DeepSec 2016 Talk: Assessing the Hacking Capabilities of Institutional and Non-institutional Players – Stefan Schumacher

Sanna/ November 3, 2016/ Conference, Security, Security Intelligence

Cyberwar, Cyberterror and Cybercrime have been buzzwords for several years now. Given the correct context, using cyber has merits. However Cyber-Headlines are full with Cyber-Reports about Cyber-Incidents, Cyber-Hacking and Cyber-Cyber in general. However, that whole discussion does not only suffer from sensationalism of journalists and bloggers, there are also some fundamental problems, says Stefan Schumacher. We are still lacking useful definitions for modern IT security threats and we still have to think about the assessment of capabilities in the IT field.Besides institutional actors like states and their military and intelligence community we also have to assess the capabilities of non-institutional actors like terrorist groups or organised crime. Unlike the assessment of classic military strength (eg. fighting power or Kriegsstärkenachweise), assessing the capabilities and powers of actors in the IT field is much more complicated

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Why Companies Must Control Their Data in the Era of IoT – and How To – Kurt Kammerer

Sanna/ November 3, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Interview, Security

In his talk Kurt Kammerer addresses any company’s dilemma: The need for data sharing in the era of IoT while at the same time controlling access and ownership. In order to succeed in business, it is imperative to make data available to customers, suppliers and business partners. However, the explosion and the proclaimed free flow of data can turn against an organisation and threaten its very existence, if not professionally controlled. We asked Mr. Kammerer a few questions beforehand. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. The relevance of “data” increases by the day and “data” is imperative to compete. Therefore, it is an asset companies must control. Data ownership is increasingly being challenged in the era of cloud/IoT (who created the data and who actually owns it?) Not exercising enough control

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Insider Threat: Profiling, Intent and Motivations of White Collar Offenders – Ulrike Hugl

Sanna/ October 31, 2016/ Conference, Security

Malicious insider threat is not only a security- or technical-oriented issue, mainly it’s a behavioural one, says Prof. Ulrike Hugl. Insiders are so-called ‘trusted’ or privileged employees, very often with legitimate access to the organization’s systems, and they are hard to catch. Furthermore, it is difficult to find appropriate predictive factors and prevention and detection measures. In fact, based on new technical developments and opportunities, data theft has become much easier these days: Mobile trends like BYOD, the increased ability to work from home, access to the organization’s systems when on the road, cloud services with related security vulnerabilities for example, as well as more and more malware opportunities have increased the potential of related attacks. Other main security obstacles and trigger factors inside and outside an organization may be, to name a few, a

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DeepSec2016 Talk: Abusing LUKS to Hack the System – Interview with Ismael Ripoll & Hector Marco

Sanna/ October 21, 2016/ Conference, Interview

Please tell us the top facts about your talk. It discloses a vulnerability that affects Linux systems encrypted with Luks, and how it can be abused to escalate privileges: CVE-2016-4484 Includes a sketch of the boot sequence with a deeper insight into the initrd Linux process A brief discussion about why complexity is the enemy of security: The whole system needs to be observed. A practical real working demo attack will be presented. How did you come up with it? Was there something like an initial spark that set your mind on creating this talk? Well, this is a difficult question. Basically, it is an attitude in front of the computer. When we start a research line, we don’t stop digging until the ultimate doubt and question is addressed. After the GRUB 28 bug, we keep reviewing the rest of

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: I Thought I Saw a |-|4><0.- Thomas Fischer

Sanna/ October 21, 2016/ Conference, Development, Security

Threat Hunting refers to proactively and iteratively searching through networks or datasets to detect and respond to advanced threats that evade traditional rule- or signature-based security solutions. “But what does this really mean?”, asks Thomas Fischer. “And what real impact does it have on the security team? Can we use threat hunting to provide a process to better detect and understand when you’ve been breached?” More and more security data is being produced and usually aggregated into a central location or body to hopefully take quick and informed decisions on attacks or compromises amongst a mountain of data. When you start to include data gathered from your endpoints the amount of data starts to explode exponentially. This level of data provides us with a large amount of visibility. But is having visibility enough? What

