Five Reasons Why You Should Go To BruCON
BruCON is one of the most important security conferences in Europe. Held each October, the ‘Bru’ in ‘BruCON’ refers to Brussels, the capital of Belgium, where it all started. Nowadays, it’s held in the beautiful city of Ghent, just 55 mins from its origin. I had the chance to attend this year, and here are the five things that make it a great conference, in my opinion. You can check out BruCON’s promo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySmCRemtMc4. 1. The conference Great talks presented by international speakers; from deeply…
Is Stegomalware in Google Play a Real Threat?
For several decades, the science of steganography has been used to hide malicious code (useful in intrusions) or to create covert channels (useful in information leakage). Nowadays, steganography can be applied to almost any logical/physical medium (format files, images, audio, video, text, protocols, programming languages, file systems, BIOS, etc.). If the steganographic algorithms are well designed, the hidden information is really difficult to detect. Detecting hidden information, malicious or not, is so complex that the study of steganalytic algorithms (detection) has been growing. You can see the growth in scientific…
The iOS Get out of Jail Free Card
If you have ever been part of a Red Team engagement, you will be familiar with the “Get out of Jail Free Card”. In a nutshell, it’s a signed document giving you permission to perform the activity you were caught doing. In some instances, it’s the difference between walking away and spending the night in a jail cell. You may be saying, “Ok, but what does a Get out of Jail Free Card have to do with iOS applications?” Well, iOS mobile application assessments usually occur on jailbroken devices,…
The Beauty of Old-school Backdoors
Currently, voodoo advanced rootkit techniques exist for persistence after you’ve got a shell during a pen test. Moreover, there are some bugdoorsimplemented on purpose by vendors, but that’s a different story. Beautiful techniques and code are available these days, but, do you remember that subtle code you used to use to sneak through the door? Enjoy that nostalgia by sharing your favorite one(s) using the #oldschoolbackdoors on social networks. In this post, I present five Remote Administration Tools (RATs) a.k.a. backdoors that I personally used and admired. It’s important…
Money may grow on trees
Sometimes when buying something that costs $0.99 USD (99 cents) or $1.01 USD (one dollar and one cent), you may pay an even dollar. Either you or the cashier may not care about the remaining penny, and so one of you takes a small loss or profit. Rounding at the cash register is a common practice, just as it is in programming languages when dealing with very small or very large numbers. I will describe here how an attacker can make a profit when dealing with the rounding mechanisms…
Saving Polar Bears When Banner Grabbing
As most of us know, the Earth’s CO2 levels keep rising, which directly contributes to the melting of our pale blue dot’s icecaps. This is slowly but surely making it harder for our beloved polar bears to keep on living. So, it’s time for us information security professionals to help do our part. As we all know, every packet traveling over the Internet is processed by power hungry CPUs. By simply sending fewer packets, we can consume less electricity while still get our banner grabbing, and…
Black Hat and DEF CON: Hacks and Fun
The great annual experience of Black Hat and DEF CON starts in just a few days, and we here at IOActive have a lot to share. This year we have several groundbreaking hacking talks and fun activities that you won’t want to miss! For Fun Join IOActive for an evening of dancing Our very own DJ Alan Alvarez is back – coming all the way from Mallorca to turn the House of Blues RED. Because no one prefunks like IOActive. Wednesday, August 5th 6–9PM House of Blues Escape to the…
Differential Cryptanalysis for Dummies
Recently, I ventured into the crazy world of differential cryptanalysis purely to find out what the heck it was all about. In this post, I hope to reassure you that this strange and rather cool technique is not as scary as it seems. Hopefully, you’ll be attacking some ciphers of your own in no time! A differential cryptanalysis attack is a method of abusing pairs of plaintext and corresponding ciphertext to learn about the secret key that encrypted them, or, more precisely, to reduce the amount of time needed to…
Hacking Wireless Ghosts Vulnerable For Years
Is the risk associated to a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in an industrial plant the same when it affects the human life? When calculating risk, certain variables and metrics are combined into equations that are rendered as static numbers, so that risk remediation efforts can be prioritized. But such calculations sometimes ignore the environmental metrics and rely exclusively on exploitability and impact. The practice of scoring vulnerabilities without auditing the potential for collateral damage could underestimate a cyber attack that affects human safety in an industrial plant and leads to…
Vulnerability disclosure the good and the ugly
I can’t believe I continue to write about disclosure problems. More than a decade ago, I started disclosing vulnerabilities to vendors and working with them to develop fixes. Since then, I have reported hundreds of vulnerabilities. I often think I have seen everything, and yet, I continue to be surprised over and over again. I wrote a related blog post a year and a half ago (Vulnerability bureaucracy: Unchanged after 12 years), and I will continue to write about disclosure problems until it’s no longer needed. Everything is…