The use of Internet of Things devices is continuously increasing: People buy devices, such as smart assistants, to make their lives more comfortable or fitness trackers to assess sports activities. According to the Pew Research Center [1], every fifth American wears a device to track their fitness. In Germany, the number increases likewise. The increasing number of fitness trackers in use can also be seen in criminal proceedings, as there exist more and more cases where these devices provide evidence.
Continue readingMisc
Puppet Assessment Techniques
Hardening guides for different systems that can be managed by Puppet are easy to find, but not the guides for hardening Puppet itself.
The enterprise software configuration management (SCM) tool Puppet is valued by many SysAdmins and DevOps, e.g. at Google, for scalable, continuous and secure deployment of application server configuration files across large heterogeneous system landscapes and increasingly also as “end-to-end” compliance solution.
Disclaimer:
This blog post does not present anything new about Puppet security, but aims to raise security awareness and summarize useful attack and audit techniques for an internal black and whitebox infrastructure assessment of a Puppet Enterprise landscape.
Most information in this post were collected during and based-on a time-limited graybox Puppet landscape assessment (Puppet Enterprise version 6.4.0, on RHEL7).
Hence, there is no claim for completeness and the post shall not be considered as a fully fledged Puppet hardening guide.
Java Buffer Overflow with ByteBuffer (CVE-2020-2803) and Mutable MethodType (CVE-2020-2805) Sandbox Escapes
Years ago, Java could be used on websites trough applets. To make these applets secure and not let them access files or do other dangerous stuff, Java introduced the SecurityManager. Before some action was performed, the SecurityManager was asked if the code is privileged to perform this action. However, since the SecurityManager lives in the same running program and can be accessed via System.getSecurityManager(), there existed some ways to remove it.
Continue readingSecurity Advisories for Nagios XI
In June 2020 we reported three vulnerabilities in Nagios XI 5.7.1 to the vendor.
The following CVE IDs were assigned to the issues :
- CVE-2020-15901: Command Injection in Nagios XI web interface (RCE)
- CVE-2020-15902: Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
- CVE-2020-15903: Reserved, details will be given on vendor fix
CVE-2020-15901 and CVE-2020-15902 have meanwhile been fixed in version 5.7.2 according to the changelog on the Nagios website (https://www.nagios.com/downloads/nagios-xi/change-log/). CVE-2020-15903 is currently being worked on by the vendor and will probably be fixed in the near future.
Continue readingQEMU, Unicorn, Zelos, and AFL
I should start by telling you that this post does not contain anything fundamentally new. Hence, if you already know the tools mentioned in the title, this post may probably not be for you. However, if you are not too familiar with these tools and want to understand a little bit more on how they work together, you should keep on reading.
First, let us get a high-level overview of the different tools. We begin with QEMU. QEMU is a piece of software to emulate hardware such as processors. Imagine, for example, that you are running an operating system such as Linux or Windows on a x86-64 machine and that you would like to analyze a binary that has been compiled for an ARM or MIPS processor. Of course, you can use static analysis on the binary, but if you want to find out more about the runtime behavior, well, it would be good to have a corresponding runtime environment.
Continue readingSecurity Advisories for Ivanti DSM Suite
From the end of 2019 on, we reported two critical vulnerabilities in the Ivanti DSM Suite to the vendor. The following CVE IDs were assigned to the issues (but note that they have a status of RESERVED, i.e. titles and descriptions may change in the future):
- CVE-2020-12441: Denial-of-Service (DoS) in Ivanti Service Manager HEAT Remote Control 7.4
- CVE-2020-13793: Unsafe storage of AD credentials in Ivanti DSM netinst 5.1
The vulnerabilities have meanwhile been fixed and an updated software version can be downloaded here.
Continue readingDog Whisperer Update
With the current situation, it’s not easy to find the right angle to start this blog post, so I won’t even try… but with Troopers cancelled, my Bloodhound workshop went down the drain, and I didn’t get a chance to meet or catch up with all of you and share my latest BloodHound adventures. So I decided to write a quick post to share all this…

As you might have heard, BloodHound 3 was released last month, so I thought it was time to update the Dog Whisperers Handbook.
It’s basically a quick intro to BloodHound and Cypher, with a lot of links to resources for further learning.
You can download the latest version here. Hope you enjoy it.
VMware NSX-T Distributed Firewall can be bypassed by default
We recently came across an issue when playing around with VMware NSX-T which not anyone might be aware of when getting started with it. Because many of our customers start with transitioning to NSX-T, we want to share this with you. In short, the Distributed Firewall (DFW) of NSX-T can be easily bypassed in the default configuration because it only works effectively if at the same time, the SpoofGuard feature is enabled on all logical switch ports which is not the case by default.
Continue readingWindows Insight: The Windows Telemetry ETW Monitor
The Windows Insight repository now hosts the Windows Telemetry ETW Monitor framework. The framework monitors and reports on Windows Telemetry ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) activities – ETW activities for providing data to Windows Telemetry. It consists of two components:
- the Windbg Framework: a set of scripts for monitoring Windows Telemetry ETW activities. The scripts are fed to a running windbg instance, connected to the Windows instance whose Windows Telemetry ETW activities are monitored.
- the Telemetry Information Visualization (TIV) framework for visualization of information and statistics. The TIV framework is a set of Python scripts that visualize information and statistics based on the data produced by the Windbg Framework. The output of the TIV framework is a report in the form of a web page.
Dissection of an Incident – Part 2
After our last blogpost regarding Emotet and several other Emotet and Ransomware samples that we encountered, we recently stumbled across a variant belonging to the Gozi, ISFB, Dreambot respectively Ursnif family. In this blogpost, we want to share our insights from the analysis of this malware, whose malware family is mainly known for being a banking trojan that typically tries to infect browser sessions and sniff/redirect data. In particular, we are going to provide details about the first stage Word Document, the embedded JavaScript/XSL document, an in-depth runtime analysis of the downloaded executable, and some details regarding detection.
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