Tag Archives: security

[kcdc 2022] insider threat : what is social engineering

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Speaker: Crux Conception @cruxconceptoin (pen name)

For more, see the table of contents

On walking in

  • He asked what talk was in the room and teased people about giving too much info
  • Also commented there is too much info (wifi password) on the badge

Social Engineering

  • Ability and talent to connect with emotion
  • Can be offline or online
  • We all do it. Ex: lying about what movie you want to see.
  • May earn trust
  • Goal is to do something or gain data
  • Highly evolving method
  • Teaching in college now

Examples

  • Anonymous test messages with links
  • Facebook messages asking where from

Exercises

  • Phishing – say have tickets but didn’t plan trip. Asks for employee id to confirm. Also gave up name by confirming it and said interested in going to Budapest (came from screensaver), – Called you so already know name.
  • Team building – where grow up, how many siblings and unique challenge from childhood. Think about how much you disclosed and if you held anything back.
  • Scenario where pen tester tries to get in building. Try to get someone to let you in. Most people say take to security or get security
  • Scenario – pen tester pretends changed auto pay info and asks for employee id
  • Companies have offices all over US. Try to get id number by calling Miami office and speak to receptionist then victium

Useful insider info

  • Knowing how much a company would pay to recover from an attack
  • Ids
  • Names
  • Departments

Attacks

  • Fill in the blanks
  • Spoof text message numbers
  • Israeli software to crack phone. Don’t even have to click link anymore. Get access to phone just by sending a SMS.
  • 40% of major companies reported industrial espionage incidents in 2016
  • Ex-employee stealing self driving car info from Apple. We focused too much on China. More African students in US than anywhere else.
  • Leaking is making info public. Info is power. Have goal.
  • Spilling is like leaking without intent.
  • Sharing info at conferences. Ex: where you work.
  • Russian and China trying to steal COVID vaccine research using malware and spear phishing
  • Twitter hack on Obama/Biden/Bezos.etc, Trying to get money. Got data from internal employees
  • Fake social media

Espionage

  • Steal sensitive data
  • Espionage is like a double life
  • Affects personality
  • Traits (thrill seeking, sense of entitlement, desire for power/control) are also found in politicians and CEOs
  • Helpful to be calm (see in tech a lot) and strong sense of responsibility
  • May have regrets after
  • Logical at the time
  • More life crises because more than one personality

Tips

  • When someone calls and says “is this Jeanne”, ask who it is rather than confirming
  • Be cautious when people ask you a lot of questions
  • No defense. Just try to avoid answering too many questions.
  • Be careful if they initiate call.
  • Think about info they should now. Ex: HR has employee id already

Human Traits

  • In psych, organized means have life together.
  • Psychopath – born that way. Sociopath – traumatic event started it

My take

Crux is an ex-cop. I like that they had someone from outside development for a different perspective than we usually get. He’s a good speaker and kept it interactive. The scenarios were fun to think about.

[devnexus 2022] java and ransomware

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Speaker: Steve Poole

Twitter: @spoole167

Link to table of contents

———————

Ransomware crimes

  • robbery
  • blackmail
  • extortion
  • revege
  • murder – ex: hospital attacks

Symptoms

  • files gone
  • files corrupt
  • unexpected files on system – obvious so believe it is real
  • prevent logging on
  • threats to delete or publish data
  • link to cryptocurrency wallet and amount – hard to trace

How get into system

  • Phishing – Impersonate boss, etc. Significant targetted social engineering. Understand business/context. Attachment with malware
  • Malware – mostly Windows
  • Government #1 target. Then education/services/health care/tech/manufacturing/retail/utilities/finance
  • Target single company or org. Look for poor security hygene
  • Vulnerabiliteis/CVEs
  • Suply chain attacks
  • Remote code execution

Once have access

  • Pull encrypton keys
  • Encrypt files not used often first
  • Then encrypt files used in memory so works until restart
  • Gigabytes/terrabytes of data – takes time
  • Would notice if network got slow so sneaky
  • Copy critical data out disguised as normal traffic. Hide in other payloads
  • Sometimes responses to ”legit” request
  • Almost always via botnets
  • Paying helps fund more
  • Rare to shut down. Instance of giving up decryption keys when one group folded

