INSIGHTS | October 22, 2013

NCSAM – Lucas Apa explains the effects of games cheating, 3D modeling, and psychedelic trance music on IT security

By Lucas Apa

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 of hacking groups, material, and magazines. Many of the hacking techniques that still prevail today started in the early century. At that time I lacked good programming skills and an Internet connection in my homeland, Argentina. I got interested in packers and solved many crackmes because I wondered how commercial games built anti-cracking protections. At that time pirated games were heavily distributed in my country. Having some experience with debuggers allowed me to quickly learn the foundations of programming languages. Many years of self-education and a soon to finish computer engineering degree finally gave me sufficient insight to comprehend how modern software works.

When I was a teenager, I also had the opportunity to explore other areas related to computers, such as 3D modeling (animated short films) and producing psychedelic trance music. All these artistic and creative expressions help me appraise and seize an opportunity, especially when seeing how a new exploitation technique works or providing a new innovative solution or approach to a problem.

There was a moment that I realized the serious effort and true thirst I needed to achieve what could be impossible for other people. The security industry is highly competitive, and it sometimes requires extreme skills to provide a comprehensive response or a novel methodology for doing things. The battle between offensive and defensive security has always been entertaining, pushing the barrier of imagination and creativity every time. This awakens true passion in the people who like being part of this game. Every position is important, and the most interesting part is that both sides are convinced that their decisions are right and accurate.

I like to research everything that could be used to play a better offense in real-world scenarios. Learning about technologies and discovering how to break them is something I do for a living. Defensive security has become stronger in some areas and requires more sophisticated techniques to reliably and precisely defeat. Today, hacking skills in general are more difficult to master because of the vast amount of information that is available out there. Great research demands a conceptual vision and being reckless when facing past experiences that show that something is not achievable. My technical interests involve discovering vulnerabilities, writing exploits, and playing offensive in CTF’s; something close to being inside the quicksand but behind defensive lines. This is one of my favourite feelings, and why I choose to work on security everyday.

My first advice to someone who would like to become a pen tester or researcher is to always maintain patience, dedication, and effort. This is a very satisfying career, but requires a deep and constant learning phase. Having a degree in Computer Science/Engineering will help you get a general overview of how the technology world works, but much of the knowledge and abilities can only be learned and mastered with personal intensive training. Technology changes every year, and future systems could be much different than today’s. The key is to not focus too much on one thing without tasting other fields inside the security world. Fortunately, they can be combined since in this career all the subjects have the same goal. Learn to appreciate other investigative works, blog posts, and publications; every detail is sometimes a result of months or weeks worth of work. Information is relatively available to everyone, you just need to dive in and start your journey with the topics you like most.

INSIGHTS | October 21, 2013

NCSAM – Eireann Leverett on why magic is crucial

By Eireann Leverett & Craig Brophy

Late last week I had the pleasure of interviewing IOActive Labs CTO – Cesar Cerrudo on how he got into IT security. Today I am fortunate enough to have the pleasure of interviewing Eireann Leverett, a senior researcher for IOActive on this field and how magic played a part.

IOActive: How did you get into security?

Eireann: Actually, I was very slow to get security as an official title for a job, it was only really in the last few years. However, I always knew that’s how my mind was bent.

For example, everything I know about software security I learned from card tricks at 14. I know it seems ridiculous, but it’s true. Predicting session id’s from bad PRNGs is just like shuffle-tracking and card counting. Losing a card in the deck and finding it again is like controlling a pointer. If you understand the difference between a riffle shuffle and an overhand shuffle you understand list manipulation.

Privilege escalation is not unlike using peeks and forces in mentalism to corrupt assumptions about state. Cards led me to light maths and light crypto and zero-knowledge proofs.

From there I studied formally in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering in Edinburgh. The latter part took me into 5+ years Quality Assurance and Automated Testing, which I still believe is a very important place to breed security professionalism.

After that I did my Master’s at Cambridge and accepted a great offer from IOActive mixing research and penetration testing. Enough practicality so I’m not irrelevant to real world application, and enough theory & time to look out to the horizon.

IOActive: What do you find most exciting about security?

Eireann: The diversity of subjects. I will never know it all, and I love that it continually evolves. It is exciting to pit yourself against the designs of others, and work against malicious and deceptive people.

