Ed Smiley's Blog

These are my links for June 5th through June 22nd:

• Security Onion – The Security Onion LiveCD is a bootable CD that contains software used for installing, configuring, and testing Intrusion Detection Systems.
• YouTube – Episode 4: Visualization of Crime – In the fourth episode of Team Cymru's 'The Who and Why Show', Marcel van den Berg takes us through a few animations charting our unique global insight into the Underground Economy.
• Social Engineering: 5 Security Holes at the Office (Includes Video) – CSO Online – Security and Risk – We poked around a secure building with social engineering expert Chris Nickerson and found several ways a criminal could get inside and access sensitive data
• Pretty-Bad-Proxy: An Overlooked Adversary in Browsers’ HTTPS Deployments – Microsoft Research – HTTPS is designed to provide secure web communications over insecure networks. The protocol itself has been rigorously designed and evaluated by assuming the network as an adversary. This paper is motivated by our curiosity about whether such an adversary has been carefully examined when HTTPS is integrated into the browser/web systems. We focus on a specific adversary named “Pretty-Bad-Proxy” (PBP). PBP is a malicious proxy targeting browsers’ rendering modules above the HTTP/HTTPS layer. It attempts to break the end-to-end security guarantees of HTTPS without breaking any cryptographic scheme. We discovered a set of vulnerabilities exploitable by a PBP: in many realistic network environments where attackers can sniff the browser traffic, they can steal sensitive data from an HTTPS server, fake an HTTPS page and impersonate an authenticated user to access an HTTPS server. These vulnerabilities reflect the neglects in the design of modern browsers – they affect all major browsers…
• SandCat | PenTestIT – SandCat has two versions – free & pro. Both these versions are programmed with the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and the SANS Institute vulnerabilities in mind. You can also scan for the latest buzz word in the security market: WebDav with this tool. Basically, SandCat is a remote web application security assessment scanner. You can scan for almost all web application flaws. Sandcat remotely injects data in the web applications and analyzes the application response. This helps it to determine if the application code is vulnerable to specific attacks such as SQL Injection, XSS, and many other web application vulnerability flaws.
• Greg Miller’s Guide to Lock Picking for Beginners –
• The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit – Tobias is laughing. And laughing. The effect is disconcerting. It's a bwa-ha-ha kind of evil mastermind laugh—appropriate if you've just sacked Constantinople, checkmated Deep Blue, or handed Superman a Dixie cup of kryptonite Kool-Aid, but downright scary in a midtown Manhattan restaurant during the early-bird special.
• Security Musings » Blog Archive » How does SSL work anyway? – We talk a lot about how SSL is useful, but how exactly does it work? Most systems today use SSL v3/TLS v1 rather than “SSL”, and the nitty gritty details are found in RFC 2246.
• MIR-ROR – Home – MIR-ROR: Motile Incident Response – Respond Objectively, Remediate MIR-ROR is a security incident response specialized, command-line script that calls specific Windows Sysinternals tools, as well as some other useful tools, to provide live capture data for investigation.

  You can easily enhance MIR-ROR to your liking with whatever command line tools you find useful.
  For incident response resource, we’ve found it indispensable.
  Windows Systinternals licensing prevents us from bundling the tools in a distribution package; you’ll have to retrieve them.

• Nine out of ten work PCs fail on basic security | Graham Cluley’s blog – Ninety percent of corporate PCs are a security risk because they are not fully patched, or do not have basic security such as anti-virus software and firewalls properly installed.

These are my links for May 15th through June 3rd:

• 10 Essential Firefox Plugins for the Infosec Professional | dmiessler.com –
• Free: USAF-Hardened Windows Build (…well kinda…) –
• r00tkit Analysis: What Is A Rootkit –
• The CFReDS Project – NIST is developing Computer Forensic Reference Data Sets (CFReDS) for digital evidence. These reference data sets (CFReDS) provide to an investigator documented sets of simulated digital evidence for examination. Since CFReDS would have documented contents, such as target search strings seeded in known locations of CFReDS, investigators could compare the results of searches for the target strings with the known placement of the strings. Investigators could use CFReDS in several ways including validating the software tools used in their investigations, equipment check out, training investigators, and proficiency testing of investigators as part of laboratory accreditation. The CFReDS site is a repository of images. Some images are produced by NIST, often from the CFTT (tool testing) project, and some are contributed by other organizations. National Institute of Justice funded this work in part through an interagency agreement with the NIST Office of Law Enforcement Standards.
• Test the strength of your password policy | Security Central – InfoWorld – Roger Grimes presents a useful tool for figuring out how susceptible your network might be to a password-cracking attack
• Registry Structure – This web page contains the full report of this MSc project complete with the source code to all the programs and utilities that were produced. It is reproduced and made available here in support of the Computer Forensic community in particular and of knowledge in general.
• DIY CISS Degree: 100 Open Courses on Computer Information Systems and Security | Computer Colleges – Whether you’ve been accepted to a degree program and want to work ahead, already have a degree and want to learn more or just want to delve into the world of computer and information systems, you’ll find plenty to keep you busy through a variety of open courseware offerings. From courses that teach the basics of computer science to those that delve into specialty areas, you’re sure to find something that will help you learn more and gain confidence in the field.
• :: Bonsai Information Security – moth :: – Moth is a VMware image with a set of vulnerable Web Applications and scripts, that you may use for:

  1. Testing Web Application Security Scanners
  2. Testing Static Code Analysis tools (SCA)
  3. Giving an introductory course to Web Application Security

• 8 Tools to Find Someone Online – Stepcase Lifehack – Finding a way to contact someone has gotten a lot easier: just type their name into Google and follow a few links. For many people, you’ll quickly find a profile on Facebook, a blog or even an email address you can use to get in touch. But a Google search doesn’t turn up good results for everyone. Maybe the person you’re trying to reach has a fairly common name. You may need a tool a little better than a simple Google search to find him.
• SANS Institute – Network, Security, Computer, Audit Information & Training – Interested and want to learn more? Try one of the four free SANS mini courses. These mini courses are designed to take 20-30 minutes to complete. They will introduce you to this learning environment and teach you something that you can apply immediately to make your network more secure. Simply click on the free mini course below that interests you.