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…
Change of guard at Infineon
We have come across samples of the über-secure & über-hyped SLE78/97. It would appear new engineers are at the core of these design series. It’s a shame they have sacrificed physical security replacing it with over-hyped so called “secure core” designs. This whole scenario makes an person miss the good old trustable SLE66P.
Practical and cheap cyberwar (cyber-warfare): Part I
Every day we hear about a new vulnerability or a new attack technique, but most of the time it’s difficult to imagine the real impact. The current emphasis on cyberwar (cyber-warfare if you prefer) leads to myths and nonsense being discussed. I wanted to show real life examples of large scale attacks with big impacts on critical infrastructure, people, companies, etc. The idea of this post is to raise awareness. I want to show how vulnerable some industrial, oil, and gas installations currently are and how easy it is…
Hacking a counterfeit money detector for fun and non-profit
In Spain we have a saying “Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa” which basically means there will always be a way to circumvent a restriction. In fact, that is pretty much what hacking is all about. It seems the idea of ‘counterfeiting’ appeared at the same time as legitimate money. The Wikipedia page for Counterfeit money is a fascinating read that helps explain its effects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money Nowadays every physical currency implements security measures to prevent counterfeiting. Some counterfeits can be detected with a naked eye,…
NCSAM – Lucas Apa explains the effects of games cheating, 3D modeling, and psychedelic trance music on IT security
I got involved with computers in 1994 when I was six years old. I played games for some years without even thinking about working in the security field. My first contact with the security field was when I started to create “trainers” to cheat on games by manipulating their memory. This led me to find many tutorials related to assembly and cracking in 2001, when my security research began. The thin line of legality at that time was blurred by actions not considered illegal. This allowed an explosion…