2502, 2016

DeepSec Video: Have We Penetrated Yet??

René Pfeiffer/ February 25, 2016/ Conference, Security

Testing the defences of a network, applications, or infrastructure can be tough. Often you spend lots of days, the results not being proportionate to the time spent. How do you assess success when doing penetration testing? How to test, what tools to use, and who should be doing the testing? Johnny Deutsch has some answers for you. He held a presentation at DeepSec 2015 about this topic. We recommend watching this presentation to everyone thinking about requesting a penetration test or, of course, everyone actually doing these tests.

2302, 2016

DeepSec Video: DDoS – Barbarians at the Gate(way)

René Pfeiffer/ February 23, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Stories

Unfortunately the Internet doesn’t follow the rules of economic theory. Unlimited growth is a myth best kept for feeding your unicorns. Of course, the Internet has grown, but the mathematics and physics behind network flows stay the same. If your pipe is full, then you are going nowhere. This is why Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks still work. You can counter or evade these attacks, but they can happen. We invited Dave Lewis of Akamai to DeepSec 2015 to hear his view on the current state of affairs where DDoS is concerned. For the record: DDoS is not hacking and no hacking attack. Spread your „cyber“ somewhere else.

2202, 2016

DeepSec Video: HORNET – High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer

René Pfeiffer/ February 22, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Security

Given that reconnaissance is the first step of a successful attack, anonymity has become more important than ever. The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) and the TOR project are prominent tools to protect against prying eyes (five or more). TOR is widely used. Users of anonymity services will notice that the price for extra protection is less speed in terms of latency and probably bandwidth. Researchers have published a method to attain high-speed network performance, called HORNET. HORNET is designed as a low-latency onion routing system that operates at the network layer thus enabling a wide range of applications. Our system uses only symmetric cryptography for data forwarding yet requires no per-flow state on intermediate nodes. This design enables HORNET nodes to process anonymous traffic at over 93 Gb/s. At DeepSec 2015 Chen Chen explained

1102, 2016

DeepSec Video: Agile Security – The Good, The Bad, and mostly the Ugly

René Pfeiffer/ February 11, 2016/ Conference, Security

How do you manage your technical and operational security? Do you follow a model? If so, what’s the flavour? Do you borrow concepts from software development? In case you do or you plan to do, then Daniel Liber might have some ideas for you. At DeepSec 2015 he held a presentation about Agile and a possible relation to information security. Buzzwords about Agile are flying around in overwhelming speed, talks about Scrum, Kanban, XP and other methodologies and practices are thoroughly discussed while security is still left as a ‘high level’ talk, or, sometimes, as understanding how to adapt from traditional development methodologies. Some best practices will leave you scratching your head, unsure what was the original intention and without understanding how to implement security in Agile, effectively. This talk will help security engineers,

0302, 2016

DeepSec Video: Building a Better Honeypot Network

René Pfeiffer/ February 3, 2016/ Conference, Security

„It’s a trap!“ is a well-known quote from a very well-known piece of science fiction. In information security you can use bait to attract malicious minds. The bait is called honeypot or honeynet (if you have a lot of honeypots tied together with network protocols). A honeypot allows you to study what your adversaries do with an exposed system. The idea has been around for over a decade. There’s even a guide on how to start. Josh Pyorre has some ideas how you can extend your basic honeypot in order to boost the knowledge gain. At DeepSec 2015 he showed the audience how to process attack-related data, to automate analysis and create actionable intelligence. Why else would you run a honeypot? So go forth and multiply the output of your honeynet!

3001, 2016

DeepSec Video: 50 Shades of WAF – Exemplified at Barracuda and Sucuri

René Pfeiffer/ January 30, 2016/ Conference, Security

Sometimes your endpoint is a server (or a couple thereof). Very often your server is a web server. A lot of interesting, dangerous, and odd code resides on web servers these days. In case you have ever security-tested web applications, you know that these beasts are full of surprises. Plus the servers get lots of requests, some trying to figure out where the weaknesses are. This is how web application firewalls (WAF) come into play. Firewalls have come a long way from inspecting layer 3/4 traffic up to all the peculiarities of layer 7 protocols. Once your firewall turns ALG and more, things get complicated. Since security researchers love complexity Ashar Javed has taken a look at WAF systems. Here is his presentation held at DeepSec 2015. He found 50 ways to bypass the

2901, 2016

DeepSec Video: Temet Nosce – Know thy Endpoint Through and Through; Processes to Data

René Pfeiffer/ January 29, 2016/ Conference

Endpoint security is where it all starts. The client is the target most attackers go after. Once you have access there (let’s say by emailing cute cat videos), you are in. Compromised systems are the daily routine of information security. Even without contact with the outside world, you have to think about what happens next. Thomas Fischer has thought a lot about scenarios concerning the endpoint, and he presented his findings at the DeepSec 2015 conference. To quote from the talk: This presentation will demonstrate that one of the most complete sources of actionable intelligence resides at the end point, and that living as close as possible to Ring 0 makes it possible to see how a malicious process or party is acting and the information being touched. There you go. Have a look!

