Local
Something about sudo, Kingcope and re-inventing the wheel
Willems and I are currently on an internal assessment and have popped a couple hundred (thousand?) RHEL machines, which was trivial since they are all imaged. Anyhoo – long story short, we have a user which is allowed to make use of sudo for a few commands, such as reboot and service. I immediately thought it would be nice to turn this into a local root somehow. Service seemed promising and I had a looksy how it works. Whilst it does do sanitation of the library path it does not remove LD_PRELOAD. So if we could sneak LD_PRELOAD past sudo then all should be good ?
ITWeb Security Summit 2012
This year, for the fourth time, myself and some others here at SensePost have worked together with the team from ITWeb in the planning of their annual Security Summit. A commercial conference is always (I suspect) a delicate balance between the different drivers from business, technology and ‘industry’, but this year’s event is definitely our best effort thus far. ITWeb has more than ever acknowledged the centrality of good, objective content and has worked closely with us as the Technical Committee and their various sponsors to strike the optimal balance. I don’t think we have it 100% right yet, and there are some improvements and initiatives that will unfortunately only manifest at next year’s event, but this year’s program (here and here) is nevertheless first class and comparable with almost anything else I’ve seen.
Rhodes MSc Information Security Weekend
An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.
– Anatole France
Jobs within Information Security, and indeed Information Technology, are often more than a 9-5 affair for many who choose them as their career. There is a wealth of different technologies, frameworks, approaches and information that you need to understand to perform your job to a suitable level. In IT security specifically, with the pace of technology constantly growing, keeping abreast is often easier said than done.
ITWeb Security Summit 2010 & Afterparty
The ITWeb security summit is coming up next week from the 11th to 13th of May. This is a conference we’re quite excited about, and have been involved in for the last few years, but most recently, we’ve been able to further our involvement beyond just speaking.
For years I jealously watched as SensePost’ers would trundle all over the world shaking hands and drinking beer with the leet haxors of the world. Then a few years ago, the ITWeb Security Summit brought over Kevin Mitnick. I remember sitting in the audience awe’d not so much by what was said (sorry Kevin, I’m sure it was interesting) but at the fact a real celebrity hacker was meters from me. I still keep his lock-pick business card as a memento. Since then, the summit has gotten bigger and better. ITWeb previously brought out people like Bruce Schneier (who I think thought I was a stalker), David Litchfield, Johnny Long (he’s African now), Johny Cache, Richard Stiennon, Roberto Preatoni and Phil Zimmerman (he video conf’ed in from his hospital bed after emergency heart surgery).
‘Scraping’ our time servers
The intertubes have been humming lately around a certain NTP feature to gather lists of NTP servers’ clients and it naturally grabbed our attention.
The humming was started by HD Moore recently where he revealed that it is possible to query NTP servers to get lists of addresses and using the information for fun and profit. He also mentioned that he will be releasing a paper describing all this and how he can create a sizable DDOS using NTP, without giving too much detail about it.
CANSA Shavathon 2010
This past Thursday we received notice that Boogterman & Partners would be a host company for the CANSA Shavathon 2010 taking place on Friday, 05/03/2010. So when I send out an email to everyone at SensePost, little did I know at the time what a huge thing this would turn into. However I really shouldn’t be surprised as this is a typical show of how “We Roll”!
I was challenged (as the only girl in the office) to shave my head for CANSA. Well what can I say, the guys really wanted to see me do this because the enthusiasm was amazing! However more importantly we raised R3000.00 for this worthy cause and I was also able to donate my hair (as it met the length criteria) to make a wig and a R100 also goes to CANSA when they sell it. CANSA Shavathon’s goal was to raise R10 million and it would seem they have raised over R19 million so far which is brilliant! Showing how supportive South Africans are in general to this worthy cause which makes me proud to be South African!
So long.. and thanks for everything..
Considering how freely i’ve ranted on our blog over the past few years i found it incredibly hard to to write this post. SensePost has been my home for the better part of a decade and i have been haroon@sensepost.com much more than i have been haroon meer.
In truly boring last post manner i wanted to quickly say thanks to everyone for making it such a fun ride. From the awesome people who took a chance on us when we were scarily young and foolish, to the guys (and girls) who joined us to help make SP elite. From the many customers who tolerated my sloppy dressing to Secure Data Holdings who have been awesome in every interaction we have ever had with them. From the people who have used our tools, read our work and contributed ideas to the people who read this blog (Hi Mom!).
Wishlist for graduates
We were invited to speak at the recent ISSA2009 conference in Joburg, a local mostly academic security conference and I decided to carry a message in addition to the regular demo-style talk with which we try to entertain. By co-incidence, Haroon also had his peer-reviewed talk on Apple Exploitation Defences accepted so there were two SensePosters talking to the tweed jackets. I figured the most important bit of the presentation should be mentioned first, so before we carry on I’d like to present our attacker:
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