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DeepSec2016 Talk: AMSI: How Windows 10 Plans To Stop Script Based Attacks and How Good It Does That – Nikhil Mittal

Sanna/ October 20, 2016/ Conference, Development, Security

In his talk Nikhil Mittal will focus on AMSI: In Windows 10, Microsoft introduced the AntiMalware Scan Interface (AMSI), which is designed to target script based attacks and malware. Script based attacks have been lethal for enterprise security and with the advent of PowerShell, such attacks have become increasingly common. AMSI targets malicious scripts written in PowerShell, VBScript, JScript, etc. It drastically improves detection and the blocking rate of malicious scripts. When a piece of code is submitted for execution to the scripting host, AMSI steps in and scans the code for malicious content. What makes AMSI effective is that no matter how obfuscated the code is, it needs to be presented to the script host in clear text and unobfuscated. Moreover, since the code is submitted to AMSI just before execution, it doesn’t

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Where Should I Host My Malware? – Attila Marosi

Sanna/ October 18, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Security

The growth of IoT devices continues to raise questions about their role and impact on cybersecurity. Badly or poorly configured devices are easy targets for malicious actors. At first glance launching an attack against IoT devices seems challenging due to the diversity of their ecosystem, but actually an attack is very easy to execute. In his talk Attila Marosi will explain why the IoT is a cybercriminal’s paradise: “In our SophosLabs research, we focused on a very generic attack scenario that would affect almost any device using FTP services – Your router or network-attached storage (NAS) for example. These attacks typically exploit the level of trust people place on any content hosted on internal network shares. A successful attacker would abuse or compromise a default FTP guest account, place a “Trojan horse” in a visible file share and rely on human curiosity

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Exploiting First Hop Protocols to Own the Network – Paul Coggin

Sanna/ October 16, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Security

At DeepSec 2016 Paul Coggin will focus on how to exploit a network by targeting the various first hop protocols. Attack vectors for crafting custom packets as well as a few of the available tools for layer 2 network protocols exploitation will be covered. Paul will provide you with defensive mitigations and recommendations for adding secure visualization and instrumentation for layer 2. He kindly answered a few questions beforehand: Please tell us the top facts about your talk. The presentation focuses on commonly overlooked layer 2 security issues. In many cases penetration testers and auditors focus on the upper layers of the OSI model and miss the low hanging fruit at layer 2. The talk will cover both offensive exploit techniques and methods for securing networks. Multicast switching and routing protocols, router redundancy protocols, IPv6 and other

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DeepSec2016 Talk: Security and Privacy in the Current E-Mobility Charging Infrastructure – Achim Friedland

Sanna/ October 15, 2016/ Conference, Development, Security

The whole information technology strongly depends on electric power. Your servers will turn into expensive door stoppers once the power goes out. The same is true for your mobile devices and the hardware you use to get around. Hence there are efforts to extend the power grid to accommodate the demand of new and emerging technologies. The charging infrastructure requires some security considerations. You cannot simply put a cable into any power socket, throw it our of the windows, and use it for charging unknown devices and vehicles. It’s a bit more complicated. At DeepSec 2016 Achim Friedland will give you an overview on what charging really means. In his talk Achim Friedland focuses on the emerging market of  smart and electric mobility as an interesting area of research and development for both academia and startups.

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: The Perfect Door and The Ideal Padlock – Deviant Ollam

Sanna/ October 14, 2016/ Conference, Discussion, Security

You have spent lots of money on a high-grade pick-resistant lock for your door. Your vendor has assured you how it will resist attack and how difficult it would be for someone to copy your key. Maybe they’re right. But… the bulk of attacks that both penetration testers and also criminals attempt against doors have little or nothing to do with the lock itself! Deviant Ollams talk  will be a hard-hitting exploration (full of photo and video examples) of the ways in which your doors and padlocks – the most fundamental part of your physical security – can possibly be thwarted by someone attempting illicit entry. The scary problems will be immediately followed by simple solutions that are instantly implementable and usually very within-budget. You, too, can have a near-perfect door and acquire ideal

