Research
Analysis of a UDP worm
Introduction From time to time I like to delve into malware analysis as a pastime and post interesting examples, and recently we received a malware sample that had a low-detection rate. Anti-Virus coverage was 15/43 (35.7%) based on a virustotal.com report and Norman sandbox did not detect any suspicious activity as shown in the report below:
Norman sandbox report did not show any registry or network activity. This might be due to the use of virtual CPU or sandbox bypass techniques by the malware. Sunbelt sandbox was down at the time of the analysis.
Information Security South Africa (ISSA) 2010
Last week we presented an invited talk at the ISSA conference on the topic of online privacy (embedded below, click through to SlideShare for the original PDF.)
The talk is an introductory overview of Privacy from a Security perspective and was prompted by discussions between security & privacy people along the line of “Isn’t Privacy just directed Security? Privacy is to private info what PCI is to card info?” It was further prompted by discussion with Joe the Plumber along the lines of “Privacy is dead!”
Memcached talk update
Wow. At some point our talk hit HackerNews and then SlashDot after swirling around the Twitters for a few days. The attention is quite astounding given the relative lack of technical sexiness to this; explanations for the interest are welcome!
We wanted to highlight a few points that didn’t make the slides but were mentioned in the talk:
Bit.ly and GoWalla repaired the flaws extremely quickly, prior to the talk. PBS didn’t get back to us. GlobWorld is in beta and isn’t publicly available yet. For those blaming admins or developers, I think the criticism is overly harsh (certainly I’m not much of a dev as the “go-derper” source will show). The issues we found were in cloud-based systems and an important differentiating factor between deploying apps on local systems as opposed to in the cloud is that developers become responsible for security issues that were never within their job descriptions; network-level security is oftentimes a foreign language to developers who are more familiar with app-level controls. With cloud deployments (such as those found in small startups without dedicated network-security people) the devs have to figure all this out.
BlackHat Write-up: go-derper and mining memcaches
[Update: Disclosure and other points discussed in a little more detail here.]
Why memcached? At BlackHat USA last year we spoke about attacking cloud systems, while the thinking was broadly applicable, we focused on specific providers (overview). This year, we continued in the same vein except we focused on a particular piece of software used in numerous large-scale application including many cloud services. In the realm of “software that enables cloud services”, there appears to be a handful of “go to” applications that are consistently re-used, and it’s curious that a security practitioner’s perspective has not as yet been applied to them (disclaimer: I’m not aware of parallel work).
SensePost Corporate Threat(Risk) Modeler
Since joining SensePost I’ve had a chance to get down and dirty with the threat modeling tool. The original principle behind the tool, first released in 2007 at CSI NetSec, was to throw out existing threat modeling techniques (it’s really attack-focused risk) and start from scratch. It’s a good idea and the SensePost approach fits nicely between the heavily formalised models like Octave and the quick-n-dirty’s like attack trees. It allows fairly simple modeling of the organisation/system to quickly produce an exponentially larger list of possible risks and rank them.
Password Strength Checker & Generator
In my previous role working as a security manager for a large retailer, I developed some password tools for various purposes, primarily to help non-security people with some of the basics. I licensed them under the GPL, and I think it’s about time they saw the light of day.
There are a couple of tools, which I will explain below. They’re all written in JavaScript, primarily because it is cross-platform, but can be centrally hosted. They all work in Firefox and Internet Explorer, although the automatic copy to clipboard functionality of the service desk tool is IE only.
GlypeAhead: Portscanning through PHP Glype proxies
As the need for online anonymity / privacy grew, the proxy industry flourished with many proxy owners generating passive incomes from their proxy networks.
Although ‘proxy’ is normally thought to imply some sort of daemonized application, such as Squid (or a SOCKS) daemon, the last couple of years have heralded in the age of CGI proxies and more commonly, their PHP variants.
These PHP proxies are extremely trivial to deploy and configure, especially since most hosting environments have PHP installed by default. When development of PHProxy (a popular PHP proxy) ceased, many devoted fans starting releasing their own customised PHProxy fixes and variants. In recent years, however, many proxy owners have gravitated towards Glype since it seemed to be well maintained (though the current status may be questionable).
Defcon-17 – Clobbering the Cloud
Our DC-17 video (of the “Clobbering the Cloud” talk) is now available on the the new look DefCon download site: [here]
All of the other DC17 videos can be found [here]
(if you are a senseposter, you can grab them with descriptions from [here])
MS Threat Modeller
Just arbitrary coolness regarding Microsoft’s Threat Modeller. It’s XSS-ible…
Since this all works in file:///, not overly sure what the benefits of these things will be, but I suppose since different folks may have different privilege levels for different protocol handlers (ie: file:// http:// etc), one might be able to instantiate previously unusable OCX’es, or even redirect to site for exploiting browser vulnerabilities.
Never happened unless there are pictures, so refer below…
Clobbering the cloud slides
[updated: videos will be made available on this page]
140 slides in 75 minutes. They said it couldn’t be done… and they were right! (mostly)
Regardless, our Vegas trip was as much fun as previous years and our presentations at BlackHat and DEFCON went down well from the looks of things. While we plan on writing up the interesting parts, a number of people have requested access to the slidedeck in the mean time, and we’ve posted them here: