PCI DSS and Security Breaches
Every time an organization suffers a security breach and cardholder data is compromised, people question the effectiveness of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Blaming PCI DSS for the handful of companies that are breached every year shows a lack of understanding of the standard’s role. Two major misconceptions are responsible for this. First, PCI DSS is a compliance standard. An organization can be compliant today and not tomorrow. It can be compliant when an assessment is taking place and noncompliant the minute the assessment is…
INTERNET-of-THREATS
At IOActive Labs, I have the privilege of being part of a great team with some of the world’s best hackers. I also have access to really cool research on different technologies that uncovers security problems affecting widely used hardware and software. This gives me a solid understanding of the state of security for many different software and hardware devices, not just opinions based on theories and real life experience. Currently, the term Internet-of-Things (IoT) is becoming a buzzword used in the media, announcements from hardware device manufacturers, etc….
The password is irrelevant too
In this follow up to a blog post on the Scalance-X200 series switches, we look at an authentication bypass vulnerability. It isn’t particularly complicated, but it does allow us to download configuration files, log files, and a firmware image. It can also be used to upload configuration and firmware images, which causes the device to reboot. The code can be found in IOActive Labs github repository. If an attacker has access to a configuration file with a known password, they can use this code to update the…
An Equity Investor’s Due Diligence
Information technology companies constitute the core of many investment portfolios nowadays. With so many new startups popping up and some highly visible IPO’s and acquisitions by public companies egging things on, many investors are clamoring for a piece of the action and looking for new ways to rapidly qualify or disqualify an investment ; particularly so when it comes to hottest of hot investment areas – information security companies. Over the years I’ve found myself working with a number of private equity investment firms – helping them to review the…
Scientifically Protecting Data
This is not “yet another Snapchat Pwnage blog post”, nor do I want to focus on discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of vulnerability disclosure. A vulnerability has been made public, and somebody has abused it by publishing 4.6 million records. Tough luck! Maybe the most interesting article in the whole Snapchat debacle was the one published at www.diyevil.com [1], which explains how data correlation can yield interesting results in targeted attacks. The question then becomes, “How can I protect against this?” Stored personal data is always vulnerable to attackers…
The password is irrelevant
This story begins with a few merry and good hearted tweets from S4x13. These tweets in fact: Notice the shared conviviality, and the jolly manner in which this discussion of vulnerabilities occurs. It is with this same lightness in my heart that I thought I would explore the mysterious world of the. So I waxed my moustache, rolled up my sleeves, and began to use the arcane powers of Quality Assurance. Ok, how would an attacker who…
Personal banking apps leak info through phone
For several years I have been reading about flaws in home banking apps, but I was skeptical. To be honest, when I started this research I was not expecting to find any significant results. The goal was to perform a black box and static analysis of worldwide mobile home banking apps. The research used iPhone/iPad devices to test a total of 40 home banking apps from the top 60 most influential banks in the world.
Practical and cheap cyberwar (cyber-warfare): Part II
Disclaimer: I did not perform any illegal attacks on the mentioned websites in order to get the information I present here. No vulnerability was exploited on the websites, and they are not known to be vulnerable. Given that we live in an age of information leakage where government surveillance and espionage abound, I decided in this second part to focus on a simple technique for information gathering on human targets. If an attacker is targeting a specific country, members of the military and defense contractors would make good human…
A Short Tale About executable_stack in elf_read_implies_exec() in the Linux Kernel
This is a short and basic analysis I did when I was uncertain about code execution in the data memory segment. Later on, I describe what’s happening in the kernel side as well as what seems to be a small logic bug. I’m not a kernel hacker/developer/ninja; I’m just a Linux user trying to figure out the reason of this behavior by looking in key places such as the ELF loader and other related functions. So, if you see any mistakes or you realize that I approached this in a…
heapLib 2.0
Hi everyone, as promised I’m releasing my code for heapLib2. For those of you not familiar, I introduced methods to perform predictable and controllable allocations/deallocations of strings in IE9-IE11 using JavaScript and the DOM. Much of this work is based on Alex Sotirov’s research from quite a few years ago (http://www.phreedom.org/research/heap-feng-shui/). The zip file contains: heapLib2.js => The JavaScript library that needs to be imported to use heapLib2 heapLib2_test.html => Example usage of some of the functionality that is available in heapLib2 html_spray.py => A Python script to…