Some of my colleagues from Symantec and I attended Black Hat in Las Vegas this past week. Wednesday was the first day of talks and there were some very interesting topics discussed. For me, the highlights were the following talks:
• “Stoned Boot Kit,” by Peter Kleissner
• “Using Guided Missiles in Drive-Bys: Automatic browser fingerprinting and exploitation with Metasploit,” by Egypt
• “Attacking Interoperability,” by Mark Dowd, Ryan Smith, and David Dewey
The papers for these presentations are available on the Black Hat website, but I did manage to talk to most of the presenters and get their views on various topics. In this post I’ll talk about the “Using Guided Missiles in Drive-Bys” and follow up with info on the other talks in later posts.
In his presentation “Using Guided Missiles in Drive-Bys,” James Lee (a.k.a. “...
Hopefully the readers of the Security Response Blogs are well aware of advance-fee fraud, which is also known as a 419 scam. A 419 scam typically pops up disguised as an email from some member of a royal family from a country far away, trying to transfer large amounts of money to you. The story used in the fraud schemes doesn’t vary much these days. However, these advance-fee scams have evolved and adapted to all of the new information sources that are available, including social networks. Such as with the following example, which was seen a couple of times at the beginning of June this year.
The scammer searched in Facebook for people who have highlighted the fact that they are disc jockeys. Since it is likely that such people usually want to be found and are proud to be DJs, it is quite easy for an attacker to create a very targeted user list for his scam. Simply browsing and comparing dedicated user interest groups can reveal all of the necessary information.
As previously promised, Security Researcher Aviv Raff officially launched the Month of Twitter Bugs (MoTB) website on July 1. Aviv will be posting a “Twitter bug a day” on MoTB in order to raise awareness of Twitter APIs and to warn end users of potential problems with the software and systems they use.
MoTB will be following a limited disclosure approach. On the bright side for Twitter, third-party service providers and Twitter themselves are notified of high-risk vulnerabilities at least 24 hours in advance, giving service providers time to create patches before the information goes public on MoTB. When a vulnerability notification is issued, it is hoped that having a deadline will push the affected provider to take action, and the resulting solution will protect end users. On the other hand, if the provider cannot—or will not—come up with a solution in time, the vulnerability information will be posted on MoTB and the bad guys are likely to...
