DeepSec 2020 Talk: “I Told You So!” – Musings About A Blameless Security Culture – Tim Berghoff, Hauke Gierow

Sanna/ October 29, 2020/ Conference

The concept of a blameless culture is familiar to agile software development teams the world over. Going blameless has lots of merits, yet in many organizations and management teams true blamelessness is far from being the norm. This is especially true for the security sector, where the thinking is perhaps even more linear than elsewhere in an organization. This way of thinking is not necessarily bad, but not always helpful. On the other hand, sugarcoating any shortcoming will not help things along either. In truth, the security industry is still facing a lot of work when it comes to dealing with people. This talk will address and explore some of the fundamental problems of corporate security culture and why it keeps companies from moving forward. We asked Tim and Hauke a few more questions

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: No IT Security Without Free Software – Max Mehl

Sanna/ October 28, 2020/ Conference

IT security is one of the most challenging global issues of recent years. But apart from the establishment of countless “cyber security” authorities, politics doesn’t seem to come up with something substantial. However, Free Software can be the solution to many pressing security problems. In this session, we will look at pros and cons and use concrete examples to illustrate why security and openness are not contradictory. For security professionals, the growing complexity of today’s digital world is no big surprise. But decision-makers are often overwhelmed by these new challenges and the uncertainties they entail. As a result, many fall for cheap selling arguments for black-boxed solutions and lose sight of a general strategy. We don’t know the exact security threats in five or ten years, but it is obvious that nobody can face

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DeepSec2020 Talk: Pivoting – As an Attack Weapon – Filipi Pires

Sanna/ October 27, 2020/ Conference

Demonstrating an exploit in a container environment (three dockers) across three different networks, I will demonstrate different pivot, vulnerability exploit, and privilege escalation techniques on all machines using Alpine linux, Gogs app, and other Linux platforms using Pentest methodologies such as recon, enumeration, exploitation, post exploitation. By the end of this presentation everyone will be able to see different ways that exist in working with a single form of pivot and how to overcome different obstacles in different networks within this “new” environment called Docker. We asked Filipi a few more questions about his talk. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. During this presentation, we are looking at some important facts such as: Observability in different environment, vulnerability exploit, use of privilege escalation techniques, some misconfigurations or maybe no good

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: The Great Hotel Hack: Adventures In Attacking The Hospitality Industry – Etizaz Mohsin

Sanna/ October 23, 2020/ Conference

Have you ever wondered if your presence might be exposed to an unknown entity even when you are promised full security and discretion at a hotel? Well, it would be scary to know that the hospitality industry is a prime target nowadays for cyber threats as hotels offer many opportunities for hackers and other cybercriminals to target them and therefore resulting in data breaches. Not just important credit card details are a prime reason, but also an overload of guest data, including emails, passport details, home addresses and more. Marriot International where 500 million guests’ private information was compromised is one of the best examples. Besides data compromise, surgical strikes have been conducted by threat actors against targeting guests at luxury hotels in Asia and the United States. The advanced persistent threat campaign called

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DeepSec2020 Talk: Faulting Hardware from Software – Daniel Gruss

Sanna/ October 22, 2020/ Conference

Fault attacks induce incorrect behavior into a system, enabling the compromise of the entire system and the disclosure of confidential data. Traditionally, fault attacks required hardware equipment and local access. In the past five years multiple fault attacks have been discovered that do not require local access, as they can be mounted from software. We will discuss the Rowhammer attack and how it can subvert a system. We then show that a new primitive, Plundervolt, can similarly lead to a system compromise and information disclosure. We asked Daniel a few more questions about his talk. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. Software-based fault attacks, like Rowhammer, enables unprivileged attackers to manipulate hardware Hardware flaws can lead to privilege escalation and a full system compromise Plundervolt is another fault attack we

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DeepSec2020 talk: Ransomware: Trends, Analysis and Solutions – Josh Pyorre

