As we grow and operate on a number of continents, so does our dependence on a rock-solid IT infrastructure. We are expanding our repertoire to include a greater collection of Linux/Open Source/Windows and OS X products. With this, we are on the look-out for a rock star to wrangle control of our internal networks, external cloud infrastructure and help us us utilise technology in a way to make us even better.

Job Title: IT Network Packet Wrangling Penguin Master

Salary Range: Industry standard, commensurate with experience

Location: Johannesburg/Pretoria, South Africa

Real Responsibilities:

• Managing a growing internal network, both in ZA and UK and increased cloud-based infrastructure


• Championing the adoption of new technologies, ways of working and being incredibly excited about security. Yes, we like that type of person who scoffs at the idea of using a plain-text protocol

As a system / network administrator your daily duties and responsibilities will include:

• Providing day-to-day Desktop, Server and Network administration, including helping plakkers (the name we give to all who work at SensePost) with their devices


• Be capable of using a variety of operating systems


• Ensuring our disaster recovery plan is working as it should


• Being the go to person to all those who require assistance with their IT


• Maintaining and administer the telecommunications system


• Administering the network to ensure that the systems in place run effectively and securely (we are, after all, a security company!)


• A real passion for finding technology led solutions to problems.


• Be excited about Unix firewalls, Cisco routers, wrangling network packets, VPN tunnelling and Wi-Fi


• Able to hold a conversation and smile when mentioning SMTP/HTTP/IMAP/Python

Not essential, but bonus points for:

• Actually getting a linux laptop to use an overhead projector, without resorting to swear words in Spanish and Afrikaans


• Administering a Windows server without complaining, at all, not once, in fact, you actually kinda enjoy it.


• Being really passionate about security and showing it doesn't have to get in the way of working productively.

If the above has got you thinking 'weird, it's like they are talking to me bru!' then we want to hear from you. Send us a carrier pigeon message or send us a mail

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) recently hosted the nation Cyber Games Challenge as part of Cyber Security Awareness month. The challenge pit teams of 4-5 members from different institutes against each other in a Capture the Flag style contest. In total there were seven teams, with two teams from Rhodes university, two from the University of Pretoria and three teams from the CSIR.

The games were designed around an attack/defence scenario, where teams would be given identical infrastructure which they could then patch against vulnerabilities and at the same time identify possible attack vectors to use against rival teams. After the initial reconnaissance phase teams were expected to conduct a basic forensic investigation to find 'flags' hidden throughout their systems. These 'flags' were hidden in images, pcap files, alternative data streams and in plain sight.

It was planned that teams would then be given access to a few web servers to attack and deface, gain root, patch and do other fun things to. Once this phase was complete the system would be opened up and the 'free-for-all' phase would see teams attacking each others systems. Teams would lose points for each service that was rendered inaccessible. Unfortunately due to technical difficulties the competition did not go as smoothly as initially planned. Once the games started the main website was rendered unusable almost immediately due to teams DirBuster to enumerate the competition scoring system. The offending teams were asked to cease their actions and the games proceeding from there. Two teams were disqualified after not ceasing their attacks on official infrastructure. Once teams tried to access their virtual infrastructure new problems arose, with only the two teams from Rhodes being able to access the ESX server while the rest of the teams based at the CSIR had no connectivity. This was rectified, at a cost, resulting in all teams except for the two Rhodes teams having access to their infrastructure. After a few hours of struggle it was decided to scrap the attack/defence part of the challenge. Teams were awarded points for finding hidden flags, with the most basic flag involving 'decoding' a morse-code pattern or a phrase 'encrypted' using a quadratic equation. It was unfortunate that the virtual infrastructure did not work as planned as this was to be the main focus of the games and sadly without it many teams were left with very little to do in the time between new 'flag' challenges being released.

In the days prior to the challenge our team, team Blitzkrieg, decided to conduct a social engineering exercise. We expected this to add to the spirit of the games and to introduce a little friendly rivalry between the teams prior to the games commencing. A quick google search for "CSIR Cyber Games" revealed a misconfigured cyber games server that had been left exposed on a public interface. Scrapping this page for information allowed us to create a fake Cyber Games site. A fake Twitter account was created on behalf of the CSIR Cyber Games organisers and used to tweet little titbits of disinformation. Once we had set-up our fake site and twitter account, a spoofed email in the name of the games organiser was sent out to all the team captains. Teams were invited to follow our fake user on twitter and to register on our cyber games page. Unfortunately this exercise did not go down too well with the games organisers and our team was threatened with disqualification or starting the games on negative points. In hindsight we should have run this by the organisers first to insure that it was within scope. After the incident we engaged with the organisers to explain our position and intentions, they were very understanding and decided to not disqualify us and waver any point based penalty. As part of our apology, we agreed to submit a few challenges for next years Cyber Games.