Motive

  • Data kidnapping – pay or release data
  • Blackmail – dirty payments, porn
  • Revenge – disgruntled employee, cripple systems
  • Competitor – wipe you out/steal secrets
  • Worse – weaponsized attacks from nation states
  • Some of these cases do not intend to give data back
  • Cybercrime beat drugs in value
  • Ransomware is worth 6 trillion

War

  • Can be test case to see if can get in
  • Goal is to infiltrate infrastructure and essential serices quietly so can manipulate/terminate when need
  • Break supply chain

Attacks

  • Used to wait for vulnerability to be announced and build attack. Now create own.
  • Open source repo attacks – attempts to get malware into source
  • Typosquatting – lookalike domain/dependency with minor typo
  • Build tool attacks – attempts to get malware into tools tat produce dependency
  • Dependency confusion – later version ex ”latest”
  • Designed to stay hidden until needed

General

  • Dependency confusion, typosquatting and malicious code injection increased 650% in 2021
  • New world – state funded, professionally developed, regularly exercised very sophisticated and exeremely lucrative
  • Could even be someone at conference – have to gain the skills

Costs

  • Being out of action
  • Recovery
  • Data loss – data recovery never 100%
  • Human cost – finger pointing, guilty feelings, feeling of being invaded/not trusting security systems
  • Data integrity – can modify/inject data when return

Java

Log4j

  • Still lots of log4j downloads (thru 4/11/22)
  • 36% on a day in April were vulnerable
  • Need right tools – check dependencies, not just your pom or in fat jar
  • Try dependabot
  • Write test cases and see if your tool can find

My take

Good collection of info and supporting data. Wrapped in a compelling story. Security talks are often scary and first conference in a while provided more time for bad things to happen!

[devnexus 2022] hacking the OSS supply changes

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Speaker: Stephen Chin

@steveonjava

Link to table of contents

———————

Theme is security with sci fi references

Examples

  • Equifax data breah – from not patching Struts for at least two months
  • Solarwinds – hacked TeamCity instance injected
  • log4shell – zero day in log4j core. Affected almost all systems. Could send class file and having it excecute on the serer
  • spring4shell

Binary repos

  • Which do you trust?
  • npm, pypi, rubygems, maven central
  • Like picking up thumb drive off sidewalk and plugging into your production server

Dependency confusion attack

  • Sci fi – Matrix – agents disguised theselves as other people
  • package mining
  • npm has no security on namespaces
  • Can use same name as a company internal package and give it higher version number
  • If grabing latest version, pull mallicious package
  • When pull from npm, announcing what package you have
  • Artifactory resolves against internal repo first. Protects even if using virtual repo which mixes public and private content

Supply Chain Attacks

  • Sci fi: millinium falcon
  • Assume depedencies built on a clean system
  • Anyone can upoad to pipi
  • About 400 zero day volunerabiities in open source/cloed source/OS, embedded systems, etc
  • Sveder uploaded library to go to his website
  • JFrog scans looking for suspicious Python code behavior
  • noblesse – “optimizes your PC for python” – steals credit card/passwords and sends via dicord
  • pythatoras – supposed to help with calculations but does remote code executio

Namespaces

  • Sci fi: War games
  • Moscow – Russia and Idaho
  • St Petersburg – Russian and Florida
  • azure-core-tracing is proper name. Created core-tracing.
  • NPM took down once repored. At least 218 packages affected.
  • Stole personal data
  • Think bug bounty of test because minimal and not steaing credit cards

Pyrisa

  • Scitfi: Avengers
  • Need automated (IronMan), trustworthy (Black Widow) and dependable (Captain America)
  • trusted binary network – secure by defaut, reliable inimal outages), open
  • peer to peer
  • multi-node verification
  • reproducabe build trust model

Websites

  • research.jfrog.com

My take

I hadn’t heard of all those attacks so learned about the Python ones. The sci fi element was a nice touch. As was the community picture with a ton of people on stage.