Sanna/ October 9, 2020/ Conference

My talk on ransomware will be technical, but also tells the story of how it’s evolved, highlighting specific and interesting infections. I’ll walk through the history of ransomware, its relationship to cryptojacking, and the supporting software made up of malspam and exploit kits. We’ll also address the recent phase of ransomware data extortion. There will be demonstrations of current malware infections as well as unique methods and ideas for detection and hunting. We’ll end with multiple methods of prevention and mitigation, some using paid products, but with the focus primarily on opensource options. Since I work with approximately 15% of the internets DNS traffic in my job, I will be using some of that data to show statistics. Despite that, I’ve done my best to make sure this is not a talk about products from my company, and aim

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: Scaling A Bug Bounty Program – Catalin Curelaru

Sanna/ October 8, 2020/ Conference

Hacking, hackers and bug bounties are really getting constant headlines into the mainstream news. In the past few years we have seen an impressive growth in Bug Bounty Programs and at this point we really need to ask: Is a Bug Bounty Program a new layer to secure applications? Implementing a Bug Bounty Program can be challenging and requires some understanding of the nuances of how to make it successful or not. Actually, running a successful bug bounty program starts far before it is launched officially. What are the prerequisites and why can we consider a bug bounty program as a layer for your Application Security Program? How do you measure if you are successful or not and what are the KPIs? When are you ready to start such a program? Based on the

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: RedTeamOps – Mert Can Coskuner, Caglar Cakici

Sanna/ October 3, 2020/ Conference

Red team operations involve many skills, the operation requires a lot of monitoring, consolidating and caution. In order to perform red team operations faster and stealthier, without thinking about the infrastructure, every team has its’ own habits and standards. However, there is a problem with those habits and standards: There are tons of tools but no operation management, No aggregation between these tools, When OPSEC fails due to problems above or any other reason, it’s essential to possess the capability of maintaining robust infrastructure which can be recreated if discovered, and more importantly, without any issues upon deployment. In this talk, infrastructure challenges we face as a red teamer will be discussed. Along with challenges, a solution will be proposed based on DevOps practices such as: Design your infrastructure based on the standards and

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: Security of Home Automation Systems – A Status Quo Analysis For Austrian Households – Edith Huber, Albert Treytl

Sanna/ September 28, 2020/ Conference

Home Automation System (HAS) are a growing market, which is very diverse ranging  from consumer electronics like TVs, mobile phones and gaming consoles via WLAN connected sensors, power plugs or lightbulbs to building automation devices for HVAC systems or access solutions. Beside “classical” network technologies IoT technologies gain increasing spread and importance. This paper presents results of a representative survey analysing the security awareness and perception as well as susceptibility to cybercrime of HAS users in Austria. The aim of this survey is to investigate the spread of the device types, cybercrime attacks and security risks. These results are compared with technical vulnerabilities of such devices to identify relevant security risks and countermeasures. Additionally, a concept to protect sensor values directly in the analogue circuit is presented as an outlook to ongoing research. We asked Edith and Albert a few more questions about their talk.   Please tell us the top facts about your talk. The most common HAS are Smart TV, voice assistants and surveillance cameras, but many other applications are on the rise. Respondents of the survey say

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: Efficient Post-quantum Digital Signature – Maksim Iavich (DeepSec Scholar 2020)

Sanna/ September 25, 2020/ Conference

Active work is being done to create and develop quantum computers. Traditional digital signature systems, which are used in practice, are vulnerable to quantum computers attacks. The security of these systems is based on the problem of factoring large numbers and calculating discrete logarithms. Scientists are working on the development of alternatives to RSA, which are protected from attacks by quantum computer. One of the alternatives are hash based digital signature schemes. Merkle digital signature scheme is the very promising alternative to the classical digital signature schemes. It must be emphasized, that the scheme has efficiency problems and can not be used in practice. Major improvements of the scheme lead to security vulnerabilities. I will show that Merkle uses hash functions many times. I will offer the improved implementation of the hash function. I

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DeepSec2020 Talk: The Art Of The Breach – Robert Sell

