2014

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.