I’m hyped! The much-anticipated Maltego version 2.0 is out. I had previously alluded to maltego here. To the 1% of you who haven’t heard of Maltego, it’s a tool for determining relationships between domains, users, email addresses, etc. I can’t think of an Infosec or traditional corporate security group which wouldn’t benefit from this tool. Check out new features here and here.

OK, everyone is probably familiar with the riddle put forth by Samson. e.g. “From the eater came forth food; and from the strong came forth sweet.”. The answer to that riddle was hidden. Who could have guessed the meaning? The strength of the riddle was in the fact that it was based on subjective knowledge that only Samson possessed. Of course, the story ends badly due to philistine subterfuge…but, I digress. I know that the security industry puts forth much effort in solving the riddle of “spam”. Question one, would a person, solving the spam riddle, be best served in keeping the answer to himself? It would seem that any sort of public solution would give the spammer equal opportunity to adjust their attack vector.

I don’t know much about spam. Google (and their gmail app) seem to know a lot about spam . Joe Stewart over at Secureworks knows a lot about spam. He claims that the top botnets can send over 100 billion spams per day. I have a few more ignorant questions:

2) Spam is a nuisance. Can the power of spam be harnessed and used against ones enemies? If spam is the “eater”, how can it be used to ones advantage?

3) The sending of spam seems highly automated. Can the power of spam be turned inward? Like a child scooping cuploads of black ants on a red ant mount, is there a way of causing a “war” between spambots? Would such a war benefit anyone?

!Dmitry

I have a strong distrust of most marketing and sales individuals. I hate evaluating software and getting a dozen calls or emails from some overzealous, inside-sales weenie. For this reason, I usually use bogus information when I fill out the obligatory form requesting the software that I want to play with. Lately, a lot more companies have been ignoring my queries for eval software. While I’m pleased to not be receiving calls or emails, I would appreciate the actual software. Today, while waiting (not too patiently) for my link to come through, I went through the email looking for some clue as to why I wasn’t selected to play with their software. In the HTML, I note a line like this (obfuscated somewhat and using ‘(’ and ‘)’ instead of angle brackets).

(IMG xsrc=”http://somelargesoftwarecompany.com/mk/auth?_ED=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv

&_esniff=true” HEIGHT=”1″ WIDTH=”1″)

What’s that? Why is HEIGHT and WIDTH equal to 1? How will I ever see that?

So, the natural next question is: What happens when the web browser (or email client) requests that image. Well, it turns out it’s not a real image. It’s size is 0 bytes and the error code is “204 NoContent”.

I add a single quote to the abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv string. Now, I’m getting an error message like:

“MarketFirst encountered an error while processing your request.”

So, what’s the deal with that little, bitty image? Well, it turns out that I’m not supposed to see that little, bitty image. That little snippet is part of a marketing software (MarketFirst) which tracks when and where the email is opened (ooooh, I am *so* hating marketing guys right now).

To see other companies using the marketfirst software, google:
MarketFirst error inurl:”/mk/”

Even more fun, google:
MarketFirst inurl:”/mk/” ODBC error

Wanna try it yourself. Check out:
http://cdcsoftware-marketing.com/mk/get/ca_m1_online_demo_registration?MP=M1COM_HOMEPAGE

You’ll even get your own email which tracks back to their database…call it marketer on marketer crime.

Now, if I could just get a MarketFirst demo evaluation

!Dmitry

P.S. and here’s how to bypass marketer profiling and get your software downloads. Open the email in plain text (it’s MIME encoded). Convert it to HTML text. Post the HTML on some web site. Now, call your buddy at a Fortune50 company and have him/her click the link. I bet you get the download now.

P.S.S Even more fun….embed the HTML in an email to some user at the same company where you are requesting the download

I’m rushing this post out so that this post can be the 1,000th post

I’ve got a project that I’d love to run, but I just don’t have the time. Here’s what I’m thinking of. I want to crawl Fortune 1000 sites and generate fingerprints on their code (ASP, JavaScript, whatever I can read in plain text). I then want to pull out variable names and other unique identifiers from the culled code. With this, I can:

1) see if there has been any cross-pollenation across the sites

2) See if any of these Fortune 1000 web developers have embedded open source code within their app.

