Security News (109 Posts)

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How to reduce WEB 2.0 attack surface by going back to WEB 1.0, the dynamic way!

#110 - Posted on 14 October 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Security

The arrival of WEB 2.0 brought dynamic content through the use of technologies such as Java, Flash and PHP.
Consequently it also widen the attack surface. Websites became prettier, more interactive, easier to update and also easier to attack!

The need for further functionality was, as it is often the case, at the cost of security.

The four diagrams below illustrates the differences between a WEB 1.0 and a WEB 2.0 architecture as well as highlighting the increased attack surface.
In a typical WEB 1.0 architecture, besides the physical, human and network security considerations, protecting the data is dependant of the Operating System and the application security layers. Typically, the application security layer is restricted to the Web Server (i.e.: Apache) if no other services/applications are exposed to the Internet.



Diagram 1 - WEB 1.0 Typical Ar...

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SELKS 2.0 vs. Security Onion

#108 - Posted on 04 August 2015 - Author: SM - Category: IDS, Security

I have recently been testing SELKS v2.0 which is an open source Network Security Monitor (NSM) based on an ELK framework: Elasticsearch (search and analytics engine) Logstash (log normalisation) Kibana (visualisation). The NSM core engine is provided by the first "S" which stands for Suricata (Network IDS) and the last "S" which stands for Scirius (Management GUI for Suricata).
SELKS is provided as a live Linux distribution based on Debian 8 (Jessie) which is also installable.

SELKS V2.0 is a great improvement from SELKS V1.0, so much so that I now consider it a serious contender to Security Onion (SO) at...
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BlackHat Mobile Security Summit - London 2015

#107 - Posted on 28 June 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Conferences, Security

In June 2015 I attended the Blackhat Mobile Security Summit in London, a 2 days event filled with talks from various researchers and security professionals, there was a 3rd day in the form of a workshop for anyone attending the Interop London hosting event
Blackhat is historically a USA based event with its main conference taking place in Las Vegas every year, lately they started to host similar (but smaller) conferences around the world such as in Singapore and Amsterdam (which I blogged about last year here).

This London edition was definitely on the "smaller" side and this actually had a few advantages:

  • You could attend all the sessions as none were run in parallel
  • It was easier to mingle among fellow participants and speakers
  • There was less "walking"! :)

    • The quali...
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    Hackfu2015 Challenge 7 - Solution

    #106 - Posted on 12 May 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Challenges, Security

    This is part of my write up from the Hackfu 2015 Security Challenge.

    The third and last challenge I solved was surprisingly very easy, but there might have been more to it...

    The instructions given were:

  • An ELF Binary file: shipbinary
  • "Your mission is to analyse the executable binary and find a way to get it to run to its completion so that it ends up spitting out the access code for the ship's central server."

    • Below is how I solved that challenge:
    We first run the following command to see all the printable/ASCII strings from the binary.
    > strings shipbinary
    Below is an extract of the most interesting result from the above command.
    Enter Decryption Code:
    burnthelandandboilthesea
    Code Accepted.
    Establishing Connection to Planet Abaddon...
    out.txt
    123.123.123.1 -c 1 | tail -1| awk '{print $4}' | cut -d '/' -f 2     ...
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    Hackfu2015 Challenge 5 - Solution

    #105 - Posted on 12 May 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Challenges, Cryptography, Security

    This is part of my write up from the Hackfu 2015 Security Challenge..

    The second challenge I solved was in fact quite easy because I solved a similar one for the SANS Summer challenge in 2014 (where it took me much longer to solve the first time I came across this type of steganography!)

    The instructions given were:

  • An audio file to analyse
  • There is a hidden message in it, find it!

    • Below is how I solved that challenge:
  • Listening to the audio file only produces white noise.
  • Looking for strings added to the file does not produce anything.
  • Looking for hidden data using stenography extraction tool such as steghide does not produce anything either.

    • But, If you load the file in a windows software such as Sonic Visualizer, add a layer to show a Spectrogram ...
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    Hackfu Challenge 2015 - Solution for Challenge 1

    #104 - Posted on 11 May 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Challenges, Cryptography, Security

    MWR ran a Security Challenge last April, unfortunately I only found out about it 3 days before the dead line! I still managed to solve 3 out of the 7 challenges and really enjoyed them.

    The first challenge was especially interesting, as I like cryptography. This was a tough one!!!

    The instructions given were

  • You are invited to a game of Poker but must find the password
  • You find a note with written "Pocket RC4"
  • You find a deck of card ordered from Ace to King with the following "couple" suits: {Diamond, Club}, {Heart and Spade}. This mean AD, AC, 2D, 2C....KH, KS
  • You find a note with the following written on it: "WEMUSTFOLLOWTHEWHITERABBITANHXJRAAZEBYYOMNWPBKGZOGY"

    • That's pretty much it! Below is how I solve this challenge and cracked the code:

    I used information on PocketRC4 f...
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    One more update to the Security Onion Guide

    #103 - Posted on 11 May 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Guides, IDS, Misc, Security

    We have updated once more our Security Onion Installation Guide with a few tweaks regarding setting up BRO emails and SSH.
    There is also a new PDF version, using an updated template, available from the download section .

    ...
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    Updated Security Onion Guide

    #102 - Posted on 5 April 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Guides, IDS, Misc, Security

    Last week, Security Onion repository moved from Google Code to Github. We have now updated our Security Onion Installation Guide with the new links.
    Basically, replacing the base part of each link from the old reference
    "https://code.google.com/p/rest_of_the_link]"
    to
    "https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/rest_of_the_link]"

    If you are looking for "issues", not only do you need to replace the base reference as mentioned above, but you also need to remove the "detail?id=" at the end of the URL.
    For example:
    https://code.google.com/p/security-onion/issues/detail?id=488 (does not work )
    Becomes
    https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/security-onion/issues/48...
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    How to setup PIWIK to track visitors' downloads

    #101 - Posted on 28 March 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Guides, Security

    PIWIK is a an amazing Open-Source Web Analytics platform which is a good alternative to http://www.google.com/analytics/ as it provides full control to your data and more details (i.e.: full IP addresses).
    You have 3x hosting options:

  • Use their cloud service. (More info here)
  • Host it yourself online: at the back of your web server or on a different/dedicated server. (More info here)
  • Host it offline, and manually import your apache logs. (More info here )

    • The advantage of hosting it online is that you can use a php/javascript trackers within your web pages producing more information on your visitors (screen resolution, plugins, etc)
    It also allows you to do certain "tricks", such as tracking who downloads a specific image as ...
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    How to setup Security Onion on a home network with Splunk, email alerts and some basic tuning

    #100 - Posted on 23 March 2015 - Author: SM - Category: Guides, IDS, Security

    Entry Last updated on the 11th of May 2015
    a PDF version is also available to download here

    Security Onion (SO) is a great open source project created by Doug Burks.
    It is a Linux Distribution based on Ubuntu and bundled/configured with all the tools you need to get a powerful, and free, Network Security Monitoring system (NSM). It can be used to monitor your network traffic for suspicious activities and malware.

    This guide is aimed at people who quickly want to get started with SO with the following basic functionalities:
  • Getting an understanding of what Network and Server setup are required
  • Going through a basic SO installation
  • Getting basic understanding on how to tune Snort and remove false positives
  • Getting regular reports and speci
    • ...
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