There are not many jobs in life where you get to pretend to be a bad guy. Deceptionists are not usually well regarded by society. However, in this industry having the mindset is very much rewarded.

There’s a quote from Houdini I once shared with our President and Founder, and we smile about it often. The quote is:

“Magic is the right way to do wrong.”

That’s what being an IOActive pirate is: the right way to do wrong. We make invisible badness visible, and explain it to those who need to understand business and process instead of worrying about the detail of the technology.

IOActive: What do you like to research, and why?

Eireann: Anything with a physical consequence. I don’t want to work in banking protecting other people’s money. My blood gets flowing when there are valves to open, current flowing, or bay doors to shut. In this sense, I’m kind of a redneck engineer.

There’s a more academic side to me as well though and my research passions. I like incident response and global co-operation. I took something Team Cymru & Dragon Research said to heart:

“Security is more about protecting your neighbours.”

If you don’t understand that your company can be compromised by the poor security of your support connections you’ve missed the point. That’s why we have dynamic information sharing and great projects like openIOC, BGPranking, honeynets, and organisations like FIRST. It doesn’t do you any good to secure only yourself. We must share to win, as a global society.

IOActive: What advice would you give to someone who would like to become a pentester/researcher?

Eireann: Curiosity and autodidacticism is the only way.

The root to hacking is understanding. To hack is to understand something better than it understands itself, and then nudge it to alter outputs. You won’t understand anything you listen to other people tell you about. So go do things, either on your own, or in formal education. Ultimately it doesn’t matter as long as you learn and understand, and can articulate what you learned to others.

INSIGHTS | October 18, 2013

NCSAM – an Interview with Cesar Cerrudo

By Cesar Cerrudo & Craig Brophy

Today we continue our support for National Cyber Security Awareness Month, by interviewing Cesar Cerrudo, Chief Technology Officer for IOActive Labs. Cesar provides us with some insight of how he got into IT security and why it’s important to be persistent!

IOActive: How did you get into security?

Cesar: I think my first hacks were when I was 10 years old or so. I modified BASIC code on CZ Spectrum games and also cheated games by loading different parts of the code from a cassette (yes not floppy disk at that time and loading games from a cassette took around 5-10mins and if something went wrong you have to try again, I don’t miss that at all ), but after that I was mostly away from computers until I was 19 years old and went to college.

I was always interested on learning to hack but didn’t have enough resources or access to a PC. So while I was at college I started to read books, articles, etc. – anything I could get my hands on. I used to play (and sometimes break) a friend’s PC (hi Flaco ) once in a while when I had the opportunity. I remember learning Assembly language just from reading books and looking at virus code printed in papers. Finding that virus code and learning from it was amazing (not having a PC wasn’t a problem; a PC is just a tool).

Later on, with some internet access (an hour or so a week), it became easier since lots of information became available and I got access to a PC; so I started to try the things I read about and started to build my own tools, etc.

When you’re learning and reading, one topic takes you to another topic and so on, but I focused on things that I was more familiar with – like web apps, database servers, Microsoft Windows, etc.

Luckily in Argentina it wasn’t illegal to hack at that time so I could try things in real life and production systems . A long time ago, I remember walking to the office of the CEO of my local ISP provider handing him hundred thousands of users, passwords and credit card information and telling him that their servers where hackable and that I hacked them. I know this sounds crazy but I was young and in the end they thank me, and I helped them identify and fix the vulnerabilities. I asked for a job but no luck, don’t know why .

I also did other crazy hacks when I was young but better to not talk about that , nothing criminal. I used to report the vulnerabilities but most admins didn’t like it. I recommend not engaging in anything illegal, as nowadays you can easily end up in jail if you try to hack a system. Today it is simpler to build a lab and play safely at home.

Luckily those crazy times ended and soon I started to find vulnerabilities in known and widely used software such as SQL Server, Oracle, Windows, etc., I was then also able to create some new attack and exploitation techniques, etc.

IOActive: What do you find most exciting about security?

Cesar: Learning new things, challenges, solving difficult problems, etc. You get to deeply study how some technologies work and can identify security problems on software/hardware massively used worldwide that sometimes have big impact on everyone’s lives since everything has become digital nowadays.

IOActive: What do you like to research, and why?

Cesar: This is related to previous answers, but I like challenges, learning and hacking stuff.

