IOActive supports National Cyber Security Awareness Month
The month of October has officially been deemed National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). Ten years ago the US Department of Homeland Security and the National Cyber Security Alliance got together and began this commendable online security awareness initiative. Why? Well, according to the Department of Homeland Security the NCSAM is seen as an opportunity to engage with businesses and the general public to create a ‘safe, secure and resilient cyber environment.’ This is something that resonates with the team here at IOActive. The 10th anniversary…
Seeing red – recap of SecurityZone, DerbyCon, and red teaming goodness
I was fortunate enough to have a chance to participate in a couple of conferences that I consider close to my heart in the past couple of weeks. First – SecurityZone in beautiful Cali ,Colombia. This is the third year that SecurityZone has been running, and is slowly making its way into the latin american security scene. This year I delivered the keynote on the first day, and albeit being a bit harsh on the whole “let’s buy stuff so we can think we are secure” approach, it…
Vulnerability bureaucracy: Unchanged after 12 years
One of my tasks at IOActive Labs is to deal with vulnerabilities; report them, try to get them fixed, publish advisories, etc. This isn’t new to me. I started to report vulnerabilities something like 12 years ago and over that time I have reported hundreds of vulnerabilities – many of them found by me and by other people too. Since the early 2000’s I have encountered several problems when reporting vulnerabilities: Vendor not responding Vendor responding aggressively Vendor responding but choosing not to fix the vulnerability Vendor releasing flawed patches…
Emulating binaries to discover vulnerabilities in industrial devices
Emulating an industrial device in a controlled environment is a really helpful security tool. You can gain a better knowledge of how it works, identify potential attack vectors, and verify the vulnerabilities you discovered using static methods. This post provides step-by-step instructions on how to emulate an industrial router with publicly available firmware. This is a pretty common case, so you should be able to apply this methodology to other scenarios. The target is the Waveline family of industrial routers from the German automation vendor Weidmüller. The firmware…
IE heaps at Nordic Security Conference
Remember when I used to be the Windows Heap guy? Yeah, me neither ;). I just wanted to give everyone a heads up regarding my upcoming presentation “An Examination of String Allocations: IE-9 Edition” at Nordic Security Conference (www.nsc.is). The presentation title is a bit vague so I figured I would give a quick overview. First, I’ll briefly discuss the foundational knowledge regarding heap based memory allocations using JavaScript strings in IE-6 and IE-7. These technics to manipulate the heap are well documented and have been known for…
FDA Medical Device Guidance
Last week the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally released a couple of important documents. The first being their guidance on using radio frequency wireless technology in medical devices (replacing a draft from January 3,2007), and a second being their new (draft) guidance on premarket submission for management of cybersecurity in medical devices. The wireless technology guidance document seeks to address many of the risks and vulnerabilities that have been disclosed in medical devices (embedded or otherwise) in recent years – in particular those with embedded RF wireless functionality…
Car Hacking: The Content
Hi Everyone, As promised, Charlie and I are releasing all of our tools and data, along with our white paper. We hope that these items will help others get involved in automotive security research. The paper is pretty refined but the tools are a snapshot of what we had. There are probably some things that are deprecated or do not work, but things like ECOMCat and ecomcat_api should really be all you need to start with your projects. Thanks again for all the support! Content: http://illmatics.com/content.zip Paper:
Las Vegas 2013
Again, that time of the year is approaching; thousands of people from the security community are preparing to head to Las Vegas for the most important hacking events: Black Hat USA and DefCon. IOActive will (as we do every year) have an important presence at these conferences. We have some great researchers from our team presenting at Black Hat USA and DefCon. At Black Hat USA, Barnaby Jack will be presenting “Implantable medical devices: hacking humans”, and Lucas Apa and Carlos Mario Panagos will be presenting “Compromising industrial…
DefCon 21 Preview
Hi Internet! You may have heard that Charlie Miller (@0xcharlie) and I (@nudehaberdasher) will present a car hacking presentation at DefCon 21 on Friday, August 2 at 10:00am. “Adventures in Automotive Networks and Control Units” (Track 3) (https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-21/dc-21-schedule.html) I wanted to put up a blog explaining what exactly we’ll be talking about in a bit more detail than was provided in the abstract. Our abstract was purposefully vague because we weren’t really sure what we were going to release at the time of submission, but obviously have…
2013 ISS Conference, Prague
I had the opportunity to attend the 2013 ISS conference in Prague a few weeks ago. The conference is a place where company representatives and law enforcement (and other government agency) officials can meet to share ideas and products information (such as appliances). Even though I had a sore throat, I still found it quite interesting; although not necessarily in terms of the products and presentations – which I felt was overall a bit flat. It was easy to differentiate between company representatives and government officials. Government officials wore yellow…