Th3 S3cr3t Ag3nt

Every year security companies are coming up with the “worst passwords” based on breached credentials found on in the murkier parts of the internet. Every year people seem surprised that “123456” is a terrible password and people are still using it. Passwords often get rated by how quickly the could be “cracked”. The length of time for cracking passwords in the real world varies wildly according the the context and the numbers are often confusing. NordPass recently published their list of most common passwords and claimed that the third most popular password was “picture1” and it would take 3 hours to crack. If that’s referring to offline password cracking then we should have a whip-round to upgrade the hackers hardware because a password like that should take seconds to crack. When hackers try to brute force their way into an account online they have to try lots of different password combinations until they get in, or just give up. This takes a lot of time so hackers spend time optimiz...

Improving your password game. Many companies around the world are settling into a future where most people work from home, at least for a while. Working from home comes with many benefits, but there are downsides from a security point of view. Most modern enterprises have spent significant chunks of their security budget on securing their perimeter. Sure everything is moving to the cloud and most of the workforce has been mobile for some time, but many IT departments still rely on people either physically coming into the office or using VPN. Without this patches cannot to be pushed to machines, updates cannot be applied, and perimeter IPS and IDS systems cannot pick up connections to C2 and malicious URLs that traditional AV missed. When it comes to security, most enterprises aren't set up for people to work outside the wire for sustained periods. What are the risks of working outside the wire? The chances are that when your employees are working from home, the only thing protectin...

This is the story of a phishing email that came across my desk. It's good to take a look at what the bad guys are doing sometimes. It's often not rocket science but it's handy to keep an eye on the simple techniques used. And if this isn't your day job you probably don't get forwarded a huge number of phishing emails, malware to analyse or dodgy sites to investigate. In fact hopefully you do your best to avoid all of those things. The Attack Chain So this particular phishing campaign started as many others do with a simple phishing email. It's not an aggressive email, it's not selling itself too hard, no spelling mistakes, no funny looking URLs and it's pretty simple. There's only one link to click on. Just a quick note here about clicking on links in nefarious emails. Don't do it unless you are ready to. This link could trigger some malware, it could be unique to the targeted email (so the attacker knows the email address is valid...

When cracking passwords, efficiency is everything. You've spend hard earned money on GPUs, you may as well optimise your password lists to make sure that you don't waste time hashing passwords that are out of policy for your target organisation. So that's simple enough with a few grep and sed commands but after a while you start to feel lazy and script it. Thats why I've added  password policy script to my password munging script . Using the policy script is pretty straightforward: ./policy.py -luns passwords.txt -o passwordsinpolicy.txt The switches are as follows: -l --lowercase passwords must include lowercase letters -u --uppercase passwords must include uppercase letters -n --numeric password must include numbers -s --special passwords must include special characters All of the above are switched on by default. The input file must have each password on a separate line. There are also the following optional switches: -m --min minimu...

What is a Mouse Jiggler? A mouse jiggler basically simulates physical movement of your mouse to prevent the computer from going to sleep, the screensaver from starting or the screen from turning off. They can also be handy if someone measures the idle time on your computer and you need to look busy, just saying. Law enforcement use them to stop laptops and servers from going to sleep when making "lights on" arrests. This is especially important to avoid losing hard drive encryption keys. They have also been used by companies wishing to maintain access to machines that they dont have the password for when employees leave. If the machine is awake, we can keep it that way with a mouse jiggler. There are basically two kinds, hardware and software. Hardware devices retail for $20-$40 but you can make your own for less than $6. All you need is some kind of ATMEGA32U4 arduino device. A quick check on ebay/amazon will reveal dozens of devices in all different form factors. ...

Password munging is the art of changing a word that is easy to remember until it becomes a strong password. This is how most people make up passwords. Munge stands for M odify U ntil N ot G uessed E asily. The trouble is that it doesn't work very well. We can guess the modifications. Password selection. Take the average office worker that is told that it's time to change their password and come up with a new one. They have just been on holiday to New York with their family and so following common advice they choose that as their password. newyork No! They are told they must include capital letters NewYork No! They are told they must include numbers N3wY0rk No! They are told they must include a special character N3wY0rk! There, now that's a password that meets security requirements and our office worker can get on with their actual job instead of playing with passwords. Scripting similar munges There are a number of ways that they could munge the...

Zip bombs aren't new. Since the days of bulletin board systems people have been highly compressing implausibly large files and transferring them to target machines to consume resources. Machines these days can handle much larger files and have ever larger amounts of RAM to process them, but zip bombs can still be very useful to an attacker in bypassing weak antivirus or filling up poorly protected servers. Some antivirus software will try to expand the zip file to scan it, using a lot of resources. Others don't try to expand huge files and simply let them through. Either of these options don't really protect us. There was a zip file going around a year or two ago called 42.zip which expands to about 4.5PB. It's good, but can we do better? The most efficient thing to compress is a string of 00000000's. So let's start with a GB of nothing. dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1048576  And less squeeze that as much as possible dd if=/dev/z...