – Jose Antonio Rodriguez Garcia and Ivan Sanz de Castro

Sanna/ September 18, 2015/ Conference, Internet, Security

Have you seen Jon Schiefer’s  film Algorithm? If you haven’t, then you should catch up. The protagonist of the story gain access by using the good old small office / home office (SOHO) infrastructure. The attack is pretty realistic, and it shows that SOHO networks can expose all devices connected to it, either briefly or permanently. Combined with the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) hype, SOHO networks are guaranteed to contain devices used for business purposes. We haven’t even talked about the security of entertainment equipment or the Internet of Stuff (IoT). Like it or not, SOHO areas are part of your perimeter once you allow people to work from home or to bring work home. Be brave and enter the wonderful world of consumer devices used to protect enterprise networks. José Antonio Rodríguez

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DeepSec 2015 Talk: Deactivating Endpoint Protection Software in an Unauthorized Manner

René Pfeiffer/ September 7, 2015/ Conference, Security

Your infrastructure is full of endpoints. Did you know that? You even have endpoints if you use your employees’ devices (BYOD!) or the „Cloud“ (YMMV!). Can’t escape them. Since the bad girls and guys knows this, they will attack these weak points first. How are your endpoints (a.k.a. clients in the old days) protected? In case you use software to protect these vulnerable systems, then you should attend Matthias Deeg’s talk. He will show you the art of Deactivating Endpoint Protection Software in an Unauthorized Manner: Endpoint protection software such as anti-virus or firewall software often have a password protection in order to restrict access to a management console for changing settings or deactivating protection features to authorized users only. Sometimes the protection can only be deactivated temporarily for a few minutes, sometimes it

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DeepSec 2013 Video: The Boomerang Effect – Using Session Puzzling To Attack Apps From The Backend

René Pfeiffer/ February 9, 2014/ Conference, Security

Attacking fortified positions head on looks good on the silver screen. Real life attackers have no sense for drama and special effects. Battering closed doors will get you nowhere fast. Instead modern adversaries take a good look at open doors and exploit them to get what they want. Security specialists know about the dangers of management interfaces (also known as backends). This is one main focus of denying unauthorised access. Once a backend is exposed, the consequences can be very fatal to your digital assets. At the DeepSec 2013 conference Shay Chen (Hacktics ASC, Ernst & Young) explained how attacks originating from backends look like and what attackers can do once they gained foothold.

Talk (U21): Solving Social Engineering Attacks

René Pfeiffer/ September 1, 2011/ Conference

You’ve heard about social engineering. You know your weakest links. You have the task of defending your network against intruders. You know how to do this with your web applications, networks, clients and servers. All these things have neat classifications of attacks, best practice lists and lots of other resources. What about social engineering? How do you keep the wrong people out and your critical information in? How do you classify the attacks? Toby Foster of the University of York, student of Computer Science and intern at First Defence Information Security, tries to address this problem by talking about modelling and categorising and solving the attacks: „There are many definitions of social engineering; almost every book or website on the subject has a different definition. Probably the only consistent point is that it relies

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