The Bash Bunny is the most recent attack tool released by Hak5 for use by penetration testers. Although the primary focus of the tool is red/black/purple team engagements, it is a dynamic device allowing reconfiguration to suit the scope of work. Continue reading
It’s not every day we get to assess biometric systems from a security perspective, they are still somewhat esoteric and testing them doesn’t quite fit with the usual slew of things that come along with being a security consultant. Recent engagements reminded us of just how interesting this facet of the industry can be and so we decided to write up a little something around biometrics. This article will cover some of the history and the basics of biometrics and some of the biometric-centric attacks you may come across… Continue reading
This year, one member of the Portcullis team went to one of the biggest security events in France: SSTIC (Symposium sur la sécurité des technologies de l’information et des communications). This post will highlight the most interesting presentations. Many of the slides, articles and videos are available on the SSTIC web site, but they are mostly in French. Continue reading
It is a topic that often comes up on client engagements, usually when running structured build reviews of Linux “gold builds”, but occasionally when trying to explain in detail how we used a Linux system to pivot internally.
SetUID and setGID files are inevitably a risk, potentially allowing attackers to elevate privileges to root from a basic user. When shared out on SMB or NFS shares they can spread the risk even further. Continue reading
At Portcullis, assessing Android applications is a frequent activity for us and we figured it would be helpful to assist others looking to get into the field of testing Android applications. To this end, we’ve compiled a cheat sheet below, it contains a number of commonly used ADB commands, as well as useful commands to assist in gathering information or performing less common tasks. Continue reading
At Portcullis, one of the most frequent assessments we perform are breakouts. One of the main challenges we face during these assessments is to get command execution that can either help escalate our privileges or allow us to gain access to different systems on the network. Continue reading
This post describes how Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections can be vulnerable to a downgrade attack if Terminal Servers are configured insecurely. Continue reading
Here at Portcullis, we are frequently involved in “red team” exercises, which means we subject an organisation’s information security systems to rigorous testing and analysis. The opposite of a red team is a “blue team”. A blue team attempts to identify and stop the red team from compromising systems. One of the techniques used when red teaming is to write malicious code to test the security systems of our clients. One of the issues we face resides in the fact that we need to bypass sandbox systems that analyse our files in real-time to identify if the potentially malicious file should be blocked and Indicators Of Compromise (IOCs) generated or if the files are benign and safe. At the same time, blue teams that catch our files will try to reverse engineer them in order to understand how we may be compromising systems. Even though the last point is not really relevant for us (ultimately we’re not the bad guys), the first point is. Continue reading
Inter Process Communication (IPC) is an ubiquitous part of modern computing. Processes often talk to each other and many software packages contain multiple components which need to exchange data to run properly. Named pipes are one of the many forms of IPC in use today and are extensively used on the Windows platform as a means to exchange data between running processes in a semi-persistent manner. Continue reading