09 October 2017
~4 min
By saif
Authors: Etienne Stalmans, Saif El-Sherei What if we told you that there is a way to get command execution on MSWord without any Macros, or memory corruption?! Windows provides several methods for transferring data between applications. One method is to use the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol. The DDE protocol is a set of messages and guidelines. It sends messages between applications that share data and uses shared memory to…
29 July 2017
~15 min
By saif
This post is an accompaniment to the Defcon 25 talk given by Saif. One of the core topics of the talk was the release of a new technique GDI object abuse technique, name Palette Objects. Saif presented a previously unreleased Windows 7 SP1 x86 exploit involving the abuse of a newly discovered GDI object abuse technique. A complete white-paper on the topic was released and can be found here: Whitepaper Both…
06 April 2017
~8 min
By saif
Whilst on a Red Team assessment back in 2015, we were faced with a tough Data Leak Protection (DLP) and web content management gateway system called Forcepoint TRITON. One of the goals, besides gaining full access to the client, was to see if sensitive data could be exfiltrated from the internal network to attacker controlled servers. The first logical step was to analyse how this device functioned and identify any flaws. Forcepoint Triton, according…
03 January 2017
~28 min
By saif
Starting from the beginning with no experience whatsoever in kernel land let alone exploiting it, I was always intrigued and fascinated by reverse engineering and exploit development. The idea was simple: find a 1-day patch with an exploitable bug but with no proof of concept exploit currently available, in order to start my reverse engineering and exploit dev journey with.Now the bug discussed here was not my initial choice: I…
20 May 2016
~5 min
By saif
aka Exploiting MS16-032 via Excel DDE without macros. The modified exploit script and video are at the end. A while ago this cool PowerShell exploit for MS16-032 was released by FuzzySecurity. The vulnerability exploited was in the secondary login function, which had a race condition for a leaked elevated thread handle, we wont go into much details about the vulnerability here though. It is a really awesome vulnerability if you want to…
23 October 2015
~12 min
By saif
“Operating system facilities, such as the kernel and utility programs, are typically assumed to be reliable. In our recent experiments, we have been able to crash 25-33% of the utility programs on any version of UNIX that was tested.” [1] Those were the original words in one of the first fuzzing studies where Prof. Barton Miller was first to use the term ‘fuzzing’ One can see the importance of fuzzing…
13 July 2015
~4 min
By saif
Wireless: it’s everywhere these days and yet owning it never gets boring. As part of our annual SensePost hackathon, where we get time off projects and get to spend a week tinkering with tech and ideas, the team I was in, consisting of Dominic, Nathi and myself, decided on creating a wireless rifle de-authentication gun, which utilized a yagi antenna and a Raspberry Pi. The idea was simple: simulate some…