Our Blog
The SensePost Academy: Wrecking Balls
There is a serious skills shortage in our industry. There are just not enough skilled hackers out there to fill all the open positions. In November of last year, I proposed a new approach for us at SensePost to address these concerns. I looked at what we could do as a company to ensure the next generation of hackers were being educated correctly (no, it’s not about how you use…
SensePost Challenge – Winners and Walkthrough
We recently ran our Black Hat challenge where the ultimate prize was a seat on one of our training courses at Black Hat this year. This would allow the winner to attend any one of the following: BlackOps – Our intermediate pentesting course Infrastructure Bootcamp – Introduction to pwning over the Internet Mobile Bootcamp – Introduction to mobile hacking Web Application Bootcamp – Introduction to web app hacking The challenge…
Hacking Challenge: Drive a tank through it
At SensePost we get to enjoy some challenging assessments and do pretty epic things. Some days it feels like the only thing that could make it better would be driving tanks while doing it. The best hacks normally make their way into our training courses as practical exercises where students get to replicate (and improve on) these hacks. However, we know that there isn’t always room for all the epicness and…
Release the hounds! Snoopy 2.0
Friday the 13th seemed like as good a date as any to release Snoopy 2.0 (aka snoopy-ng). For those in a rush, you can download the source from GitHub, follow the README.md file, and ask for help on this mailing list. For those who want a bit more information, keep reading. Snoopy is a distributed, sensor, data collection, interception, analysis, and visualization framework. It is written in a modular format,…
Using Maltego to explore threat & vulnerability data
This blog post is about the process we went through trying to better interpret the masses of scan results that automated vulnerability scanners and centralised logging systems produce. A good example of the value in getting actionable items out of this data is the recent Target compromise. Their scanning solutions detected the threat that lead to their compromise, but no humans intervened. It’s suspected that too many security alerts were…
Associating an identity with HTTP requests – a Burp extension
This is a tool that I have wanted to build for at least 5 years. Checking my archives, the earliest reference I can find is almost exactly 5 years ago, and I’ve been thinking about it for longer, I’m sure. Finally it has made it out of my head, and into the real world! Be free! Be free! So, what does it do, and how does it do it? The…
BootCamp Reloaded Infrastructure
Why Infrastructure Hacking Isn’t Dead If you work in IT Security you may have heard people utter the phrase, “Infrastructure hacking is dead!” We hear this all the time but in all honesty, our everyday experience of working in the industry tells a completely different story. With this in mind we’ve decided to factor out our “infrastructure related h@x0ry” from our Bootcamp Course and create a brand spanking new…
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…
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,…
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…