3) If (2), I’d like to run the open source code through a static source code analyzer and see if there are any ‘gotchas’.

A few months ago, I did this exercise for a single Fortune 1000 company. I wasn’t really surprised to find a bunch of open source libs in use. In this particular case, I didn’t even need to use google codesearch to find the package that they were using. The company had left all te GNU comment info within the source. It also wasn’t surprising to find that the developers had installed the entire open source project under an ‘include’ directory, even though my spider only found a link to several of the ‘.js’ files. And, lastly, searching bugtraq for this particular product revealed that they were running an older, vulnerable version of their open source software. Mildly interesting. I’d love to automate this. A cool product would:

1) spider a site and download all their code (even HTML can have comment fields or variable names which can be used to track the HTML back to an open source app)

2) Use some algorithm to find uniq identifiers within the code. Store these identifiers.

3) Use some algorithm to compare these identifiers to other sites which have already been spidered and stored.

4) Feed these identifiers to ‘google codesearch’ to see if the code is part of a larger, open source project.

5) If (4) use some algorithm to determine the version level. Query bugtraq for flaws within the observed version.

6) Run the code through some static analyzers looking for coding flaws.

That’s it. Happy 1,000-post birthday Securiteam blogs!

!Dmitry

Maltego GUI is off-the-freaking-chain. Check it out at http://www.paterva.com/web2/maltego/maltego-gui-1.0-download.html

Also, the folks at Security Compass have released some new firefox plugins which should aid in detecting SQL injection and XSS. I’m between gigs, but will give these a good test drive the next time I’m tasked with a web application.

If one doesn’t already exist, I’d like an open source “Reporting Framework”. A metasploit for power reporters. I spend at least 10% of my consulting hours on reporting. I hate reporting. Feed this tool your reports and get back a standard report in the template of your choosing. All cross-referencing with CVE, CVSS, BID, NIST, etc. should be automagic. Relevant references should be automatically inserted (links to patches, standards, etc.). There should even be an option for uploading screen shots which are tagged to an IP/FQDN and service…

Enjoy the Holiday of your choosing,

!Dmitry

HillBillySec is set for July 25. I won’t be there (or will I?), but I will plan on attending the August meetup. The meetings will be held at this pub. I hope to meet some of you at these meetings.
Peace,

!Dmitry

Long, long ago on a planet, far, far away, a rag-tag group of explorers discovered valuable gems beneath the surface of the planet. The explorers could barely walk without stumbling over a protruding gem. “Stub a toe and find a gem”, they gleefully cried. The explorers were happy and spent much of their free time exploring the planet and enjoying the company of their fellow explorers. This was a time of love and general ‘hippiness’.

As time went on, the gems closer to the surface were exhausted and the explorers had to use their hands to scrabble into the hard soil in search of the gems. Those who had accumulated many gems retired to Alpha-9 (also known as the ‘playboy’ planet as 99.9% of the inhabitants of this planet were beautiful, 19-year-old virgins). Those who were frivolous with their gems (or greedy, some were just plain greedy) had to develop tools to help them get even deeper into the surface. These tools were, of course, of great value and the researchers separated into cabals which shared the same tools. The cabals hated each other but they at least understood that which drove them. This was the time of greed and vendettas.

As time went even further on, the tools which extracted the gems became free to all and many, many more explorers were seen taking the shuttle to this now-desolate planet. These new explorers were without cabal affiliation and were seen as immoral renegades. Some explorers paid a ransom and were taken under the wing of a particular cabal - Most perished. This time was dubbed ‘the great explorer genocide’ or ‘The Civil war of our discontent’ (by the more romantic explorer-historians).

In the end times, a few new cabals decided to pay each explorer for the gems that they discovered. In this way, explorers did not have to any longer associate with a particular cabal. Gems were harvested at an incredible rate and the newer (smarter) cabals grew in power and influence. One of the older cabals, understandably perturbed, created a blog and whine about it daily.

