“Nein! Ein von unbeugsamen Galliern bevölkertes Dorf hört nicht auf, dem Eindringling Widerstand zu leisten.”
This is a famous quote pretty much every German kid used to know. Not sure if this still applies though, my three haven’t touched Asterix comics so far. Anyhow, you might ask why I cite this.
Simple answer: see this recent article from the Guardian on a Utah-based ISP “resisting some pressure”. That’s the spirit…
Have a great Sunday everybody,
Continue readingSome days ago a security advisory related to web application firewalls (WAFs) was published on Full Disclosure. Wendel Guglielmetti Henrique found another bug in the IBM Web Application Firewall which can be used to circumvent the WAF and execute typical web application attacks like SQL injection (click here for details). Wendel talked already (look here) at the Troopers Conference in 2009 about the different techniques to identify and bypass WAFs, so this kind of bypass methods are not quite new.
Continue readingOn Friday we released our latest technical newsletter with the fancy title “Sell Your Own Device – A Field Study on Decommissioning of Mobile Devices”. It is the result of a field study on decommissioned mobile business devices bought on eBay and about how stored data may be extracted in different ways.
As always we love to share plenty of practical advise: At the end of the newsletter you will find the mitigating controls to securely handle mobile devices at the end of their life cycle process.
Continue readingCurrently there’s quite some discussion ongoing why it took Apple so long to fix a severe vulnerability in the update process of iTunes. A severe vulnerability which could easily be exploited by means of an automated tool called evilgrade which can be downloaded here (Hi Francisco!). Just one small note here: did you know that evilgrade was first shown and released at the 2008 edition of Troopers? We had a number of initial releases of tools in the last years (like wafw00f at the 2009 edition and VASTO at the 2010 edition) and we will continue this fine tradition in 2012. I can already promise that some nice code is going to be released for the first time at Troopers12…
Continue readingOnce again there’s a reference to some action movie here, as some of you may have immediately spotted ;-).
For the record: this one is from “Snake Plissken”, the main protagonist in John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. There’s another well-known quote of the same character in the kind-of sequel “Escape from L.A.” which goes like: “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. I’m aware that this is not the initial source (but French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr presumably is, at the time in French ;-)); still this gives a nice transition to today’s topic.
Continue readingThis week I stayed some days in Zurich, to give a workshop and to meet both clients and fellow researchers (kudos again to C. for the awesome office tour @Google). In the course of one of those dinners somehow Troopers was mentioned and a guy asked: “I’ve heard of the conference. What’s so special about it?”
Funnily enough I didn’t even have to respond myself as a 2011 attendee coincidentally present at the table jumped in and started praising the event (“best con ever. great spirit, great talks”). Obviously this gave me a big grin… but it reminded as well me that some of you might ask themselves the very same question.
Continue readingAfter the basic iCloud discussion in this post, I would like to add some more technical information. The following items are just a loose compilation of facts about the mentioned controls which allow the restriction of iCloud usage. The basic iCloud usage, consisting of backup, document sync, and photo stream, can be deactivated using the most recent version of the iPhone Configuration Utility:
Since there are no default settings for these values, it is necessary to include the disabled entries in existing configuration profiles.
Continue reading… the corrupt DEA agent in Luc Besson’s great movie “Léon (The Professional)”. I’m sure quite some of you, dear readers, know the plot…
Just before the final shootout, when sending the first men of the NYPD ESU team into Léon’s apartment, he tells them to “Be careful!”. After learning those men got killed he just comments: “I told you”.
[btw: before yelling to bring “EEEEEEEVERYONE!!!!”, as those familiar with the piece will certainly remember ;-)].
A few days ago the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) published this quite interesting document with the exact title. Here’s what it covers:
“The booming smartphone industry has a special way of delivering software to end-users: appstores. Popular appstores have hundreds of thousands of apps for anything from online banking to mosquito repellent, and the most popular stores (Apple Appstore, Google Android market) claim billions of app downloads. But appstores have not escaped the attention of cyber attackers. Over the course of 2011 numerous malicious apps were found, across a variety of smartphone models. Using malicious apps, attackers can easily tap into the vast amount of private data processed on smartphones such as confidential business emails, location data, phone calls, SMS messages and so on. Starting from a threat model for appstores, this paper identifies five lines of defence that must be in place to address malware in appstores: app review, reputation, kill-switches, device security and jails.”
Continue readingHi,
just a short, somewhat non-technical, post today: I really like this response Ross Anderson gave to the “UK Cards Association” asking Cambridge University for taking offline a thesis of one of their students. It (the letter) pretty much summarizes how security research should be treated and backed by those interested in a more secure world we live in.
On a personal note I’d like to add that Ross’ main volume “Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems”, initially published in 2001 and updated in the interim with a second edition in 2008, has been the most influential security book for me on my long way in the infosec space (which started back in 1997, with some workshops on firewalls I gave for IT auditors). If I could take only one infosec book to a lonely island, it would be this one.
Continue reading