Our Blog
Poking Around in Android Memory
Taking inspiration from Vlad’s post I’ve been playing around with alternate means of viewing traffic/data generated by Android apps. The technique that has given me most joy is memory analysis. Each application on android is run in the Dalvik VM and is allocated it’s own heap space. Android being android, free and open, numerous ways of dumping the contents of the application heap exist. There’s even a method for it…
Client Side Fingerprinting in Prep for SE
On a recent engagement, we were tasked with trying to gain access to the network via a phishing attack (specifically phishing only). In preparation for the attack, I wanted to see what software they were running, to see if Vlad and I could target them in a more intelligent fashion. As this technique worked well, I thought this was a neat trick worth sharing. First off the approach was to…
Dangers of Custom ASP.NET HttpHandlers
ASP.NET HttpHandlers are interesting components of a .NET web application when performing security assessments, mainly due to the fact they are the most exposed part of the application processing client requests in HttpContext level and at the same time, not yet part of the official ASP.NET framework. As a result, data validation vulnerabilities in custom HttpHandlers can be exploited far easier than issues on the inner layer components. However, they…
Snoopy Release
We blogged a little while back about the Snoopy demonstration given at 44Con London. A similar talk was given at ZaCon in South Africa. Whilst we’ve been promising a release for a while now, we wanted to make sure all the components were functioning as expected and easy to use. After an army of hundreds had tested it (ok, just a few), you may now obtain a copy of Snoopy…
SensePost Hackathon 2012
Last month saw the inaugural SensePost hackathon happen in our new offices in Brooklyn, South Africa. It was the first time the entire company would be in the same room, let alone the same continent, together and away from the pressures of daily work constraints. The idea was simple: weeks before the date, we sent out emails to everyone in the company (not just the tech teams but everyone) to…
Brad the Nurse
Organising our yearly training event at Blackhat in Las Vegas is no mean feat. With well over two hundred students to prepare for, the size of Caesars Palace to contend with (last year, we, on average, walked 35 kilometers in distance just inside the hotel) and the manic environment, it’s a stressful environment. There are many Blackhat helpers running about, but none like Mr Brad ‘the Nurse’ Smith. Brad would…
Skype Passive IP Disclosure Vulnerability
When performing spear phishing attacks, the more information you have at your disposal, the better. One tactic we thought useful was this Skype security flaw disclosed in the early days of 2012 (discovered by one of the Skype engineers much earlier). For those who haven’t heard of it – this vulnerability allows an attacker to passively disclose victims external, as well as internal, IP addresses in a matter of seconds,…
T-Shirt Shell Competition
For our internal hackathon, we wanted to produce some shirts. We ran a competition to see who could produce a reverse shell invocation most worthy of inclusion on a shirt. Here are the submissions, which may be instructive or useful. But first; the winning t-shirt design goes to Vlad (-islav, baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more): Funny story; the printer left out the decimal points between the…
HTTPS via WinAPI
Hijacking SSL sessions initiated by the browser is a trivial task. The challenge comes when trying to intercept SSL traffic in applications such as Dropbox or Easynote. These apps create additional measures to verify certificates and their integrity, hence not very friendly to perform with Burp. One quick solution to the above problem is hiding one level above (or below :) the OSI layer. Live API monitoring // hooking can be…
CSIR Cyber Games
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) recently hosted the nation Cyber Games Challenge as part of Cyber Security Awareness month. The challenge pit teams of 4-5 members from different institutes against each other in a Capture the Flag style contest. In total there were seven teams, with two teams from Rhodes university, two from the University of Pretoria and three teams from the CSIR. The games were designed around an attack/defence…