New Attack on AES

A new attack has been discovered against AES. "Abstract. In this paper we present two related-key attacks on the full AES. For AES-256 we show the rst key recovery attack that works for all the keys and has complexity 2119, while the recent attack by Biryukov-Khovratovich-Nikolic works for a weak key...

Security Guard Busted For Hacking Hospital's HVAC, Patient Information Computers

"A former security guard for a Dallas hospital has been arrested by federal authorities for allegedly breaking into the facility's HVAC and confidential patient information computer systems. In a bizarre twist, he posted videos of his hacks on YouTube, and was trying to recruit other hackers to help him wage a...

Three Web Application Firewall Advisories, Whitepaper Published

Michael Kirchner and Wolfgang Neudorfer have published 3 advisories in various Web Application Firewall products. Artofdefence Hyperguard Web Application Firewal (Remote Denial of Service) http://www.h4ck1nb3rg.at/wafs/advisory_artofdefence_hyperguard_200907.txt phion airlock Web Application Firewall (Remote Denial of Service via Management Interface (unauthenticated) and Command Execution) http://www.h4ck1nb3rg.at/wafs/advisory_phion_airlock_200907.txt radware AppWall Web Application Firewall (Source code disclosure on...

Researcher barred for demoing ATM security vuln

"A talk demonstrating security weaknesses in a widely used automatic teller machine has been pulled from next month's Black Hat conference after the machine vendor placed pressure on the speaker's employer. Juniper Networks, a provider of network devices and security services, said it delayed the talk by its employee Barnaby Jack...

Masked passwords must go?

"Websites should stop masking passwords as users type because it does not improve security and makes websites harder to use, according to two of the technology world's leading thinkers. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen and security expert Bruce Schneier both think websites should stop blanking out passwords as users type them in....

Blind Hacker Sentenced to 11 Years in Prison

"A legally blind Massachusetts phone hacker was sentenced Friday to over 11 years in federal prison, following his guilty plea on computer intrusion and witness intimidation charges earlier this year. Matthew Weigman, 19, was sentenced in Dallas by U.S. District Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office there....

Max Vision Pleads Guilty To Wire Fraud/Carding

"A San Francisco man pleaded guilty today in Pittsburgh this afternoon to federal charges of hacking into computer systems of financial institutions and other hackers to steal nearly 2 million credit card numbers, which were used to rack up more than $86 million in fraudulent charges. Max Ray Vision, formerly Max...

Generic Remote File Inclusion Attack Detection

"A big challenge for identifying web application attacks is to detect malicious activity that cannot easily be spotted using using signatures. Remote file inclusion (RFI) is a popular technique used to attack web applications (especially php applications) from a remote server. RFI attacks are extremely dangerous as they allow a client...

Session Attacks and ASP.NET - Part 2

"In Session Attacks and ASP.NET - Part 1, I introduced one type of attack against the session called Session Fixation as well as ASP.NET’s session architecture and authentication architecture. In this post, I’ll delve into a couple specific attack scenarios, cover risk reduction, and countermeasures." Read: https://blogs.sans.org/appsecstreetfighter/2009/06/24/session-attacks-and-aspnet-part-2/

FTP login credentials at major corporations breached

"A trojan has reportedly been uncovered that is harvesting FTP login data of major corporations, including the Bank of America, BBC, Amazon, Cisco, Monster.com, Symantec and McAfee. According to a report in the Friday edition of The Register, Jacques Erasmus, CTO at Prevx, an internet security vendor headquartered in the U.K.,...

Article: The Problem of "Too Many Problems"

Rafal has a good post on the challenges security folks/sdl folks have when presenting their findings to business folks. "The presentation the next day kicked off as expected... we presented our executive summary, the methodology of our product validation and moved on to the specific findings. In this case, since there...

Google Chrome Fixes Buffer Overflow Vulnerability

"Google Chrome 2.0.172.33 has been released to the Stable and Beta channels. This release fixes a critical security issue and two other networking bugs. CVE-2009-2121: Buffer overflow processing HTTP responsesGoogle Chrome is vulnerable to a buffer overflow in handling certain responses from HTTP servers. A specially crafted response from a server...

Iran accuses CNN of training hackers to launch DDOS attacks

"Iran's foreign ministry spokesman accused the cable network CNN of "officially" training people to "hack government and foreign ministry" websites on Monday, citing a CNN.com article that explained how hackers were launching distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on Iranian government sites. "They officially trained the people to come and hack Iran's government...

Browser Security: Lessons from Google Chrome

An article on security in Google's Chrome browser has been published. "The Web has become one of the primary ways people interact with their computers, connecting people with a diverse landscape of content, services, and applications. Users can find new and interesting content on the Web easily, but this presents a...

Stephen Watt/JimJones/Unix Terrorist to be Sentenced Monday

Photo (c) of sensepost Watt Pictured far right during a Defcon talk (video available). "Watt, a 7-foot-tall software engineer who was working for Morgan Stanley at the time the hacks occurred, pleaded guilty in December to creating a sniffing program dubbed “blabla” that Gonzalez and others allegedly used to steal millions...

Session Attacks and ASP.NET - Part 1

Sans has published part 1 of an article discussing Session Fixation attacks against .NET applications. "I’ve spent some time recently looking for updated information regarding session attacks as they apply to ASP.NET and am still not completely satisfied with how Microsoft has decided to implement session management in ASP.NET 2.0+ (haven’t...

Hacker cracks TinyURL rival, redirects millions of Twitter users

"A URL-shortening service that condenses long Web addresses for use on micro-blogging sites like Twitter was hacked over the weekend, sending millions of users to an unintended destination, a security researcher said today. After Cligs, a rival to the better known TinyURL and bit.ly shortening services, was attacked Sunday, more than...

Article: 'Setting the appropriate security defect handling expectations in development and QA

I have just published the following article on handling application security defects (vulnerabilities) in development and QA. "If you've worked in information security you've likely had to report a security defect to development in an effort to remediate the issue. Depending on your organization and its culture this can be a...

Phrack 66 is out!

IntroductionTCLH Phrack Prophile on The PaX TeamTCLH Phrack World NewsTCLH Abusing the Objective C runtimenemo Backdooring Juniper FirewallsGraeme Exploiting DLmalloc frees in 2009huku Persistent BIOS infectionaLS and Alfredo Exploiting UMA : FreeBSD kernel heap exploitsargp and karl Exploiting TCP Persist Timer Infinitenessithilgore Malloc Des-Maleficarumblackngel A Real SMM RootkitCore Collapse Alphanumeric RISC...

SHA-1 collisions achievable

"The researchers, from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, found a way to break the SHA-1 algorithm in significantly fewer tries than previously required. Although the hash function was previously believed to withstand attempts numbering 263, the researchers have been able to whittle that down to 252, a number that puts practical...