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DeepSec2016 Talk: Java Deserialization Vulnerabilities – The Forgotten Bug Class – Matthias Kaiser

Sanna/ October 13, 2016/ Conference, Development, Security

Most programming languages and frameworks have support for serialization of data. It’s quite handy for storing things to disk (or other media) and transporting them around a network for example. The process can be reversed, aptly called deserialization, in order to obtain the original pieces of data. Great. Even though this process sounds simple, there is a lot that can go wrong. First of all data can be manipulated. Subtle modifications can cause havoc when the data is touched. There is a lesser known class of bugs around deserialization and serialization techniques. Matthias Kaiser has some insights to share. Java deserialization vulnerabilities are a bug class of its own. Although several security researchers have published details in the last ten years, still the bug class is fairly unknown. Early 2015 Chris Frohoff and Gabriel

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Brace Yourselves – Exploit Automation is Coming! – Andreas Follner

Sanna/ October 12, 2016/ Conference, Development, Security

Automating tasks is not only the domain of system administrators. We use computers for a lot of dull and boring processes. This enhances productivity and enables us to focus on problem solving. That’s good news. The bad news is that your adversaries can do this, too. While there are still more than enough hand-crafted attacks Out There™, there are classes of exploits that follow a certain pattern. So if you want to find out how this auto0wning works, you should listen to the presentation by Andreas Follner. Gone are the days of simple stack smashing and code injection (thanks, DEP / W^X!), says Andreas Follner. Today, return-oriented programming (ROP) is the foundation of exploitation. Most ROP exploits are created as follows: you use a tool to dump all gadgets in a binary to the disk, grep specific

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DeepSec2016 Talk: The (In)Security or Sad State of Online Newspapers – Ashar Javed

Sanna/ October 8, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Press

Web sites are simply, one might think. The client requests a page, the server sends it, the layout is applied, and your article appears. This is a heavy simplification. It worked like this back in 1994. Modern web sites are much more complex. And complexity attracts curious minds. Usually that’s what gets you into trouble. Now content management systems serve the web page of the 1990s with a lot of queries, executable code, and from different servers. The ever changing Top 10 list of mistakes from the Open Web Application Security Project can show you the tip of the iceberg. Ashar Javed took a closer look at online newspapers, and he found some scary stuff. The goal of his talk is to raise awareness about the (in)securities of online newspapers. Ashar Javed hopes that their

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DeepSec Talk 2016: Inside Stegosploit – Saumil Shah

Sanna/ October 7, 2016/ Conference, Pictures, Security

Stegosploit creates a new way to encode “drive-by” browser exploits and delivers them through image files. Using current means these payloads are undetectable. In his talk Saumil Shah discusses two broad underlying techniques used for image based exploit delivery – Steganography and Polyglots. Drive-by browser exploits are steganographically encoded into JPG and PNG images. The resultant image file is fused with HTML and Javascript decoder code, turning it into an HTML+Image polyglot. The polyglot looks and feels like an image, but is decoded and triggered in a victim’s browser when loaded. This talk focusses more on the inner mechanisms of Stegosploit, implementation details and how certain browser specific obstacles were overcome. The Stegosploit Toolkit contains the tools necessary to test image based exploit delivery. A case study of a Use-After-Free memory corruption exploit (CVE-2014-0282) shall

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Social Engineering The Most Underestimated APT – Hacking the Human Operating System – Dominique C. Brack

Sanna/ October 5, 2016/ Conference, Security

Social Engineering is an accepted Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) and is going to stay according to Dominique C. Brack of the Reputelligence, Social Engineering Engagement Framework (SEEF). Most of the high-value hacking attacks include components of social engineering. Understanding the behind the scene methods and approaches of social engineering will help you make the world a safer place. Or make your attack plans more successful! Social Engineering is a topic that does not really fit into technical hacking and is also underestimated by security professionals. There are no tools or hardware you can buy to prevent Social Engineering attacks. But Social Engineering is an APT to be taken seriously, because most attacks consist partly of it and its attack execution and prevention needs training and skills. Social Engineering has progressed and professionalized more than you think. It is disastrously effective.

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