Talk Security

The 2nd CTF organised by NotSoSecure.com from the 18th to 20th of April was hit with a DNS Amplification DDoS attack midway through the event. Contestant voiced out on twitter but it took some hours to get everything back under control. Despite the DDoS, the organisers hailed the event as a successful one, though a lot of contestants were stuck at the 2nd flag even with hints from @notsosecure. The leaderboard can be seen at http://ctf.notsosecure.com/leaderboard/

What is the Heartbleed Bug ? The Heartbleed bug is a vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library that allows stealing of information normally protected by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. OpenSSL is open-source software that is widely used to encrypt web communications. SSL/TLS is what normally provides secure and private communication over the Internet via websites, email, IM, and VPNs. According to CNET , an attacker can exploit Heartbleed to essentially “get copies of a server's digital keys then use that to impersonate servers or to decrypt communications from the past or potentially the future, too.” The versions of OpenSSL that are affected, version 1.0.1 and 1.02-beta release have been widely deployed for some time. The bug has been described as a program error, and a fix has been published for the 1.01 program in OpenSSL 1.01g. The bug was found in the heartbeat extension (RFC6520) of the Transport Layer Security/Datagram Transport Layer Sec...

Hi Everyone, It has been a while I wrote stuff about anything...blame my employers...:D. Anyway, I just want to put down a short note on why pentesters are not performing well in Nigeria. The Nigerian Cyber Environment is filled with low-hanging fruits - poorly designed system and application infrastructures are all around the corner. Thus, a regular pentester can WooooW his/her client by just running few commercial tools. In a more difficult terrain, the same pentester will issue a certificate of no risk to the client. Ok, moving ahead of myself, back to the matter - most uses I have seen of hacking tools in the real world in this part of the globe is so limited, a bit script-kiddish I might say. Even the commercial ones that come with graphical tutorials are even not fully utilised. I dont really know the reason for this, but i think we are less inquisitive about what we see or observe, we still think that some things are really hard to understand, when in ac...

Hi all, I would like to talk about the coolness of android applications. So if you want to perform a security review an android app, how will you go about it? There are so many ways to go about this, i will highlight some of the ways I use. 1) Most android applications work just like Web applications, they send out HTTP requests using POST and GET methods. So a cool thing to do is to intercept and capture these requests, make modifications and monitor responses (which can also be intercepted and modified). So how can this be done? A sweet way to achieve this is by proxying all traffic from the application on your phone through a proxy tool such as Burp Suite (coolest tool for me). Now how can you direct that phone traffic to your Burp Suite which is probably running on a laptop or system? Well, you can use a great android tool called "Proxy Droid" to direct the traffic to the IP address and port on which the burp suite is listening. You can connect them to the same wire...

It is with deep regret that I announce the security atrocities being commited by Internet Service Providers. These ISPs sell broadband solutions and actually imbibe no element of security on their part. My story: I recently purchased a popular broadband router modem because of its reputation of being very fast. I had a staff of the company set it up for me. I actually thought that  the setup would include some basic security advice on how to manage my modem, but that was not the case, the staff just changed my SSID to the name I wanted and THATS ALL. These were the settings untouched: 1) Username and password to log into the management console of the router. The default was (user:user)...jeeeezzzz. 2) The Wireless security protocol: It was left on WEP, instead of using the more secure WPA/WPA2. 3) The default wireless password is the MAC address of the router, which is written on the carton enclosing the router. There are a lot of these routers where I li...

Hello Everyone, My topic was prompted after I got to listen to some presentations by IT Security companies on carrying out a penetration testing on a company's network. It was quite a colorful and rich presentation about how they were going to scan the network from inside and outside, but the problem was that this has been the trend for some years now. Real world hackers are ever-dynamic evolving, upgrading, and getting more sophisticated by the day, most security consultant firms do not change in their methodologies. Majority of attacks are now client-side based and exploits the weakest link in the network - the user. Social engineering attacks are now more sophisticated than ever, employing clever techniques to bypass endpoint security. Dozens of social engineering tools are out in the wild and can easily be used against targets. Real-world attacks are well-funded, motivated and have a specific aim. Simulating these attacks, which is the job of the pentester, will involve a h...

Truecaller, an app built by a Swedish company and also has the largest database of collaborative phone directory has been compromised by Syrian Electronic Army hackers. The app was running an outdated Wordpress version, and this has been compromised by hackers with millions of phone records stolen. They claimed to have downloaded more than 7 databases from Truecaller server of 450 GB in size. The Trucaller website is under maintenance, saying "We are doing some upgrades. Thank you for your patience" They also leaked the database admin usernames and passwords. Even if you are not a user of truecaller, you are still not exempted as one of your friends might be using it and has your number stored on his/her phone. Lesson : Limit the amount of information you put on the web. It is not safe and will never be.