IOActive: What advice would you give to someone who would like to become a pentester/researcher?

Cesar: My advice would be if you are interested in or like hacking, nothing can stop you. Everything is out there to learn. You just need to try hard and put in a lot of effort without ever giving up. Nothing is impossible it’s just matter of effort and persistence.

INSIGHTS | October 16, 2013

A trip down cyber memory lane, or from C64 to #FF0000 teaming

By Ian Amit

So, it’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and here at IOActive we have been lining up some great content for you. Before we get to that, I was asked to put in a short post with some background on how I got to info sec, and what has been keeping me here for almost 20 years now.

Brace yourselves for a trip down memory lane then :-). For me getting into security didn’t start with a particular event or decision. I’ve always been intrigued by how things worked, and I used to take things apart, and sometimes also put them back together. Playing with Meccano, Lego, assorted electrical contraptions, radios, etc. Things got a bit more serious when I was about 6 or 7 when somehow I managed to convince my parents to get me one of those newfangled computers. It was a Commodore 64 (we were late adopters at the Amit residence), but the upside is I had a real floppy drive rather than a tape cassette 😉

That has been my introduction to programming (and hacking). After going through all the available literature I could get my hands on in Hebrew, I switched over to the English one (having to learn the language as I went along), and did a lot of basic programming (yes, BASIC programming). That’s also when I started to deal with basic software protection mechanisms.

Things got more real later on in my PC days, when I was getting back to programming after a long hiatus, and I managed to pick this small project called Linux and tried to get it working on my PC. Later I realized that familiarity with kernel module development and debugging was worth something in the real world in the form of security.

Ever since then, I find myself in a constant learning curve, always running into new technologies and new areas of interest that tangent information security. It’s what has been keeping my ADD satisfied, as I ventured into risk, international law, finances, economic research, psychology, hardware, physical security and other areas that I’m probably forgetting in the edits to this post (have I mentioned ADD?).

I find it hard to define “what I like to research” as my interest range keeps expanding and venturing into different areas. Once it was a deep dive into Voice over IP and how it can be abused to exfiltrate data, another time it was exploring the business side of cyber-crime and how things worked there from an “economy” perspective, other times it was purely defense based when I was trying to switch seats and was dealing with a large customer who needed to up their defenses properly. It even got weird at some point where I was dealing with the legal international implications of conflict in the 5th domain when working with NATO on some new advisories and guidance (law is FUN, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!).

I guess that for me it’s the mixture of technical and non-technical elements and how these apply in the real world… It kind of goes back to my alma-mater (The Interdisciplinary Center) where I had a chance to hone some of these research skills.

As for advice on to how to become a pentester / researcher / practitioner of information security? Well, that’s a tough one. I’d say that you would need to have the basics, which for me has always been an academic degree. Any kind of degree. I know that a lot of people feel they are not “learning” anything new in the university because they already mastered Ruby, Python, C++ or whatever. That’s not the point. For me the academia gave tools rather than actual material (yes, I also breezed through the programming portions of college). But that wouldn’t be enough. You’d need something more than just skills to stay in the industry. A keen eye for details, an inquisitive mind, at times I’d call it cunning, to explore things that are out of boundaries. And sometimes a bit of moxie (Chutzpa as it’s called in Hebrew) to try things that you aren’t completely allowed to. But safely of course 😉

Hope this makes sense, and maybe sheds some light on what got me here, and what keeps driving me ahead. Have a safe and enjoyable “Cyber” month! 🙂

INSIGHTS | October 15, 2013

IOActive supports National Cyber Security Awareness Month

By Craig Brophy

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 10^th anniversary of NCSAM looks ahead at the cyber security challenges for the next ten years. So, over the next few days and weeks we will be publishing some short blog posts from our researchers and consultants to show our support for this good cause.

The first round of posts – given that this week is slated to highlight the ‘cyber workforce and the next generation of cyber leaders’ – will be from our international research team giving insight into how they got into the world of cyber security. From getting their first computers, their studies through to what they enjoy most about security and why.

If anything, we hope these posts will help encourage our young generation to pick up their pens and their computers and explore the realm of cyber security.

So keep an eye out for these posts over the coming days. And if you have any questions or comments relating to the blog posts, please feel free to let us know. We welcome the discussion.