Five Attributes of an Effective Corporate Red Team
After talking recently with colleagues at IOActive as well as some heads of industry-leading red teams, we wanted to share a list of attributes that we believe are key to any effective Red Team. [ NOTE: For debate about the relevant terminology, we suggest Daniel’s post titled The Difference Between Red, Blue, and Purple Teams. ] To be clear, we think there can be significant variance in how Red Teams are built and…
Red Team Testing: Debunking Myths and Setting Expectations
The term “cyber” seems to be overused in every corner of the information security industry. Now there is a new buzz phrase in computer security, “red team engagements.” Supposedly (to get “cyber” on you), you can have a red team test, and it will help move your organization in the correct “cyber direction.” But what is red team testing really? And what is it not? In this post I’ll try to make some sense of this potent term. The red team concept has been around for ages. It…
Tools of the Trade – Incident Response, Part 1: Log Analysis
There was a time when I imagined I was James Bond zip lining into a compromised environment, equipped with all kinds of top-secret tools. I would wave my hands over the boxes needing investigation, use my forensics glasses to extract all malware samples, and beam them over to Miss Moneypenny (or “Q” for APT concerns) for analysis. I would produce the report from my top-notch armpit laser printer in minutes. I was a hero. As wonderful as it sounds, this doesn’t ever happen in real life. Instead of sporting a…
Industrial Device Firmware Can Reveal FTP Treasures!
Security professionals are becoming more aware of backdoors, security bugs, certificates, and similar bugs within ICS device firmware. I want to highlight another bug that is common in the firmware for critical industrial devices: the remote access provided by some vendors between their devices and ftp servers for troubleshooting or testing. In many cases this remote access could allow an attacker to compromise the device itself, the company the device belongs to, or even the entire vendor organization. I discovered this vulnerability while tracking connectivity test functions within the firmware…
Spotting Fake Chips in the Supply Chain
In the information security world we tend to focus upon vulnerabilities that affect the application and network architecture layers of the enterprise and, every so often, some notable physical devices. Through various interrogatory methods we can typically uncover any vulnerabilities that may be present and, through discussion with the affected business units, derive a relative statement of risk to the business as a whole. An area of business rarely dissected from an information security perspective however is the supply chain. For manufacturing companies and industrial suppliers, nothing is more…
SQL Injection in the Wild
As attack vectors go, very few are as significant as obtaining the ability to insert bespoke code in to an application and have it automatically execute upon “inaccessible” backend systems. In the Web application arena, SQL Injection vulnerabilities are often the scariest threat that developers and system administrators come face to face with (albeit way too regularly). In fact the OWASP Top-10 list of Web threats lists SQL Injection in first place. More often than not, when security professionals…
Energy Security 2013: Less Say, More Do
Due to recent attacks on many forms of energy management technology ranging from supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks and automation hardware devices to smart meters and grid network management systems, companies in the energy industry are increasing significantly the amount they spend on security. However, I believe these organizations are still spending money in the wrong areas of security. Why? The illusion of security, driven by over-engineered and over-funded policy and control frameworks and the mindset that security must be regulated before making a start is preventing, not…
The Demise of Desktop Antivirus
Are you old enough to remember the demise of the ubiquitous CompuServe and AOL CD’s that used to be attached to every computer magazine you ever brought between the mid-80’s and mid-90’s? If you missed that annoying period of Internet history, maybe you’ll be able to watch the death of desktop antivirus instead. 65,000 AOL CD’s as art Just as dial-up subscription portals and proprietary “web browsers” represent a yester-year view of the Internet, desktop antivirus is similarly being confined…
Exploits, Curdled Milk and Nukes (Oh my!)
Throughout the second half of 2012 many security folks have been asking “how much is a zero-day vulnerability worth?” and it’s often been hard to believe the numbers that have been (and continue to be) thrown around. For the sake of clarity though, I do believe that it’s the wrong question… the correct question should be “how much do people pay for working exploits against zero-day vulnerabilities?” The answer in the majority of cases tends to be “it depends on who’s buying and what the vulnerability is” regardless of the…
The Future of Automated Malware Generation
This year I gave a series of presentations on “The Future of Automated Malware Generation”. This past week the presentation finished its final debut in Tokyo on the 10th anniversary of PacSec. Hopefully you were able to attend one of the following conferences where it was presented: IOAsis (Las Vegas, USA) SOURCE (Seattle, USA) EkoParty (Buenos Aires, Argentina) PacSec (Tokyo, Japan) The Future of Automated Malware Generation from
