This year’s Penetration Testing and Exploit Development course (Fall 2008) will contain completely rewritten course material, guest lectures from leading security professionals, and free access to commercial tools provided by Fortify Software and Matta (thank you!). Additionally, the class will be held on-campus rather than online as it has been.
The instructor for the course is Nasir Memon with TA’s Dan Guido (me) and Vikram Padman. The syllabus has been finalized and the guest professors as well as their respective topics are as follows:
- December 4th — FINAL PROJECTS
- December 11th — hack the planet/show off projects
Students will have to complete one homework assignment every two weeks, a take-home midterm, and do a final project of their choosing. Each two week session will contain one full session of Q&A to review the homework associated with it. Extra credit will be given for participating in CSAW and UCSB iCTF.
Any questions about the course can be e-mailed to me at dguido@gmail.com.
EDIT: The course will be held in room RH227
In a recent (experimental only) project, I followed one of the multiple guides such as this one on how to make a Lego case for a USB stick. To top it off, I loaded the Hak5 Switchblade packages on the sticks. When used with U3 USB autorun technology, these packages allow automatic theft of various personal data upon insertion of the stick into a Windows computer. Now, doesn’t this just crush the competition (a regular USB stick lost in the parking lot)?
Continue reading ‘Cute + Malicious == Deadly’
I’m sure most of you have read the article in BusinessWeek that turned up on Slashdot regarding the hacker attacks the US government has to deal with. If you haven’t, you really should read it because despite its obvious inaccuracies (journalists always get something horribly wrong) it’s got a ton of good information. I liked how they explained exactly how the unknown attacker uses phishing (whaling?) so effectively.
But really, my alterior motive for posting this, was so I could point out this one particularly entertaining paragraph buried in the middle of it:
Now, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) is said to be discreetly informing fellow senators of the Byzantine operation, in part to win their support for needed appropriations, many of which are part of classified “black” budgets kept off official government books. Rockefeller declined to comment. In January a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer urged his boss, Missouri Republican Christopher “Kit” Bond, the committee’s vice-chairman, to supplement closed-door testimony and classified documents with a viewing of the movie Die Hard 4 on a flight the senator made to New Zealand. In the film, cyber terrorists breach FBI networks, purloin financial data, and bring car traffic to a halt in Washington. Hollywood, says Bond, doesn’t exaggerate as much as people might think. “I can’t discuss classified matters,” he cautions. “But the movie illustrates the potential impact of a cyber conflict. Except for a few things, let me just tell you: It’s credible.”
For the record:
“Except for a few things, let me just tell you: It’s credible.”
- Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-MO) on Die Hard 4
In a recent incident a school server (not an ISIS server) was compromised. PHP code was injected that listened to and executed commands passed through a POST request with ‘www’ user privileges. Some of the commands that were run include id, pwd as well as directory searches and wgets of various files. The compromised machine also served as a hop in a pharmacy ad delivery scheme. It redirected HTTP requests for medications to a possible ‘mothership’ server. There is evidence that links to our server were posted as ads on websites like MySpace.
Continue reading ‘Reverse Engineering a PHP “Virus”’
While I’ve been sitting at home, sick for the last few days, I’ve been trying to keep my mind at least somewhat sharp by watching some light videos here and there. The usual stuff, some TED, some 30 Rock, and I came across this gem I thought many people on this list might be interested in:
Crouching Powerpoint, Hidden Trojan: An analysis of targeted attacks from 2005 to 2007
Presented by Maarten Van Horenbeeck of the SANS ISC at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2189.en.html
See the links at the bottom for presentation materials including a PDF, video, and analysis of actual targeted exploits. I highly recommend the video, the torrent was extremely fast.
Enjoy 
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