This is the part of the story where a hero steps in, or Peace descends on the valley…or, some crap like that. Not in this story. This story ends with the explorers tearing each other to shreds, killing each other in droves, until a large governing body of Explorers steps in and banishes all the greedy explorers to Alpha-2 (also known as the ‘buggery’ planet…for all the obvious reasons).

The end.

!Dmitry

So, the kids are out of school and it’s time to start putting together the list of companies that I’ll be consulting for this summer. With a full time job, I have to be careful to only choose companies that allow testing after business hours, remote work, etc. If the trend continues (from last summer), network pen-tests and straight application pen-tests (blackbox) will be eclipsed by a more ‘hybrid’ approach (application pen-testing with access to the source). Of course, the big ‘hitter’ will be .NET applications. Java will be a remote (remote, remote) second. If there is a 3rd place finisher, I’ve yet to see them (PHP, RoR?). As usual, I’m most interested in finding (or creating) automation that does 80% of the work for me. As I mentioned in a previous post, the tools which do this sort of auditing seem to be catching up with the demand.

Speaking of tools … Ounce Labs is holding a two-day training course for source code auditors. The second day of training includes auditing open source projects and finding 0-dayz. How cool is that?!? OWASP is also investing time (and money) on source code auditing. It was also very nice to see SWAAT (*WITH* source code!!!!!) donated to the OWASP project. The next year will, imo, be critical for source code auditing companies.

Peace,

!Dmitry

dmitry.chan@gmail.com

Just a few quick snippets.

First, as mentioned on vulnerableminds.com, Google has some kick-ass training videos available. I recommend the following search: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=type%3Agoogle+engEDU+security

Second, I’m still trying to break my Motorola Q. However, the fuzzing is going slow due to a stupid little thing called DHCP! I have to literally watch the fuzzing as my IP changes so often. Add to this the fact that I’m naturally lazy and prone to distraction and you have a recipe for disaster (read: lawsuit). An interesting post on cell phone (in)security can be found here.

Third, I’m into source code scanning (well, actually, I’m into the automation of source code scanning). I’ve mentioned Ounce labs in the past…Well, Dinis Cruz was just cajoled into doing some work for them. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dinis in the past. This freaking guy is a .NET ninja! I expect Ounce will be kicking butt in this arena very soon.

Last, but certainly not least, if you’re a GPF fan there is a very cool movie that Jared Demott put together. Go see it here

!Dmitry

So, I got a new Motorola Q Smartphone. And, of course, the first thing anyone does when they get a new networked device is scan the sucker. I don’t expect any ports to be open (besides the synching ports), so I go for the UDP ports first. The stack on the Motorola is UDP-scanning friendly and I get:

42/udp open|filtered nameserver
67/udp open|filtered dhcps
68/udp open|filtered dhcpc
135/udp open|filtered msrpc
136/udp open|filtered profile
137/udp open|filtered netbios-ns
138/udp open|filtered netbios-dgm
139/udp open|filtered netbios-ssn
445/udp open|filtered microsoft-ds
520/udp open|filtered route
1034/udp open|filtered activesync-notify
1434/udp open|filtered ms-sql-m
2948/udp open|filtered wap-push

Interesting. Now, I just need to generate some test cases and I can start fuzzing those services. I now scan to see what’s open on the TCP side. I honestly don’t expect anything. I start with ports 1-10000. And….port 8000 is open????? That’s a wierd port to be open, so I telnet in to the port, and I get a 4-byte packet of \x00\x00\x00\x69 followed by a packet with the following strings:

“”"
Motorola Test Command#11000
Motorola MCU Data Logger#11006
Motorola DSP Logger#11007
QC Interface#11008
“”"

