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Ranum Reloaded..
A little while back i commented on Marcus Ranums HiTB talk “Cyberwar is Bullshit!“. I ended the post with the words “Ranum is indeed much better than this..“. Ranum spoke recently at Source Boston, and his talk [The Anatomy of Security Disasters] indeed shows this is true..
If you are in the industry to make a quick buck, or because it beats flipping burgers at McD’s, you probably dont need to, but if you are involved with security decisions at any level, then you really should take a few minutes to digest his talk.
Hello World (With an LED)
Way back when i was a sysadmin, i recall reading a quote from one of the ATT greybeards who said something to the effect of “every competent sysadmin should be able to build his own network card”.
Of course most of us have spent tons of time ripping apart electronics and “watching what happens when you connect X and Y”, but unlike the electronic engineers with their oh-so-cool multi-meters ive never actually done any plc programming..
HBN Developer Edition Training
Hi All
We have scheduled our first Developer course for April in Pretoria, should you know of anyone in your area that would like to attend.
– Hacking by Numbers – Developer Edition (28-30th April)
Information about the course:
HBN – Developer Edition ‘Hacking By Numbers – Developer Edition’ is a course aimed at arming web application developers with knowledge of web application attack techniques currently being used in the ‘wild’ and how to combat them. Derived from our internationally acclaimed ‘Hacking By Numbers’ security training, this course focuses heavily on two questions: “What am I up against?” and “How can I protect my applications from attack?” During the course sample applications will be dissected to discover security related bugs hidden within the code. The class will then consider prevention, detection & cure.
!exploitable [Vuln finding freebie from MSFT]
Microsoft released !exploitable at CanSecWest this year. The debugger extension, and the accompanying slide deck can be found [here].
I have not looked at it, but a glance at the slides implies that they aim to solve the problem of too many dumps – not enough time..
Its pretty cool.. and that Microsoft is releasing this is even cooler..
Jack C. Louis: Jan 5, 1977 – March 14, 2009
Truly tragic. We are all poorer for it.. It really was an honor and a privilege to have known him..
Like deja-vu (all over again)
Those of you who were around in 2001 will recall http://anti.security.is (anti-sec f.a.q)..
The sentiment pops up periodically (in different forms) and it seems like CansecWest this year has seen a resurgence of it.. From Charlie Millers comments on the Safari bug:
“Did you consider reporting the vulnerability to Apple?
I never give up free bugs. I have a new campaign. It’s called NO MORE FREE BUGS. Vulnerabilities have a market value so it makes no sense to work hard to find a bug, write an exploit and then give it away. Apple pays people to do the same job so we know there’s value to this work. No more free bugs.”
Hack Like You Mean It – we’re taking PCI to Vegas
We’ve been busying ourselves with the PCI DSS in one way or another for more than a year now here at SensePost. Its been a frustrating exercise of mixed messages, politics, tokenism, mixed in with a healthy dose of mixed feelings about what the standard offers and whether that’s good for anyone at all. Now, finally, we’re accredited to do this that and the other under the standard so we feel its time to start speaking our minds on the subject.
Only an idiot will install a beta os on his primary phone..
and i am that idiot…
Developers signed up with Apples Dev Program get to take iPhoneOS3.0 out for a spin, so that the app store can have ver3 apps when the new OS launches.. A quick download (as quick as it gets in South Africa), a prayer (or 10) during install:
and now i too have a phone that can handle cut n paste! (tho admittedly it feels surprisingly fiddly to me at this point).
CodeGate – 2009
[beistlabs] [CodeGate] has come and gone.. A nice writeup of the event can be found [here] with a pdf of challenges and solutions [here]
Attack Vector based Risk Management?
Interesting post by Michael Dahn at pcianswers.com discussed (again) the difference between compliance and security. Do you know the joke about the difference between a canary? Apparently, its one leg is the same. Well, according to the post, the difference between compliance and security is… there is no spoon. I’m sounding facetious, but the post is actually not bad. Read more…
But actually, there was another part of the post that caught my eye. Its the comments about ‘Attack Vector based Risk Management’ or ‘AVRM’. Not much is said about this except: