Hack-back in the Real World
Posted by scriptjunkie in Defense, Uncategorized on August 17, 2017
ProtonMail just recently (yet briefly) bragged about shutting down a phishing campaign that it was the target of by hacking back the phishing server… Earlier this year, a member of the US Congress (Rep. Tom Graves) proposed the “Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act (ACDC)” to amend US law to allow private entities, with mandatory reporting requirements to law enforcement, to conduct certain forms of hack-back… Following this proposal, discussion online exploded… My timeline was filled with “If people tried hack-back, this would happen!” but you don’t have to hypothesize. You can see what did happen in the myriad examples of hack-back in the real world. So below I assembled a list of publicly recorded hack-backs, with the results of each and reference to original sources.
Hoarder
Posted by scriptjunkie in Uncategorized on July 14, 2017
A few years ago, I gave a DerbyCon presentation on the Ambush open-source host intrusion prevention system I was working on, as well as evasion techniques you can use against systems like that, implemented in the hoarder project. Ambush was an interesting project in dynamic system-wide user-mode hooking which has since faded away a bit, […]
Supply Chainsaw: Practical software supply chain attacks for everyone
Posted by scriptjunkie in Uncategorized on April 27, 2017
I recently presented Supply Chainsaw: Practical software supply chain attacks for everyone at the OPCDE technical security conference in Dubai.
To summarize:
Goals
Posted by scriptjunkie in /dev/urandom on March 11, 2017
In any complex system, a solution that best meets one goal will fall short in other areas. Computer programs to solve nearly any problem in the fastest manner will not be the algorithms that use the least memory. Solutions that can be written in the least amount of time will neither be the fastest nor […]
Climate Change Archive
Posted by scriptjunkie in Uncategorized on January 24, 2017
For another short detour from information security… Climate policy is again in the news. The past year has seen record high temperatures, the election of a US President who claimed global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese (then later backed off), and the 10th anniversary of probably the most authoritative decision regarding climate […]
Just Too Much Administration – Breaking JEA, PowerShell’s New Security Barrier
Posted by scriptjunkie in Uncategorized on October 8, 2016
Update – 10/9 The PowerShell team has been very responsive in addressing these issues. The documentation should be updated soon (if not yet). Lee Holmes from the PowerShell team also addressed these issues in another DerbyCon presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDtUmue9mIw&feature=youtu.be&t=1766 tl;dr Just Enough Administration (JEA) is a new Windows 10/Server 2016 feature to create granular least privilege […]
Intercepting Passwords to Escalate Privileges on OS X
Posted by scriptjunkie in Uncategorized on September 17, 2016
A few weeks ago, a lot of attention was paid to Dropbox for “hacking” macs. Dropbox asked for your admin password when it was installed, then used that root access to enable privileges later even if you try to disable them. Despite the internet’s indignation and Dropbox’s impoliteness, Dropbox wasn’t exploiting any vulnerability or breaking […]
The Security Pretend Game – Sudo and Runas
Posted by scriptjunkie in Uncategorized on August 28, 2016
Common wisdom would have you believe when you run sudo that you are only granting root privileges to one command at one point in time. In reality, you are granting root privileges to any hacker who has ever run any code in any process at any previous time in your account and decided they wanted escalated privileges.
Use completely unprivileged accounts for day-to-day tasks, then log out and log in with a privileged, trusted account for privileged tasks; don’t use runas or sudo from your day-to-day account; it eliminates the security benefits of using the unprivileged account.
Control should always flow from a more privileged and more trusted environment to the less privileged, untrusted environment; going the other way, even when presenting credentials, only allows those credentials to be stolen and hackers to ride up to the higher privileges. This is not a new idea; it is why Microsoft’s #1 recommendation to secure privileged accounts from credential theft is to make it so you cannot log into a privileged account from an ordinary, untrusted workstation. But this principle frequently seems to be forgotten.
Defying Analysis With Sparse Malware
Posted by scriptjunkie in /dev/urandom on August 19, 2016
If you’re writing tools for red teaming or pentesting, the main point of your backdoors, or implants as people are starting to call them, is to enable remote control of a system without being detected. If that fails, and your backdoor is found, the next best option is to avoid analysis so any of your […]
Using a Fully Untrusted Cloud
Posted by scriptjunkie in Crypto, Defense on June 11, 2016
Cloud services can save a lot of time and money, but security is a frequent concern. You use the providers as a data store right now, but it is not simple to do so in a way that is available and flexible for live applications, keeps information confidential from the cloud provider and prevents the cloud provider from silently corrupting data to break your security model. The good news is that by layering existing technologies on top of each other, we can achieve those goals.
The basic idea is to use the untrusted system as a remote block storage device, then layer an encrypted mapped block device on top of that using LUKS to keep the cloud provider from seeing the data contents, then layer a filesystem that performs both metadata and data checksumming on top of that.