Hmmmm, another bit of interesting news. And those strings (minus the pound digits) return no info via Google. Further, what are those #[DIGIT] things. And, what sort of logging is being done? For kicks, I tell nmap to scan ports 11,000-11008 on both TCP and UDP. All the UDP ports are dead…but, port 11008/TCP is open. Nice. I now scan all ports through 65535 and I note that port 13000 is also open. So, to recap. I have 13 UDP ports to fuzz and 3 TCP ports to fuzz. I don’t hold much hope for port 8000. It appears to be a poor man’s rpc or something…telling me where other services might be living. Connect to port 8000 and it just dumps it’s data and immediately FINs. 11008 and 13000 don’t respond to the nudging that I’ve been sending down the pipe thus far. I’ve got a little homemade program that I’m running (a stupid little program) which just generates rand() bytes of rand() composition and sends it down the line and waits 6 seconds for a response. Once I can get a single response, I can just run permutations of the successful-response packet in hopes of a second response, ad infinitum….blackbox testing at it’s worst. So, now I’m out of the loop and just waiting for my program to find something and send me an email. I think I’ve hit refresh on my email client 75 times this morning. I’m too impatient to be a decent fuzzer guy. It’s been running for 11 hours! I should have some data by now! … Somewhere in cyberspace, Johnny Disco is laughing at me.

What would be nice (hint hint) would be a pointer to some protocol specs In case anyone has forgotten, my email address is dmitry.chan@gmail.com

!Dmitry

I read security blogs to stay current. That’s a lie. I read security blogs for the same reason I watch Jerry Springer. I want to see sociopaths and rednecks nutting up over their 20-minutes of fame. So-and-so is leaving this-or-that blog/company/affiliation/whatever and such-and-such is screwing this guy over with rambo litigation….etc. etc. It’s all meaningless, but it’s entertaining and a great way to kill time if you’re all out of good drugs. I think I might be getting jaded, apathetic, or burned out…hmmm, oh well, it doesn’t matter. Here’s some stuff that’ll help you get through another 2 or 3 minutes of your day.

Perhaps the funniest blog entry that I’ve ever read.

In other news…It’s official - Web application scanners are now so bad that I won’t even use them if they’re free. At this point, I am officially divorced from automated application scanners. What I’ve been using, primarily, is Proxies and Firefox browser plugins. Some folks were nice enough to put together a very nice list of Firefox plugins which make the app pen-testers life much easier. Snag it here

!Dmitry

Over the past few years, I haven’t had the time to attend many security conferences. I happened to be in Seattle for the tail end of the OWASP autumn of code (October of 2006). I had the chance to go out to dinner and chat with many of the leaders in web application security. These are some of the sharpest guys in the industry and OWASP is on the cusp of really taking off. Some of their proposed projects for the Spring of Code will greatly aid the security industry. I already use many of their tools and the financing of innovative, open source security tools is *always* a good thing.

I’m very excited to see that a ’source code scanner’ may be one of the funded tools. As I’ve blogged in the past, there are great ‘frameworks’ (CodeScout and SWAAT to name two), but the meat of the work is always the individual checks. I hope to see a great open source .NET source code scanner in the near future.
If you’re young (of heart or otherwise), full of vim and vigour, and can afford the time, check out their Spring of Code initiative at http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Spring_Of_Code_2007

!Dmitry

There’s no real substance to this post…so, I’m just coming with a little bling to brighten your day.

Big ups to Microsoft for publishing a list of banned SDL functions.  I hope to come up with just such a list for other languages…More here

Big ups to this dude who writes about stuff like: hiring pen-testers, managing technical staff, and hiring code auditors.  This dude has a serious clue and has probably forgotten more than I know.   I’ve blogged about this in the past, but he does it better so go read more here

!Dmitry

It don’t know exactly when it started…but, at some point a few years ago, network pen-tests started becoming 10% network scanning and 90% web application scanning. I guess it was around 2003 or so???? At any rate, I was working on a pen-test team for a large Fortune ^[1-9]{2}$ company and we ran out of vulnerable network apps. We were scared, since lack of vulnerable apps meant that the network pen-testing team was gonna lose staff, lose resources, or both. Not good. We knew that we had about 6 months until the current flaws made it through the Compliance team, out to the business units, down to the IT director, down to the first manager, down to the second manager, down a few more managers, and finally to the admin who would fix the bug in about 10 minutes (albeit 6 months late).