Sanna/ September 16, 2020/ Conference

The Art of the Breach is designed to be a journey for anyone interested in physical security. Robert takes the audience on a trip from the public sidewalk outside a target organization all the way through to the executive filing cabinet in the President’s office. While many physical security talks focus strictly on the information security aspect of breaching, Robert will combine this with techniques used by first responders to enter a building. While social engineering and lock picking will be discussed, Robert will also outline the third option of forced entry. During this adventure, Robert discusses everything from successful reconnaissance to ensuring an easy exit afterwards. Robert spends time at each step to go over the various options for moving forward. Some of these options are easy and straightforward while others require preparations

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: Abusing Azure Active Directory: Who Would You Like To Be Today? – Dr. Nestori Syynimaa

Sanna/ September 14, 2020/ Conference

This will be one of the few online talks held at DeepSec. Dr. Nestori Syynimaa covers the wonderful world of Azure AD and third-party code. Azure AD is used by Microsoft Office 365 and over 2900 third-party apps. Although Azure AD is commonly regarded as secure, there are serious vulnerabilities regarding identity federation, pass-through authentication, and seamless single-sign-on. In this session, using AADInternals PowerShell module, I’ll demonstrate the exploitation of these vulnerabilities to create backdoors, impersonate users, and bypass MFA. The purpose of this session is to raise awareness of the importance of the principle of least privilege and the role of on-prem security to cloud security. We asked Dr. Nestori Syynimaa a few more questions about his talk. Please tell us the most important facts about your talk. Azure AD acts as an

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: Caught in the Middle with You: Examining the Implications of Adversary Midpoint Collection – Joe Slowik

Sanna/ September 9, 2020/ Conference

Information security typically focuses on endpoint exploitation and manipulation. Endpoints are where our tools reside (EDR, log sources, and similar artifacts), and where we are most comfortable operating as these are the systems we interact with on a daily basis. However, adversaries increasingly migrate attacks to cover “midpoint” techniques (DNS manipulation, router exploitation, and traffic shaping mechanisms) to circumvent both endpoint and network defenses. Such actions shift operations to either devices we are unfamiliar with – routers, VPN concentrators, and similar devices – or systems and services completely outside our control – ISP equipment and fundamental Internet functionality. Although media stories highlighting such attacks exist, most threat analysis provides little information on the implications of such attacks or defensive strategies to meet them. By analyzing revelations emerging from various NSA-related leaks, followed by consideration

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DeepSec 2020 Talk: EPP/EDR – Unhooking Their Protections – Daniel Feichter

Sanna/ September 4, 2020/ Conference

More and more we see in our penetration tests, that companies do not just rely on the traditional endpoint protection (EPP). Instead they began to add an additional EDR to the existing EPP or they use an EPP/EDR combination from different vendors like Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Endgame etc. Compared to EPP, an EDR is not designed for the prevention of malware, but for detection, response and hunting. EDR systems have a high process visibility at the endpoint. This makes it possible to conduct malware analysis based on the monitored behaviour. For that some EPP/EDR products under Windows rely on the technique API-Hooking. API-Hooking is a method to check executed code (via APIs) for malicious content by interception. For this purpose, the EPP/EDR software injects its own .dll into the address memory of a process. In

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DeepSec 2020 U21 Talk: Protecting Mobile Devices from Malware Attacks with a Python IDS – Kamila Babayeva, Sebastian Garcia

Sanna/ September 2, 2020/ Conference

[Editorial note: We are proud to publish the articles about the U21 presentation slot for young researchers. The U21 track is a tradition of DeepSec. We aim to support (young) talents and give them a place on the stage to present their ideas and to gain experience.] Technology poses a risk of cyber attacks to all of us, but mobile devices are more at risk because there are no good detection applications for phones, and because they are the target of many novel attacks. We still don’t have a good idea of what our phones are doing in the network. To be better protected, mobile devices need better detection solutions from our community. In this talk I will present the development of Slips, a Python-based, free software IDS using machine learning to detect attacks

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