1411, 2017

DeepSec2017 Talk: Building Security Teams – Astera Schneeweisz

Sanna/ November 14, 2017/ Conference

While ‘security is not a team’, you’ll find that most companies growing just beyond 60-80 people start employing a group of people focusing primarily on the topic. But the culture of secure engineering in a company does not only strongly correlate with when you start building a security team – it becomes (and grows as) a matter of how they connect with the rest of your organization, and make security, adversarial thinking, and the care for user safety and privacy part of everyone’s concern. In this talk, Astera will review what the purposes of a security team can be, which challenges you’ll face, how you can make it scale beyond the team’s boundaries; as well as proven good practices of running (fairly operational) engineering teams themselves. Whether your organization already has a security team

Read More

1411, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: How I Rob Banks – Freakyclown

Sanna/ November 14, 2017/ Conference, High Entropy, Security

You are in for an adventure at DeepSec this year. We have a tour on robbing banks for you: A light-hearted trip through security failures both physical and electronic that have enabled me over the years to circumvent security of most of the worlds largest banks. Through the use of tales from the front line and useful illustrative slides, I will attempted to take you through the lessons to be learned from an ethical hacker with a penchant for breaking into the impossible. Let me take you on a rollercoaster ride of epic fails and grandiose plans and my Jason Bourne like adventures including Lockpicking, Kidnap, Police chases and multi-million pound bank heists. FC is a well-known ethical hacker and social engineer. He has been working in the infosec field for over 20 years

Read More

2510, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: BitCracker – BitLocker Meets GPUs – Elena Agostini

Sanna/ October 25, 2017/ Conference

Encryption and ways to break it go hand in hand. When it comes to the digital world, the method of rapidly using different keys may lead to success, provided you have sufficient computing power. The graphics processing units (GPUs) have come a long way from just preparing the bits to be sent to the display device. Nowadays GPUs are used for a lot of computational expensive tasks. At DeepSec 2017 you will hear about keys, encryption, and storage encryption – all with the use of GPUs, but forthe purpose of cracking keys. BitLocker (formerly BitLocker Drive Encryption) is a full-disk encryption feature available in recent Windows OS (Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10). It is designed to protect data by providing encryption for several types of memory units like internal hard disks or external removable

Read More

1710, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: Who Hid My Desktop – Deep Dive Into hVNC – Or Safran & Pavel Asinovsky

Sanna/ October 17, 2017/ Conference

Seeing is believing. If you sit in front of your desktop and everything looks as it should look, then you are not in the Matrix, right? Right? Well, maybe. Manipulating the surface to make something to look similar is a technique also used by phishing, spammers, and social engineers. But what if the attacker sitting on your computer does not need to see what you see? Enter hidden virtual network computing where malicious software controls your system, and you don’t know about it. Since the past decade, financial institutions are increasingly faced with the problem of malware stealing hefty amounts of money by performing fraudulent fund transfers from their customers’ online banking accounts. Many vendors attempt to solve this issue by developing sophisticated products for classifying or risk scoring each transaction. Often, identifying legitimate

Read More

1710, 2017

DeepSec Talk 2017: Normal Permissions In Android: An Audiovisual Deception – Constantinos Patsakis

Sanna/ October 17, 2017/ Conference, Security

The Marshmallow version was a significant revision for Android. Among the new features that were introduced one of the most significant is, without any doubt, the runtime permission. The permission model was totally redesigned, categorising the permissions into four main categories. The main concept of this categorisation is how much risk a user is exposed to when permissions are granted. Therefore, normal permissions imply the least risk for the user. However, in this case, there are some important issues. Firstly, these permissions are not actually displayed to the user; they are not displayed upon installation and the user needs to dig into several menus to find them for each app. Most importantly though, these permissions cannot be revoked. Unlike permissions categorized as dangerous, where the user can grant or revoke a permission whenever deemed

Read More

0910, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: How To Hide Your Browser 0-days: Free Offense And Defense Tips Included – Zoltan Balazs

Sanna/ October 9, 2017/ Conference

There is a famous thought experiment described in the book A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. It deals with the possibility of unperceived existence; for example does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when no one is around to hear it? Given the many reports and mentions about zero-day exploits, the question might be rephrased. Does a zero-day exploit cause any effects when no one is able to detect its presence? Before we completely get lost in philosophy, the question has a real background. Zoltan Balazs wants to address the issue of zero-days in his DeepSec 2017 presentation. The idea seems somewhat contrary to intuition – protecting exploits from being disclosed. Zero-day exploits targeting browsers are usually very short-lived. These zero-days are actively gathered and analyzed by security researchers.

Read More

0810, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: BITSInject – Control Your BITS, Get SYSTEM – Dor Azouri

Sanna/ October 8, 2017/ Conference, Internet, Security

Microsoft has introduced the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) into Windows 2000 and later versions of the operating system. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 feature the version 4.0 of the protocol. BITS is designed to use idle bandwidth in order to transfer data to and from servers. BITS is an obedient servant, and it may be abused into doing transfers on behalf of others. Dor Azouri will present his findings regarding BITS at DeepSec 2007. Windows’ BITS service is a middleman for your download jobs. You start a BITS job, and from that point on, BITS is responsible for the download. But what if we tell you that BITS is a careless middleman? Current Windows software comes packaged with a mix of old and new features and components. New, shiny features and

Read More

0710, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: XFLTReaT: A New Dimension In Tunnelling – Balazs Bucsay