Overall we believe concept of using structured Cyber Games to promote security awareness is both fun and useful. While the games were hampered by network issues there was enough content available to make for an entertaining and exciting afternoon. The rush of solving challenges as fast as possible and everyone communicating ideas made for an epic day. In closing, the CSIR Cyber Games was a success, as with all things we believe it will improve over time and provide a good platform to promote security awareness.

For the defacement phase of the games we made a old school defacement page.

This year, for the fourth time, myself and some others here at SensePost have worked together with the team from ITWeb in the planning of their annual Security Summit. A commercial conference is always (I suspect) a delicate balance between the different drivers from business, technology and 'industry', but this year's event is definitely our best effort thus far. ITWeb has more than ever acknowledged the centrality of good, objective content and has worked closely with us as the Technical Committee and their various sponsors to strike the optimal balance. I don't think we have it 100% right yet, and there are some improvements and initiatives that will unfortunately only manifest at next year's event, but this year's program (here and here) is nevertheless first class and comparable with almost anything else I've seen.

Dominic White was interviewed for a short video that sums it all up quite nicely.

<Shameless plug>If you're in South Africa, and you haven't registered, I highly recommend that you do</Shameless plug>

This year's Summit explores the idea that trust in CyberSpace is "broken" and that, one for one, all the pillars we relied on to tame the Internet and make it a safe place to do business in, have failed. Basically the event poses the question: "What now"?

We've tried hard to get all our speakers to align in some way with this theme. Sadly, as is often he case, we had fewer submissions from local experts then we hoped, but we were able to round up a pretty killer program, including an VIP list of visiting stars.

After the plenaries each day, the program is divided into themed tracks where talks on a topic are grouped together. Where possible we've tried to include as many different perspectives and opinions as possible. Here's a brief summary of my personal highlights:

Plenaries:

• Eddie Schwartz - "A State of Dynamic Risk: Containment and Victory in a World of Advanced Threats
• Moxie Marlinspike - "The demise of SSL & Internet Trust"
• Kenneth Geers - "Cyber War - Beyond Theory"
• Charlie Miller - "Banned in the USA"
• Joshua Corman - "Where do we go from here? Adapting to modern adversaries"
• Haroon Meer - "Information Security: The things we dont say…"

Finally, there's excellent looking full-day workshop titled "Security in an era of BYOD" with Dan Crisp and Lynn Terwoerds.

Its gonna be excellent. See you there!

We were asked to contribute an article to PenTest magazine, and chose to write up an introductory how-to on footprinting. We've republished it here for those interested.

Network foot printing is, perhaps, the first active step in the reconnaissance phase of an external network security engagement. This phase is often highly automated with little human interaction as the techniques appear, at first glance, to be easily applied in a general fashion across a broad range of targets. As a security analyst, footprinting is also one of the most enjoyable parts of my job as I attempt to outperform the automatons; it is all about finding that one target that everybody forgot about or did not even know they had, that one old IIS 5 webserver that is not used, but not powered off.

With this article I am going to share some of the steps, tips and tricks that pentesters and hackers alike use when starting on a engagement.

Approach

As with most things in life having a good approach to a problem will yield better results and overtime as your approach is refined you will consume less time while getting better results. By following a methodology, your footprinting will become more repeatable and thus reliable. A basic footprining methodology covers reconnaissance, DNS mining, various information services (e.g. whois, Robtex, routes), network registration information and active steps such as SSL host enumeration.

While the temptation exists to merely feed a domain name into a tool or script and take the output as your completed footprint, this will not yield a passable footprint for two reasons. Firstly, a single tool will not have access to all the disparate information sources that one should consult, and secondly the footprinting process is inherently iterative and continuous. A footprint is almost never complete; instead, a fork of the footprint data provides the best current view of the target, but the information could change tomorrow as new sites are brought online, or old sites are taken offline. As a new piece of data is found that could expand the footprint, a new iteration of the footprinting process triggers with that datum as the seed, and the results are combined with all discovered information.

Know your target

The very first thing to do is to get to know your target organisation. What they do, who they do it for, who does it for them, where they do it from - both online and in the kinetic world, what community or charity work they are involved in. This will give you an insight into what type of network/infrastructure you can expect. Reading public announcements, financial reports and any other documents published on or by the organisation might also yield interesting results. Any organisation that must publish regular reports (e.g. listed companies), provide a treasure trove of information for understanding the target's core business units, corporate hierarchy and lines of business. All these become very useful when selecting targets.

