Just realized that 20 years have passed since I started this site to learn more about web security threats. What 'appsec' looked like in 2000 OWASP didn't exist yet, nor did WASC Vulnerability disclosure was the wild west. Rain forest puppy (RFP) (that guy who discovered sqli) had just created the first...
My experience coleading purple team
I've been fortunate enough to manage a red team program for several years and since it's inception it has gone through many changes. What started out as adhoc engagements trying to see how far we could get/what problems we could find, turned into a mechanism to work more closely, and regularly with...
oAuth nightmares talk
Two of my co workers have presented at HackMiami on flaws people implement in their oauth implementations. The talk summary is below "OAuth is one of the most popular authorization frameworks in use today. All major platforms such as Google, Facebook, Box etc support it and you are probably thinking of implementing...
Extensive IOS hacking guide released by Security Innovation
Security Innovation has published a very extensive guide to IOS hacking that's worth checking out. Here's the table of contents 1. Setting Up iOS Pentest Lab.................. 5 1.1 Get an iOS Device...................5 1.2 Jailbreaking an iOS Device.................. 7 1.3 Installing Required Software and Utilities .................. 10 2. Acquiring iOS Binaries.................. 13 3....
Presentation: Problems you'll face when building a software security program
A video for a talk I gave at LASCON last year made it online that some folks may find interesting. I rarely give public talks, but felt this information would have been useful to learn earlier in my career. Basically it goes through problems I've had to deal with building out appsec...
Google's intentions are good, but implementation leave MORE users vulnerable to hacking than before
In 2010 I wrote an article about a flaw Google discovered, and published working exploit code when no fix or mitigation existed. This allowed attackers to immediately start using the flaw to hack Google's own users (in this case, the world). Since then Google has announced a new program 'Project Zero' which...
My experience with developer security training
I've been busy this past year which has resulted in almost no updates to this site. Consider this one of many rants/posts of my experience/s in the industry during this time. This post covers a topic I think many people implement poorly, which is security training targeting developers. How most people implement...
A reminder that what you say at events may show up in unexpected places (like the news)
Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to a Yahoo event discussing bug bounty programs where all the organizers of these bounties were discussing their experiences. I attended this conference because years earlier I was involved in creating PayPal's bug bounty program and wanted to ask a panel of people...
Malicious CA's continue to cause headaches
Google published today that yet another CA has been caught generating certs for Google's domains. This problem is likely occuring on a much larger scale and seems to be detected by chance. Some have suggested crawling the internet and starting a DB, and while this may detect some issues it's limited for...
WASC Announcement: Static Analysis Technologies Evaluation Criteria Published
The Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) is pleased to announce the Static Analysis Technologies Evaluation Criteria. The goal of the SATEC project is to create a vendor-neutral set of criteria to help guide application security professionals during the process of acquiring a static code analysis technology that is intended to be used...
Poll: How do you rank the importance of a vulnerability?
I've added a new poll to the WASC linkedin group that a few of you may be interested in. Specifically asking how people rank the importance of vulnerabilities. Poll Link http://www.linkedin.com/groups/How-do-you-rank-importance-83336.S.202840840
Five pieces of advice for those new to the infosec industry
I've worked in the security field in various roles (script kiddie, security researcher, incident response, application security engineer, security consultant, strategy, etc..) and thought I'd share a few points to those of you starting out in the security industry. Things are worse than you expect The reality is that companies, even large...
Security Industry Plagiarism: Finding 3 examples in 5 minutes with Google
UPDATE: One of the authors has posted two responses including an apology (accepted). I was taught in grade school that if you plan on writing something, never plagiarize. If you want to republish portions of existing content ensure you properly quote/reference them, and never represent this content as your own original work....
Quick defcon/blackhat preparation list
A couple of people had asked me what are some things that you can do prior to attending hacker cons such as Blackhat and Defcon. Kurt Cobain said it best "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you'. Here's a short list (albeit not complete as I don't plan to...
Summary of Google+ browser security protections
Ray "Vanhalen" Kelly has written a post describing the security mechanisms used by Google+, as well as compares them to facebook. In particular he reviews each HTTP protection header and provides a good explanation of the purpose of each protection. Link: https://www.barracudanetworks.com/blogs/labsblog?bid=1743
Paper: Web Application finger printing Methods/Techniques and Prevention
Anant Shrivastava has posted a whitepaper providing a rundown of application fingerprinting methodologies, as well as comparisons of various tools such as W3af, BlindElephant, and Wapplyzer. "This Paper discusses about a relatively nascent field of Web Application finger printing, how automated web application fingerprinting is performed in the current scenarios, what are...
Oracle website vulnerable to SQL Injection
Someone has published a SQL Injection in labs.oracle.com at http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/07/oracle-website-vulnerable-to-sql.html . That is all.
WASC Announcement: 'Static Analysis Tool Evaluation Criteria' Call For Participants
I sent the following out to The Web Security Mailing List (which I moderate) announcing a new WASC Project. "The Web Application Security Consortium is pleased to announce a new project "Static Analysis Tool Evaluation Criteria (SATEC)". Currently WASC is seeking volunteers from various sections of the community including security researchers, academics,...
Results of internet SSL usage published by SSL Labs
Ivan Ristic (of modsecurity fame) has published the results of an evaluation against over 900,000 websites supporting SSL. The goal of this evaluation was to see how people really use/misuse ssl in the wild, as well as report on the usage of browser protections such as the Secure cookie flag, and Strict-Transport-Security....
Another use of Clickjacking, Cookiejacking!
Rosario Valotta has published an interesting attack against IE that takes advantage of clickjacking. In a nutshell it combines origin flaws within IE with clickjacking to trick a user into copying/pasting their own cookies from any site! Demonstration below The technical details can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/tentacoloviola/cookiejacking and his slides at https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnx0ZW50YWNvbG92aW9sYXxneDoxMWJlZTI5ZjVhYjdiODQx