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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 operations/it teams. More…
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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 programs at companies…
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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 from the project…
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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 developer focused…
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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 currently running a…
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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 the following reasons…
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Jacking out of the metaverse: Retaliating to cyberwar in the real world
I've been chatting with some folks in infosec about the escalation of 'cyber attacks' sponsored by governments which target other governments, and private corporations. There's uneasyness in the security industry about possible overeactions and restrictions of freedom as a result of this growing concern. This entry will attempt to break down some of these concerns,…
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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 ones, are…
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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. Unfortunately it seems…
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How not to publish SCADA security advisories
"Luigi Auriemma" has posted an interesting series of SCADA vulnerabilities to the bugtraq security list this morning. From his email "The following are almost all the vulnerabilities I found for a quick experiment some months ago in certain well known server-side SCADA softwares still vulnerable in this moment. In case someone doesn't know SCADA (like…
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Easy Method For Detecting Caching Proxies
While thinking about some of the transparent proxy problems I came up with a fairly reliable way to detect caching proxies. Caching proxies can be either explicit or transparent, but are typically used in a transparent mode by an ISP to cut down on upstream bandwidth. A side effect (and benefit 🙂 of caching is…
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CGISecurity Turns 10!: Summary of the more interesting site posts throughout the years
To commemorate this site turning 10 I've created a list of my top 10 thought provoking/innovate posts that people who haven't been following this site may be unaware of. The Cross-site Scripting FAQ (2001) In 2001 someone informed me of this new threat involving the injection of HTML/Javascript into a site's response (XSS). At…
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CGISecurity.com Turns 10!: A short appsec history of the last decade
Ten years ago today I started cgisecurity.com to fill a void in the application security space. At the time no other dedicated site existed, neither OWASP nor WASC had been created, and the www-mobile list was effectively the only place to discuss web related vulns and attacks . When I first started this site I…
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Why publishing exploit code is *generally* a bad idea if you’re paid to protect
Update2: Further proof that people are abusing this in a wide scale and likely wouldn't have had the exploit code not been released. Update: I've clarified a few points and added a few others. Recently Tavis Ormandy (a google employee) discovered a security issue in windows, and days after notifying Microsoft published a working exploit…
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Random FireFox URL handling Behavior
About a year ago I discovered this by accident and hadn't seen it published anywhere so thought it was worth mentioning. If you enter the following into the firefox URL bar it will follow them to http://www.cnn.com. [http://www.cnn.com] [http://]www.cnn.com [http://www].cnn.com Etc… You can also substitute [] for {} or " and it will also work…
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Larry Suto Web Application Security Scanner Comparison Report Inaccurate Vendors Say
Larry Suto published a report comparing the various commercial web application security scanners. As you'd expect the vendors are likely to respond about how inaccurate the report is, however in this case both HP and Acunetix argued valid points. From Acunetix "They were not found because Larry didn’t authenticated our scanner (didn’t provided any credentials). No…
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Threat Classification v2 and the need for change
As I recently posted the WASC Threat Classification v2 is currently in a public working state and there's been a buzz on the mailing lists about it compared to other related projects. Vishal Garg posed a question I was expecting for awhile which is why does the TCv2 look so much different than TCv1? I've…
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Blackhat 2006 RSS Security Talk Video Available
In 2006 I gave a talk on hacking RSS feeds, and feed readers. I stumbled upon the video for blackhat 2006 by accident the other day and thought it was worth posting. Video: http://media.blackhat.com/bh-usa-06/video/2006_BlackHat_Vegas-V36-Auger_and_Sima-0day_subscriptions.mp4Slides: http://www.cgisecurity.com/papers/RSS-Security.pptPaper: http://www.cgisecurity.com/papers/HackingFeeds.pdf
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Socket Capable Browser Plug-ins Result In Transparent Proxy Abuse
For over a year in my spare time I've been working on a abuse case against transparent proxies at my employer, and have just released my latest paper '"Socket Capable Browser Plugins Result In Transparent Proxy Abuse". When certain transparent proxy architectures are in use an attacker can achieve a partial Same Origin Policy Bypass…
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Application Security Vendors Need Help With Reporting
I've been reading web application vulnerability reports from tools and services for 6-7 years and found that 99% of these reports are geared towards security engineers or system administrators. Many of the reports I see focus on The type of flaw and what it its impact is The URL affected Links to references and additional…
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The security industry needs to re-align its training expectations for QA
I've been involved in the security community for over 10 years and have worked for small, medium, andlarge companies. I have also worked in Quality Assurance and base my comments here on my experiences being a QA tester, and speaking with them as an outsider. I've seen advice in articles, and conferences discussing the need…
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Rant: Mac user’s security arrogance clouds common sense
F-Secure has posted the following blog entry at securityfocus. "There has been a lot of talk (link 1, link 2, link 3) during the last few days about a support article that seemingly appeared on the Apple website. In the article, Apple advised users to install an anti-virus software to make sure their computers are…
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Fyodor speculates on new TCP Flaw
Fyoder (the author of nmap if you’ve been sleeping under a rock) has posted a write up on the recent TCP Dos flaw. UPDATE: According to a post by Robert Lee this isn’t the issue. "Robert Lee and Jack Louis recently went public claiming to have discovered a new and devastating denial of service (DoS)…
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Researchers from Princeton University Publish vulnerabilities in unpatched sites
Yesterday a couple of ‘researchers’ published that a couple of major sites were vulnerable to CSRF. A general rule of thumb is that unless you are explicitly protecting against CSRF, or are accidentally protected, then you’re vulnerable. CSRF in 2008 is what XSS was in 2002, somewhat understood and rarely protected against properly. Generally I…
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The Palin Hack: Why most question recovery systems suck
Motley fool wrote an article blaming Yahoo! for the Palin Hack. Computerworld has pointed out Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail as being vulnerable as well. To be clear any site supporting answering of common questions as a way to restore account access is vulnerable. The issue is not that these sites are vulnerable and others aren’t,…
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WASC Threat Classification
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