Sanna/ October 7, 2017/ Conference, Security

“Our new tool XFLTReaT is an open-source tunnelling framework that handles all the boring stuff and gives users the capability to take care of only the things that matter”, says Balazs. “It provides significant improvements over existing tools. From now on there is no need to write a new tunnel for each and every protocol or to deal with interfaces and routing. Any protocol can be converted to a module, which works in a plug-and-play fashion; authentication and encryption can be configured and customised on all traffic, and it is also worth mentioning that the framework was designed to be easy to configure, use and develop.” We asked Balazs Bucsay a couple more questions about his talk: Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. Tunnelling is not new at all, but

Read More

0610, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: Insecurity In Information Technology – Tanya Janca

Sanna/ October 6, 2017/ Communication, Conference, Security

A lot is expected of software developers these days; they are expected to be experts in everything despite very little training. Throw in the IT security team (often with little-to-no knowledge of how to build software) telling developers what to do and how to do it, and the situation is further strained. This silo-filled, tension-laced situation, coupled with short deadlines and mounting pressure from management, often leads to stress, anxiety and less-than-ideal reactions from developers and security people alike. In this talk Tanya Janca will explain how people’s personal insecurities can be brought out by leadership decisions in the way we manage our application security programs, and how this can lead to real-life vulnerabilities in software and other IT products.  This is not a soft talk about “feelings”, this is a talk about creating

Read More

0510, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: Bypassing Web Application Firewalls – Khalil Bijjou

Sanna/ October 5, 2017/ Conference, Security

Everyone has firewalls or filters. They are now called application-level gateway (ALG) and have lots of features included. Algorithms, signatures, heuristics, protocol checks, verification; you name it. It’s all in there. But does it work? Obfuscation and evading technology has been around since the first filter was created. Anticipating what data might look like is hard, and some protocols were designed to be as ambivalent as possible, one might think. At DeepSec 2017 Khalil Bijjou will show you what can be done being evasive in the web. Security experts perform security assessments of web applications in order to identify vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious users. Web Application Firewalls add a second layer of protection to web applications in order to mitigate these vulnerabilities. The attempt to bypass Web Application Firewalls is an

Read More

0210, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: Hacking The Brain For Fun And Profit – Stefan Hager

Sanna/ October 2, 2017/ Conference, Discussion

You are what you think. At least we think so. Is this mental model the right way to explore our surroundings and our interconnected world? Well, let’s find out by thinking about it. When we’re talking and thinking about security, we very often have a rather fixed mindset and keep using what we think are proven methods. We tend not to question our decisions and thoughts, and the way how our brains work reaffirms our bias and our mediocre choices. In this talk we take a closer look at how we are thinking, and how we can change or expand this as well as our perception, by hacking into our own brains in order to get a clearer picture of what we really want and need. New ways of thinking and creativity can be

Read More

2909, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: Essential Infrastructure Interdependencies: Would We Be Prepared For Significant Interruptions? – Herbert Saurugg

Sanna/ September 29, 2017/ Conference

How would your day look without electrical power? Given the fact that we rely on information technology every single minute of our lives (well, mostly), this would be a very dark outlook indeed. Knocking out the power grid is a tactic used by the military. They have even special tools for disabling power lines and transformer stations. Progress has enabled network access for power plants and other parts of the grid. It’s not all about hacking stuff. There is a lot more involved when it comes to critical infrastructure, and this is why we have asked Herbert Saurugg, a renowned specialist on this topic, to conduct a presentation at DeepSec 2017. Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) are major topics almost everywhere. Its priority has also increased during recent years because of rising

Read More

2809, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: Uncovering And Visualizing Botnet Infrastructure And Behavior – Andrea Scarfo & Josh Pyorre

Sanna/ September 28, 2017/ Conference, Internet

When you read about information security, then you might get the impression that there are lots of nameless threats Out There™. Especially when it comes to networked malicious software, i.e. malware, that forms robot armies, the picture gets a lot more vague and foggy. So you need to get some details to sharpen your view. There are some means how to do this, and you will be told at DeepSec 2017 by Andrea Scarfo and Josh Pyorre. How much information about a botnet can one find using a single IP address, domain name or indicator of compromise (IOC)? What kind of behavior can be determined when looking at attacker and victim infrastructure? In an attempt to discover and analyze the infrastructure behind large-scale malware activity, Andrea and Josh began their research with known indicators

Read More

2709, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: Next-Gen Mirai Botnet – Balthasar Martin & Fabian Bräunlein

Sanna/ September 27, 2017/ Conference, Internet, Security

While you were living in a cave, devices took over the world and got connected to the network. This is the state of affairs we live in right now. As long as nothing happens we don’t notice anything about it. The Mirai (未来) botnet changed this all of a sudden. Consumer devices were drafted into an army of bots. Thanks to the proliferation of networked devices such as cameras, home routers, and others the botnet was very successful. The code was designed to run on embedded devices and is even online for inspection. Let’s take a look at how to improve Mirai. Badly secured embedded devices enabled the largest DDoS attack on critical networks seen to date: The Mirai attacks in 2016 were largely pegged on Internet-exposed telnet with default credentials. While such telnet

Read More

2009, 2017

Workshops, Trainings, Talks: DeepSec and ROOTS Schedule Update

René Pfeiffer/ September 20, 2017/ Administrivia, Conference

As you might have noticed, the DeepSec schedule is not complete yet. Furthermore the ROOTS schedule is not published at all. The reason for this are the still pending reviews. The major part concerns ROOTS. ROOTS is an academic workshop where academic publications are presented. There has been some confusion about the term workshop. In the context of ROOTS this means presentations. This is why we have replaced the word workshops on the DeepSec web site and in (hopefully) all texts with the word training. Trainings are the two-day, well, trainings in advance of the DeepSec conference days. ROOTS features presentations, also called workshops in ROOTS-context, as does the DeepSec conference (on the conference days). So we have trainings (the two-day training courses; one, the ARM exploit laboratory is for three days, be careful)

Read More