DeepINTEL 2018 Talk: Framing HUMINT as an information gathering technique – Ulrike Hugl

Sanna/ November 20, 2018/ DeepIntel, Security Intelligence

NATO defines human intelligence (HUMINT) or hyoo-mint as “a category of intelligence derived from information collected and provided by human sources” (NATO Glossary of terms and definitions, APP-6, 2004) focusing on different kinds of information, for example data on things related to a human, information about a human’s specific knowledge of a situation, and other issues. HUMINT is differentiated into several categories like clandestine and overt collection. And: It is one of several other traditional intelligence collection disciplines, so called INTs; examples are SIGINT (signals intelligence), OSINT (open source intelligence), MASINT (measurements and signatures intelligence), GEOINT (geospatial intelligence), TECHINT (technical intelligence), SOMINT (social media intelligence), FININT (financial intellicence, gathered from analysis of monetary transactions), as well as CYBINT/DNINT (cyber intelligence/digital network intelligence, gathered from cyberspace). Intelligence Services deal with the analysis and collection of

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: RFID Chip Inside the Body: Reflecting the Current State of Usage, Triggers, and Ethical Issues – Ulrike Hugl

Sanna/ November 14, 2018/ Conference

Chipping humans can be seen as one of the most invasive biometric identification technologies. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as the key technology in the field of the Internet of Things produces many applications. For example, human implants are used by scientists in the fields of cyborgism, robotics, biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, by hobbyists for identification reasons to start their computers, cars, for smart home applications or to pay by credit card, by hospitals for the control of human biological functions of patients, but also by companies to tag their employees for security reasons and workplace surveillance. All in all, worldwide human implants are mainly used for security, healthcare, and private (individual) reasons. Beside some positive individual or organizational outcomes, implants may compromise privacy and raise manifold ethical questions. For example, research in the

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ROOTS 2018 Talk: The Swift Language from a Reverse Engineering Perspective – Malte Kraus & Vincent Haupert

Sanna/ November 13, 2018/ Conference, ROOTS

Over the last decade, mobile devices have taken over the consumer market for computer hardware. Almost all these mobile devices run either Android or iOS as their operating systems. In 2014, Apple introduced the Swift programming language as an alternative to Objective C for writing iOS and macOS applications. The rising adoption of this new language has to some extent obsoleted existing techniques for program analysis for these platforms, like method swizzling and “class-dump”. In this paper we discuss features of Swift binaries that help in reverse engineering the functionality of the contained code: We document the memory layout of compound data types and the calling convention used by the Swift compiler, as well as the runtime type information that is used by runtime and debugger when data types are not known statically. This

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ROOTS 2018: How Android’s UI Security is Undermined by Accessibility – Anatoli Kalysch

Sanna/ November 9, 2018/ Conference, ROOTS

Android’s accessibility API was designed to assist users with disabilities, or temporarily preoccupied users unable to interact with a device, e.g., while driving a car. Nowadays, many Android apps rely on the accessibility API for other purposes, including apps like password managers but also malware. From a security perspective, the accessibility API is precarious as it undermines an otherwise strong principle of sandboxing in Android that separates apps. By means of an accessibility service, apps can interact with the UI elements of another app, including reading from its screen and writing to its text fields. As a consequence, design shortcomings in the accessibility API and other UI features such as overlays have grave security implications. This talk will provide a critical perspective on the current state of Android accessibility and selected UI security features.

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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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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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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 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: 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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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Dissecting The Boot Sector: The Hunt for Ransomware in the Boot Process – Raul Alvarez

Sanna/ October 4, 2018/ Conference, Security

Ransomware is as cyber as it gets these days. It’s all over the news, and it is a lucrative business case. Modern malicious software has been put to work for its masters. It is the platform of deployment for a whole variety of additional code. So why is ransomware not the same as any other malicious software? Raul Alvarez will explain this to you at DeepSec 2018: Ransomware slightly differs in their attack vectors, encryption algorithms, and selection of files to encrypt. A common ransomware technique is to encrypt files and hold it for ransom. Petya ransomware does the infection a bit different from the others. Instead of encrypting files, it encrypts the MFT, Master File Table, which contains the metadata and headers for each file in the system. Another trait of this malware

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