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…
Why sanitize excessed equipment
My passion for cybersecurity centers on industrial controllers–PLCs, RTUs, and the other “field devices.” These devices are the interface between the integrator (e.g., HMI systems, historians, and databases) and the process (e.g., sensors and actuators). Researching this equipment can be costly because PLCs and RTUs cost thousands of dollars. Fortunately, I have an ally: surplus resellers that sell used equipment. I have been buying used equipment for a few years now. Equipment often arrives to me literally ripped from a factory floor or even a substation. Each controller…
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…
Bypassing Geo-locked BYOD Applications
In the wake of increasingly lenient BYOD policies within large corporations, there’s been a growing emphasis upon restricting access to business applications (and data) to specific geographic locations. Over the last 18 months more than a dozen start-ups in North America alone have sprung up seeking to offer novel security solutions in this space – essentially looking to provide mechanisms for locking application usage to a specific location or distance from an office, and ensuring that key data or functionality becomes inaccessible outside these prescribed zones. These “Geo-locking” technologies are…
InfoSec Europe 2013 – Security on Tap
It’s that time of the year again as Europe’s largest and most prestigious information security conference “Infosecurity Europe” gets ready to kick off next week at Earls Court, London, UK. This year’s 18th annual security gathering features over 350 exhibitors, but you won’t find IOActive on the floor of the conference center. Oh no, we’re pulling out all the stops and have picked a quieter and more exclusive location to conduct our business just around the corner….
Can GDB’s List Source Code Be Used for Evil Purposes?
One day while debugging an ELF executable with the GNU Debugger (GDB), I asked myself, “How does GDB know which file to read when you use the list command?” (For the uninformed, the list command prints a specified number of lines from a source code file -— ten lines is the default.) Source code filenames are contained in the metadata of an ELF executable (in the .debug_line section, to be exact). When you use the list command, GDB will open(), read(), and display the file contents if and only…
What Would MacGyver Do?
“The great thing about a map: it gets you in and out of places in a lot different ways.” – MacGyver When I was young I was a big fan of the American TV show, MacGyver. Every week I tuned in to see how MacGyver would build some truly incredible things with very basic and unexpected materials — even if some of his solutions were hard to believe. For example, in one episode MacGyver built a futuristic motorized heat-seeking gun using only a set of batteries, an electric mixer,…
Behind ADSL Lines: How to Bankrupt ISPs While Making Money
Disclaimer: No businesses or even the Internet were harmed while researching this post. We will explore how an attacker can control the Internet access of one or more ISPs or countries through ordinary routers and Internet modems. Cyber-attacks are hardly new in 2013. But what if an attack is both incredibly easy to construct and yet persistent enough to shut Internet services down for a few hours or even days? In this blog post we will talk about how easy it would be to enlist ordinary home Internet connections in…
IOAsis at RSA 2013
RSA has grown significantly in the 10 years I’ve been attending, and this year’s edition looks to be another great event. With many great talks and networking events, tradeshows can be a whirlwind of quick hellos, forgotten names, and aching feet. For years I would return home from RSA feeling as if I hadn’t sat down in a week and lamenting all the conversations I started but never had the chance to finish. So a few years ago during my annual pre-RSA Vitamin D-boosting trip to a warm beach an…
Do as I say, not as I do. RSA, Bit9 and others…
You thought you had everything nailed down. Perhaps you even bypassed the “best practice” (which would have driven you to compliance and your security to the gutter) and focused on protecting your assets by applying the right controls in a risk-focused manner. You had your processes, technologies, and logs all figured out. However, you still got “owned”. Do you know why? You are still a little naive. You placed your trust in big-name vendors. You listened to them, you were convinced by…