Blog
Associating an identity with HTTP requests – a Burp extension
This is a tool that I have wanted to build for at least 5 years. Checking my archives, the earliest reference I can find is almost exactly 5 years ago, and I’ve been thinking about it for longer, I’m sure.
Finally it has made it out of my head, and into the real world!
Be free! Be free!
So, what does it do, and how does it do it?
The core idea for this tool comes from the realisation that, when reviewing how web applications work, it would help immensely to be able to know which user was actually making specific requests, rather than trying to just keep track of that information in your head (or not at all). Once you have an identity associated with a request, that enables more powerful analysis of the requests which have been made.
BootCamp Reloaded Infrastructure
Why Infrastructure Hacking Isn’t Dead
If you work in IT Security you may have heard people utter the phrase,
“Infrastructure hacking is dead!”
We hear this all the time but in all honesty, our everyday experience of working in the industry tells a completely different story.
With this in mind we’ve decided to factor out our “infrastructure related h@x0ry” from our Bootcamp Course and create a brand spanking new one, completely dedicated to all things ‘infrastructure’.
SenseCon 2014
What originally started as one of those “hey, wouldn’t this be cool?” ideas, has blossomed into a yearly event for us at SensePost. SenseCon is a time for all of us to descend on South Africa and spend a week, learning/hacking/tinkering/breaking/building, together and in person.
A few years ago we made the difficult, and sometimes painful, shift to enable remote working in preparation for the opening of our UK and Cape Town offices. Some of you probably think this is a no-brainer, but the benefit of being in the same room as your fellow hackers can’t be overlooked. Being able to call everyone over to view an epic hack, or to ask for a hand when stuck is something tools like Skype fail to provide. We’ve put a lot of time into getting the tech and processes in place to give us the “hackers in the same room” feel, but this needs to be backed with some IRL interaction too.
Combat Reloaded
The British Special Air Service (SAS) have a motto that’s rather fitting for their line of work – Who Dares Wins
To a degree, the same could be said for our newly updated Hacking by Numbers course, Combat. Penetration testing is sometimes more than following a checklist or going for the easy kill. A good penetration tester knows how to handle all thrown at them, be it a Joomla implementation, or *shudder* an OpenBSD box.
Channel 4 – Mobile Phone Experiment
This evening we were featured on Channel 4’s DataBaby segment (link to follow). Channel 4 bought several second hand mobile phones that had been “wiped” (or rather reset to factory default) from various shops. Our challenge was to recover enough data from these seemingly empty phones to identify the previous owners.
After a long night of mobile forensics analysis, we had recovered personal data from almost every phone we had been provided with. This information included:
Revisting XXE and abusing protocols
Recently a security researcher reported a bug in Facebook that could potentially allow Remote Code Execution (RCE). His writeup of the incident is available here if you are interested. The thing that caught my attention about his writeup was not the fact that he had pwned Facebook or earned $33,500 doing it, but the fact that he used OpenID to accomplish this. After having a quick look at the output from the PoC and rereading the vulnerability description I had a pretty good idea of how the vulnerability was triggered and decided to see if any other platforms were vulnerable.
January Get Fit Reversing Challenge
Aah, January, a month where resolutions usually flare out spectacularly before we get back to the couch in February. We’d like to help you along your way with a reverse engineering challenge put together by Siavosh as an introduction to reversing, and a bit of fun.
The Setup This simple reversing challenge should take 4-10+ hours to complete, depending on your previous experience. The goal was to create an interactive challenge that takes you through different areas of the reverse engineering process, such as file format reverse engineering, behavioural and disassembly analysis.
Goodbye to 2013, hello to 2014
With 2013 coming to a close, I thought it pertinent to look back at the year we’ve had and also forward to what’s promising to be an incredibly exciting 2014 for us.
2013 for SensePost, was a year of transition. With a new leadership structure in myself, Shane and Dominic, we had a chance to stamp our style and vision and also learn from Charl and Jaco. One of the first leadership choices was to expand our reach and open our first office in London, aptly in a borough called Hackney. Here, we grew our family and welcomed some amazing people into the plak. After a few short months, we had outgrown the office and needed to look for bigger premises, this time in another aptly named area: Whitechapel (think Jack the Ripper).
Botconf 2013
Botconf’13, the “First botnet fighting conference” took place in Nantes, France from 5-6 December 2013. Botconf aimed to bring together the anti-botnet community, including law enforcement, ISPs and researchers. To this end the conference was a huge success, especially since a lot of networking occurred over the lunch and tea breaks as well as the numerous social events organised by Botconf.
I was fortunate enough to attend as a speaker and to present a small part of my Masters research. The talk focused the use of Spatial Statistics to detect Fast-Flux botnet Command and Control (C2) domains based on the geographic location of the C2 servers. This research aimed to find novel techniques that would allow for accurate and lightweight classifiers to detect Fast-Flux domains. Using DNS query responses it was possible to identify Fast-Flux domains based on values such as the TTL, number of A records and different ASNs. In an attempt to increase the accuracy of this classifier, additional analysis was performed and it was observed that Fast-Flux domains tended to have numerous C2 servers widely dispersed geographically. Through the use of the statistical methods employed in plant and animal dispersion statistics, namely Moran’s I and Geary’s C, new classifiers were created. It was shown that these classifiers could detect Fast-Flux domains with up to a 97% accuracy, maintaining a False Positive rate of only 3.25% and a True Positive rate of 99%. Furthermore, it was shown that the use of these classifiers would not significantly impact current network performance and would not require changes to current network architecture.
Mobile Hacking on the West Coast
December sees SensePost presenting Hacking by Numbers: Mobile at BlackHat West Coast Trainings. This course was first presented at BlackHat Vegas 2013 and 44Con 2013, growing in popularity and content with each iteration. For more information continue reading below or visit https://blackhat.com/wc-13/training/Hacking-by-Numbers-Mobile.html.
The mobile environment has seen immense growth and has subsequently seen organisations racing to be the first to market with the next best app. The rapid increase in mobile popularity and the speed at which developers are forced to produce new applications has resulted in an ecosystem full of security vulnerabilities. As more organisations are moving from web applications to mobile applications, penetration testers are required to adapt their testing methodology to keep pace with the changing platforms. Mobile applications developers have been lulled into a false sense of security due to the belief that “the platform will take care of the security”. The Hacking by Numbers: Mobile course aims to help both penetration testers and mobile applications developers to find and understand common security vulnerabilities on a wide range of mobile platforms. The course teaches a mobile application security testing methodology that can easily be applied to mobile applications on Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.