Recently I changed my personal firewall software. I was using the default Windows7 Pro firewall, which is fine for basic stuff, but I found a deal on one of my favorite security suites, so I went ahead and sprung for it. One main befuddlement people have with additional firewall software is the amount of nagging it often does when it’s first installed. You open your email client – popup – “program X is trying to communicate on port Y would you like to allow this?” You click yes, and move on. You open your instant messaging client and again – popup – “program X is trying to communicate on port Y would you like to allow this?” This can be[…]
Enter Armitage. If you’re normally a windows/GUI person and aren’t comfortable with the command line (much less metasploit’s command line), you might want to look into Armitage. It uses xmlRPC to talk to metasploit and presents you with a nice pretty picture of your network and what you’ve compromised and allows you to launch metasploit plugins and attacks against the networks, as well as interface with meterpreter to pivot through compromised hosts. I have only scratched the surface of what Armitage can do in my own testing, but what I’ve seen so far has been excellent – especially for an initial release. Some folks will complain that this makes it too easy to “hack” into things, but I really think[…]
Recently I found myself playing red cell at Computer Sciences Corporation’s Cyber Defense Competition. By the time I heard about it, the competition was well underway, students were crying and vomiting all over the competition room (I exaggerate) and Meterpreter shells on every student network. I quickly ran into Tim Rosenberg from White Wolf Security and found some space at the red cell table for me and my Backtrack netbook. I spent the rest of the day harassing my former team from James Madison University, as well as 3 other school teams from the Virginia/D.C./Maryland area. Rarely as a pentester will you find a gig where the scope includes defacing websites with lolcats, chatting with employees through Nuclear RAT, and[…]
Cloud services are becoming ubiquitous, common, and more useful every day. What do I mean by cloud services? Google Apps, Dropbox, or basecamp are all cloud services. Many people (including me) use them to manage their productivity work flow. I’m a big fan of Dropbox to sync my to-do list (Things) and 1Password file between my office machine, my desktop at home, and my laptop. It just works. I also use MobileMe to take care of my calendar syncing. But, I’m careful about what I put in my calendar, or my to-do list. Those things can tell a great deal about information that should be kept confidential – who I’m having meetings with about what can give away who our[…]
Today is the day before thanksgiving in the U.S., otherwise known as the busiest travel day of the year. It is also the date of national opt-out day, an effort to raise awareness of the TSA’s use of “strip search scanners” and “enhanced pat-downs”. While I’m sure most folks would prefer not to be irradiated, seen naked, and/or groped, they will willingly do it because (a) they want to get to their destination with a minimum of hassle, and (b) everyone else is doing it. Robert Graham decided to address this topic and to do so he wanted to take some photos of his TSA checkpoint for his blog. Photography is, by the way, completely allowable under TSA regulations. Unfortunately,[…]
One of the most common vulnerabilities in web applications is known as HTML injection or cross-site scripting, and one of the simplest ways of showing such a problem exists involves loading a JavaScript alert dialog. Those who understand the ramifications of such an issue know that it creates the potential for far more malicious activity, but the alert box is an easy demonstration that the application can be automatically manipulated. Other vulnerability, though, may be more subtle and not as readily visualized. Take cross-site request forgery, for example. It’s easy to understand that there’s a problem when an application lets you manipulate the data of other users – the site should validate the account making requests before executing them. What[…]