Our take on social engineering

Like many other offensive IT security companies, we also offer social engineering assessments. And like in other areas of our portfolio, we try to steer client needs in a way that they order something that actually matters. This blog post summarizes what we experienced and how we see things in...

9 minute read

The curious case of encrypted URL parameters

As intra-app URLs used in web applications are generated and parsed by the same code base, there’s no external force pushing developers towards using a human-readable form of serialization. Sure, it’s easier to do debugging and development, but that’s why I used the word “external”. Many frameworks use custom encodings,...

6 minute read

Snow cannon vs. unique snowflakes — testing registration forms

Many of the web application tests we conducted had a registration form in the scope. In such cases, there’s usually a field that needs to be unique for each invocation, sometimes called username, in other cases, the e-mail address is used as such. However, launching the Scanner or Intruder of...

3 minute read

Bare Knuckled Antivirus Breaking

Endpoint security products provide an attractive target for attackers because of their widespread use and high-privileged access to system resources. Researchers have already demonstrated the risks of complex input parsing with unmanaged code and even sloppy implementation of client- and server-side components of these products. While these attacks are still...

5 minute read

Emulating custom crytography with ripr

Custom cryptography and obfuscation are recurring patterns that we encounter during our engagements and research projects. Our experience shows that despite industry best practices and long history of failures these constructs are not getting fixed without clear demonstration of their flaws. Most of the time demonstration requires instrumenting the original...

6 minute read

Conditional DDE

Here’s a little trick we’d like to share in the end-of-year rush: DDE is the new black, malware authors quickly adopted the technique and so did pentesters and red teams in order to simulate the latest attacks. According to our experience trivial DDE payloads (like fully readable PowerShell scripts) slip...

2 minute read

Notes on McAfee Security Scan Plus RCE (CVE-2017-3897)

At the end of last month, McAfee published a fix for a remote code execution vulnerability in its Security Scan Plus software. Beyond Security, who we worked with for vulnerability coordination published the details of the issue and our PoC exploit on their blog. While the vulnerability itself got some...

3 minute read

Fools of Golden Gate

In this blog post, we once again demonstrate that excessive reliance on automated tools can hide significant risks from the eyes of defense. Meanwhile, we discuss technical details of critical vulnerabilities of Oracle Golden Gate and show another disappointing example of the security industries approach to product quality. The Shining...

6 minute read