In a hysterical state, we tried the obvious. Yes, we elevated Traceroute and non-ICMP-filtering issues to High Risk. Bad move - we’re losing credebility.

So, in what can only be considered a move of sheer genius, we turned up our timeout values on Nessus, told it to recurse more than 20 pages into the webserver, and let the scan run for a few hours. OMG! We found flaws. XSS? “Could this be a ‘High’ Risk?”, we whispered amongst ourselves. SQL Injection? Oh Yes! We were ecstatic. For the first time in years, my wife heard me hollering ‘I’ve got root…errr Admin’ from the downstairs office. Our plate was full. We were feasting on hearty portions of web flaws. The compliance team had to double-up in staff. The scan team started working 5 days a week from home during scan window. Looking back, I think of these times as our ‘Salad Days’. Our blood wasn’t cold but our judgement was surely green…and autumn was coming….
(more…)

Very, very, funny

…and, very very true.  But, we all play the game, don’t we?

!Dmitry

Building a static source code analyzer is a daunting task. I note that the latest edition of CSO has an ad for ouncelabs - I guess I should state that I don’t work for Ounce, don’t know anyone who does, and have never (never-ever-ever) used their stuff. And, having said that, I really want to see how they deal with variable state in their app. Give me a shout if you have any first-hand knowledge

My problem can be best summarized with a simple example. I recently did a code audit of a banks web app which was handling incoming numeric data. Data came in as a verified Decimal, was converted to a string, and much later the string got converted to an integer without any exception handling. Easy to spot the flaw, right? Well, not for the static analyzer, as the conversions were spread across multiple files, multiple includes, multiple classes, etc. etc. The static code analyzer has to be smart enough to know variables, scope, conversions, mathematical operations, etc. etc. My source code analyzer didn’t flag on the true nature of the bug. Instead, my tool told me where all the data conversions were taking place without exception handling. I had to manually trace each of these variables back to it’s beginning and all the way through it’s handling, modifications, etc. to the point where it was de-referenced and used in business logic. Yes, I could have just generated an alert based on the fact that the conversion took place without any exception handling. However, this will generate false positives on programs where the data comes in as an integer, is converted to a string, and then later back to an integer. The source code analysis tool which has the smarts to automate all of that manual ‘tracing’ will be a valuable tool. I’d buy it. I’d be interested in hearing if such a tool exists.

Lastly, apologies for leaving CodeScout off my list of source code tools. It has a few built-in checks (like SWAAT) which can be extended fairly easily. However, the nicest features is a fully-compliant regex parser which you can run over your entire source tree. It is very fast and you can use it to very quickly identify flaws.

!Dmitry
dmitry.chan@gmail.com

(in keeping with my ‘purging’ theme, I’m gonna release old blog posts that I meant to come back and clean up. These are just scattered remnants of long-gone ideas…)

A few years back, I worked for this company that subjected all their employees to ‘out-of-the-box’ training. It was a non-grueling, week-long seminar that was mandatory for all IT disciplines and included team-building exercises, personality inventories, group puzzles, creative-thinking exercises, etc. At the end of the week, we were supposed to be equipped to solve problems in creative ways. It was very lame.

In the beginning, Security groups were way out of the box. In fact, most didn’t even acknowledge the existence of a box. Over the years, they have not only invented the box - they have reverse-houdinied themselves into the box. How did that happen?

1) Security has become increasingly complex.

2) The single human brain can only master a finite amount of information.

3) Niche skills become the norm.

Add all this up and you get what I call “The problem of Babel”. We are creating (have created) a growth-limiting caste system. Instead of building a large Tower which would enhance our view of the landscape and feed our creativity, we have dotted the landscape with disjoint chimneys. The chimney’s rarely touch, have no solid base for high growth, are limited in size and scope, and end up trapping those inside.

And, one more

Peace,

!Dmitry