0511, 2015

Debugging Information Security: Self Defence for Entrepreneurs

Sanna/ November 5, 2015/ Conference, High Entropy, Internet, Security, Security Intelligence

In our economy data leaks are a constant companion. That’s the impression one gets when reading the news. Customer portals, online shops, digital communications, plans of products, personnel data, and more can be found in department stores throughout the shadow economy. Blind faith in global networks has indeed suffered in recent years, but companies and individuals still have a partially carefree attitude when it comes to the imminent risk their data is exposed to. “Who cares about our data?”, is often said. This year’s DeepSec IT Security Conference has some very specific answers to this question. Duncan Campbell and James Bamford open IT Security Conference in Vienna Duncan Campbell is a freelance British journalist, author, and television producer. Since 1975 he has specialized in intelligence and security services, defence, policing and civil liberty rights.

2110, 2015

DeepSec Talk: Got RATs? Enter Barn Cat (OSint)

Mika/ October 21, 2015/ Conference, Schedule

We are happy to have John Bambenek (Fidelis Cybersecurity & SANS Internet Storm Center) on stage to present his new Open Source Intelligence Project Barn Cat. OSINT Barn Cat: Mining Malware for Intelligence at Scale I like the name of the project: Barn cats are the best mousers and this new project is targeted to catch (not only) RATs. In reality we have a hard time to keep track and ensure up-to-date signatures, with half a million unique samples pouring into the analysis machinery of the AV-industry and signature producers every day. Barn cat has a new approach: Instead of learning every time from scratch how a new mouse looks like, Barn Cat monitors the criminal infrastructure to detect undesired activity in your network. It’s like a true barn cat couching in front of

1310, 2015

Defence – Beating the Odds with Knowledge

René Pfeiffer/ October 13, 2015/ Conference, Discussion, Mission Statement, Training

When did you write your last business letter? You probably don’t recall, because you write one all of the time. When did you last use ink and paper to do this? If you can’t remember the answer to this question, don’t bother trying. Digital communication is part of our daily life, not only in the business world. We are very accustomed to communicate in the here and now, up to the point where being offline feels unnatural. In turn this means that we are constantly exposed to networks of all kinds, especially the Internet. Our door is open all around the clock. We can’t close it any more, thus openly inviting every kind of threat also using networks. It’s time to seriously think about this. What does it mean? What do we need to

0310, 2015

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

1709, 2015

DeepSec 2015 Talk: Building a Better Honeypot Network – Josh Pyorre (OpenDNS)

Sanna/ September 17, 2015/ Conference, Internet, Security

Most defenders only learn what attackers can do after recovering from a successful attack. Evaluating forensic evidence can tell you a lot. While this is still useful, wouldn’t it be better to learn from your adversaries without risking your production systems or sensitive data? There is a way. Use some bait and watch. Honeypots to the rescue! Josh Pyorre will tell you in his presentation how this works. Honeypots and honeypot networks can assist security researchers in understanding different attacker techniques across a variety of systems. This information can be used to better protect our systems and networks, but it takes a lot of work to sift through the data. Installing a network of honeypots to provide useful information should be an easy task, but there just isn’t much to tie everything together in

1009, 2015

DeepSec 2015 Talk: “Yes, Now YOU Can Patch That Vulnerability Too!” A short Interview with Mitja Kolsek

Sanna/ September 10, 2015/ Discussion, Interview, Security

Patching software is a crucial task when it comes to fixing security vulnerabilities. While this totally works, usually you have to wait until the vendors or the developers provide you either an upgrade or a patch. What do you do in the meantime? Reducing the exposure of the software helps, but sometimes you have no choice. Public interfaces are public. There’s help. Do it yourself! Mitja Kolsek will tell you more. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. We want to shake the security world by introducing a simple twist and essentially reinventing software patching. Attackers’ main advantage comes from software vulnerabilities (often very old and long-patched ones), which are a critical ingredient of most breaches into corporate and government networks. Unfortunately, most software vendors are lacking economical motivation for providing patches, let alone pro-actively

0309, 2015

The Enemy Within: Industrial Espionage and Your Network at DeepSec 2015

Sanna/ September 3, 2015/ Conference, High Entropy, Security

Networking is vital to aquire jobs in the business world, manage projects, and develop products. It all started with the World Wide Web, now we also interact via various clouds and social media platforms with our staff, clients, and customers. Data gets outsourced to third parties, and business letters are airily send by Instant Messenger (due to the lack of messenger ravens, sadly). But the thoughtless embrace of networks invites threats, previously known only from the silver screen – spies. And, unfortunately, in today’s digital environment, it is no longer enough to just close the door to protect yourself from prying eyes. There is much more to be considered. We’re here to help. DeepSec does not want to leave your company out in the cold: Attend our next conference which takes place in Vienna on

3007, 2015

New MJS Article: Why Anti-Virus Software Fails

René Pfeiffer/ July 30, 2015/ Security

What is your first impulse when you see a fence? Well, we can’t speak for you, but we like to look for weak spots, holes, and ways to climb it. The same is true for filters of all kinds. Let’s see what one can do to bypass them. Anti-virus software is a good example. At DeepSec 2014 Daniel Sauder explained how malware filters/detectors fail. Daniel was kind to provide an article for the special edition „In Depth Security – Proceedings of the DeepSec Conferences“: „Based on my work about antivirus evasion techniques, I started using antivirus evasion techniques for testing the effectivity of antivirus engines. I researched the internal functionality of antivirus products, especially the implementation of heuristics by sandboxing and emulation and succeeded in evasion of these. A result of my research are

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