0610, 2011

Of Web Apps, Smartphones and Data Leaks

René Pfeiffer/ October 6, 2011/ High Entropy

Just digging through the backlog of the past days. Someone shot me a quick link to a web site showing an administrative interface. I failed to see the significance right away, because the link was sent by chat with an URL obfuscator shortener. I know discovered the corresponding blog post to this issue. Coincidentally I was talking on the phone today about AnonAustria’s latest publications. Apparently they found the addresses of Austrian police staff online. The claim is that the data was sitting on a web server and could be downloaded simply by guessing links. Yesterday the Austrian Chamber of Commerce confirmed a data leak covering more than 6.000 data sets of customers (400 of them complete with bank accounting information). The data leak looks like a web server „glitch“, too. AnonAustria referred to

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0410, 2011

Talk: Ground BeEF – Cutting, devouring and digesting the legs off a Browser

René Pfeiffer/ October 4, 2011/ Conference

Web browsers have turned into industrial standard software. There’s no office, no company, no network, no client any more that does not use web browsers for at least one task. Any attacker can safely assume that browser software will be present in most target networks. Sadly browser security has not kept up with the spread of web browsing software. Browser security is still one of the trickiest challenges to afford nowadays. A lot of efforts has been spent on mitigating browser exploitation from heap and stack overflows, pointers dereference and other memory corruption bugs. On the other hand there is still an almost unexplored landscape. X-Frame-Options, X-XSS-Protection, Content Security Policy, DOM sandboxing are good starting points to mitigate the XSS plague, but they are still not widely implemented. An explorer willing to look for

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2309, 2011

Workshop: Web Hacking – Attacks, Exploits and Defence

René Pfeiffer/ September 23, 2011/ Conference

In 2011 we have seen a lot of articles about „cyber“ attacks in the media. Judging from the media echo it looks as if a lot of servers were suddenly compromised and exploited for intruding into networks. While attacks usually take advantage of weaknesses in software, servers do not develop vulnerabilities over night. Most are on-board by design, by accident or by a series of mistakes. The first line of defence are web applications. Every modern company has a web site or uses web portals. Attackers know this and look for suitable attack vectors. If you want to improve your security, you have to start right at this first line. This is why we recommend the workshop Web Hacking – Attacks, Exploits and Defence by Shreeraj Shah & Vimal Patel of Blueinfy Solutions. As

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1209, 2011

Workshop: The Art of Exploiting Injection Flaws

René Pfeiffer/ September 12, 2011/ Conference

If you have ever developed a web application you know that attackers try to exploit requests to the web server in order to inject commands sent to a database server. This attack is called SQL injection. It is done by modifying data sent through web forms or parameters that are part of a request to a web server. In theory web developers learn to avoid mistakes leading to SQL injection. In practice not every developer has the skill or the tools to prevent SQL injection due to lack of knowledge. Validating data can be hard if the data is badly defined or if the building blocks of the web application do not offer ways to normalise or sanitise data. Most developers might not even know if the frameworks they are using protects them or

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0707, 2011

SecInt: Radar for Anti-Security Movement

René Pfeiffer/ July 7, 2011/ High Entropy, Press, Security

We have been talking to some journalists in the past weeks. Most questions revolved around the rise in attacks against well-known web sites and their companies (or vice versa). Jeffrey Carr has published a good source for an overview of Anti-Security groups. If you are looking what to put on your radar, his article might be a good start. Security intelligence is gathering importance. Make sure that you don’t drown in tools or gadgets, and that you don’t neglect your strategic view. Quite a lot of people are confused by the many reports of incidents, „lulz“, „LOLs“, scanty slogans when it comes to motivations of attackers, damage reports, panic and media mind disruption (always remember: anonymous ≠ Anonymous). Currently we’re working on material to put the threats into perspective. It’s hard to distinguish the

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2804, 2011

Data Leaks Reviewed

René Pfeiffer/ April 28, 2011/ Internet, Security

Often single incidents don’t attract much attention, but the combination does. We’re getting used to lost laptops, USB sticks, CDs/DVDs/HDs and gadgets containing data. There’s even a project trying to keep track of data loss incidents world-wide, it’s called DataLossDB. Compromised web sites are also quite common. Only figures raise eyebrows, so this week’s favourite news item is Sony and the PS3 network. Someone created unauthorised backups of database tables containing (encrypted) credit card information, user names, passwords, birth dates and home addresses of PlayStation Network users. We still don’t know the nature of the security breach, however the impact is substantial both in terms of number of stolen records and very probably financial damage. There’s been not much talk about the passwords and their data format, but we all know that few people

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1409, 2010

Vacation 2.0 and its Disadvantages

René Pfeiffer/ September 14, 2010/ Security

Imagine you are the CEO of a small company. You have some days off. You relax, buy a newspaper and have a coffee. After browsing through the news and financial section you stumble upon a full-page advertising of your own company. The text reads: Dear world, our office is completely deserted. No one’s working at the moment. The rooms are completely unattended. No one will pick up the phone. Only the security guards will walk by and superficially check the door handles. Although the doors are tightly locked and the windows are (probably) closed, you can be sure that no one will enter the office space until INSERT_DATE. So if you want to try picking our locks and rearranging the furniture, feel free. You can take what you want. The coffee machine is plugged

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0107, 2010

Sneak Preview – Workshop about Advanced PHP Security

René Pfeiffer/ July 1, 2010/ Schedule

Our CfP ends on 31 July 2010, so we start publishing information about some of the submissions in advance. We got the confirmation from Laurent Oudot, founder of TEHTRI-Security, concerning the Advanced PHP Hacking training. The workshop will deal with breaking into PHP environments, methods of attackers once they are inside, defense against intruders and real hack simulations. This is a hands-on exercise guided by TEHTRI Security experts. Everyone running, developing or auditing PHP web applications should attend. Knowing how attacks work is the first step of avoiding them. When it comes to web applications, there is no silver bullet. You have to deal with the hosting environment, known about possible vulnerabilities, learn about the tools attackers use and then you can tune your defenses. Code analysis, filters, fuzzing, NIDS and hardening alone are

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2406, 2010

Native Code Protection and Security

René Pfeiffer/ June 24, 2010/ Development, Internet

The Mozilla vice president of products announced that Firefox doesn’t need to run native code anymore when it comes to plugins. The idea is called crash protection for it aims to keep the web browser alive when a plugin fails to run correctly. At the same time the magical words about the future being in the hands of (open) web standards and HTML5 are uttered. What does this imply in terms of security? Is there any benefit? The thought of having more reliable web browsers is certainly tempting. It is also true that overloading the browser with plugins increases the „angle of attack” to the point of stalling or most probably catching some malware floating around on the Web. The message seems to be that seperating vulnerable plugins from the browser doesn’t rule out

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