West Coast in the house, well actually more like an African visiting Seattle for Blackhat’s West Coast Trainings.
We’ve had a great year delivering the latest course in our amazing Hacking by Numbers training series: Mobile. What’s cool about this course, is like the others, we teach a hacking methodology rather than punting a tool or a magic, do it all solutions.
Mobile was created to match the continuous growth in mobile phone usage, with a specific focus on showing you how you would go about testing the mobile platforms and installed applications, to ensure they have been developed in a secure manner. HBN Mobile provides a complete and practical window into the methods used when attacking mobile platforms and presents you with a methodology that can be applied across platforms. This course is structured to cater to penetration testers who are new to the mobile area and who need to understand how to analyze and audit applications on various mobile platforms using a variety of tools.
Some of the material covered in the course includes:
- Android, iOS, RIM and Windows 8 Platform security
- Communication protocols
- Programming languages for mobile development
- Building your own mobile penetration testing lab
- Mobile application analysis
- Static Analysis
- Authentication and authorization
- Data validation
- Session management
- Transport layer security and information disclosure
The methodology presented is structured to allow testing to be performed on different mobile platforms and is demonstrated using both the Android and iOS platforms. Like all the HBN courses, the mobile edition focuses heavily on demonstration and hands-on practicals.
Blackhat Las Vegas 2013 saw the introduction HBN Mobile with two training sessions being presented. The course was well attended and consisted of students with varying degrees of mobile experience, however, the vast majority were new to Mobile application security and HBN Mobile provided the ideal launch pad for them. The great thing about the HBN series is that it accommodates people from all technical and security backgrounds. This held true with the Mobile edition, where we had reverse engineers, penetration testers, development managers, aerospace engineers and developers just to name a few. The feedback from the course was extremely positive and has been fed back into the course and used to improve it even further. Then we had the chance to give it to students over at 44Con in London and this again gave us a chance to take your feedback and make the course even better.
What’s slightly different about this course is that you get to find flaws in common mobile applications available both in the Google Play and Apple App store. In addition, we have devices for you to use, so not everything is done in an emulator. As a result, students on the last course found common security vulnerabilities in numerous well known and popular applications.
On the 11th December in Seattle, I’ll be delivering Hacking by Numbers: Mobile edition at Blackhat and I cannot wait to get on that plane. If you want to learn more about how to tear apart mobile apps, this is definitely for you. The regular price goes up on the 5th of December, so take advantage of this now and book your place.
Look forward to seeing you there.