I’m fairly certain I unwittingly committed a serious crime. I went through airport security using someone else’s boarding pass, bearing a name that only resembled my own completely legitimate and self-representative government-issued ID in that our last names shared the same first letter. The TSA agent, you know the one, with the little hologram-checking flashlight, looked at my ID, my boarding pass, my ID again, me. I thought he seemed a tad skeptical, taking longer than necessary on a process he must step through about a million times a day. I will admit that passport photograph was taken when I was 16, and I can look a little like a fraud at 7 am after several nights of limited sleep.[…]
Author: Georgia Weidman
I got a chance to see the Metasploit Express beta in action last week at NoVa Hackers. I was planning on writing about my impressions, but there is plenty out there from people who have spent a good deal more time in front of the beta than I have. Instead, I’m going to delve into pertinent questions a company should ask itself to see if Metasploit Express fits into the security program. I am a fan of Core Impact, not only because they let me into their party at Blackhat Las Vegas last year. They make a good product. However, a common scenario I have seen in my experience as a security consultant is companies just purchasing flashy products without[…]
Sometimes I travel for work. Sometimes I travel for pleasure. Sometimes when I travel for pleasure I bring my work along so as to maximize the number of days a year I can spend traveling for pleasure. How about you? Recently I was on a plane, and it came to my attention that the computer screen directly in my line of sight had all the telltale signs of doing work. Was this passenger aware that I as well as several other passengers could see what had all the looks of stuff that should be shredded before heading to the dumpster? Translation: little ‘ole me who was bored with the onboard entertainment should not be able to see this information. The[…]
First off, I would like to commend Apache for their detailed, well written disclosures of security breaches. Some organizations take the esoteric route even within the organization, sometimes going so far as immediately reimaging machines that have potentially been compromised without performing any forensic analysis to see what attacks were successful and if any sensitive information was compromised. In the spirit of full disclosure, Apache not only goes through the steps of analyzing exactly what happened, but also shares this information with the public. Many companies, as well as vulnerability researchers, believe that Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are all benign; the worst that will possibly happen to your site is an alert window announcing “Georgia is l33t!” However part[…]
Probably one of the first things you find out when you transition from “This is fun. Let’s learn some stuff about ethical hacking,” to breaking into doing it professionally is that it’s imperative to keep track of everything. Clients are going to want a little more information than “Oh look I broke in! I’m so cool!” They are going to want an in-depth report (a whole new skill to learn). Thus keeping records of what you did as you do it becomes a vital part of the job. Additionally, whether working on a pentest, playing red at a cyber defense competition, or pretty much any other large project, chances are you will find yourself working on a team. In school[…]
So you think penetration testing might be a fun and valuable skill to pick up. You read some books on the subject and spend a good few evenings poring over the man pages of some common tools, what now? Chances are you set up a couple of unpatched or otherwise vulnerable machines and test out your skills. Next thing you know Metasploit has a system shell. Are you a pentester now? Chances are the experience left you somewhat unsatisfied; you did after all know the vulnerabilities ahead of time. To be a real pentester, you will have to start from scratch with little or no knowledge of the network at hand. So what now? No doubt there are plenty of[…]