Dumpster diving, if you are up for it and have physical access to the target, means sifting through trash to get useful information, but in recent times social media can provide us with even more. Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can provide you with lists of employees and projects that the organisation is involved with and perhaps even information about third party products and suppliers that are in use.

One should even keep an eye out for evidence of previous breaches or loss of credentials. It has become common place for hackers to post information about security breaches on sites like pastebin.com. The most likely evidence would be credentials in the form of corporate emails and passwords being reused on unrelated sites that are hacked, and have their user databases uploaded. In addition, developers use sites like Pastebin to share code, ideas and patches, and if you are lucky you might just find a little snippet of code sitting out in the open on Pastebin, that will give you the edge.

DNS

“The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network.” — WikiPedia

In a nutshell, DNS is used to convert computer names to their numeric addresses.

Start by enumerating every possible domain owned by the target. This is where the information from the initial reconnaissance phase comes in handy, as the target's website will likely point to external domains of interest and also help you guess at possible names. With a list of most discovered domains in hand, move on to a TLD (Top level domain) expand. TLDs are the highest level subdomains in DNS; .com, .net, .za, .mobi are all examples of TLDs (The Mozilla Organization maintains a list of TLDs https://wiki.mozilla.org/TLD_List).

In the next step, we take a discovered discovered domain and check to see if there are any other domains with the same name, but with a different TLD. For example, if the target has the domain victim.com, test whether the domains victim.net, victim.info, victim.org etc. exist and if they exist check to see if they are owned by our target organization. To determine whether a domain exists or not, one should examine the SOA (start of authority) DNS record for the domain. Using commands like nslookup under Microsoft Windows or the dig/host commands under most of the *nix family will reveal SOA records.

Using dig, “dig zonetransfer.me soa”.

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Figure 1: Using dig to get the SOA (Start of authority) record for a domain

If, by verifying the SOA, it is confirmed that the domain exists, then the next step is to track down who it belongs to. At this point the whois service is called upon. ‘Whois' is simply a registry that contains the information of the owner of a domain. Note that it is not entirely reliable and certainly not consistent. The following very simple query “whois zonetransfer.me” provides us with the owner of the domain “zonetransfer.me” detail.

Figure 2: Using whois to get the domain owner detail

After finding domains, running them through a TLD expansion and verifying their whois information, it is time to track down hosts. First we need to get the NS or name server records for the domains. Again using “dig zonetransfer.me ns” returns a list of all the name servers used by this domain. In many cases the name server will not be part of the target's network and is often out-of-scope, but they will still be used in the next step.

DNS yields much interesting information, but the default methods for extracting information from foreign servers effectively relies on a brute force. However, DNS supports a trick where all DNS information for a zone can be downloaded if the server allows it, and this is called a “zone transfer”. When enabled, they are extremely useful as they negate the need for guessing or brute-forcing; sadly they are commonly disabled. Still, given the usefulness of zone transfers it is always worth testing for. Zone transfers should be performed against all the name servers that are specified in the NS records of a domain as the data contained in each name server should be the same, but the security configuration might be different. Using dig, the following command will attempt to perform a zone transfer “dig axfr @ns12.zoneedit.com zonetransfer.me”

Figure 3: Performing a zone transfer using dig

As mentioned previously, zone transfers are not that common. When we cannot download the zone file, there are a couple of other tricks that might work. One is to brute force or guess host names: by using a long list of common hostnames one can test for names such as “fw.victim.com”, “intranet.victim.com”, “mail.victim.com” and so on. The names can be commonly seen hostnames, generated names when computers are assigned numeric or algorithmic names, or from sets of related names such as characters from a book series. When brute forcing DNS, be sure to check the following DNS records: CNAME, A and AAAA. Again this is easy using a tool like dig. “dig www.google.com a” produces the DNS configuration for www.google.com, note that the hostname www.google.com actually has multiple DNS entries, one CNAME record, and multiple A records. Looking at the IP addresses it is clear that there are several different hosts (2 in the screenshot below).

Figure 4: Using dig to get the a record for a host entry

Doing this manually seems easy and quick, (and it is) but if we want to brute force or guess many host names, then this will take too long. Of course, it is easy enough to script these commands to automate the process; however there are existing tools written specifically for this purpose. One of the most popular tools, Fierce, is a perl script written by RSnake (http://ha.ckers.org/fierce/), which is easy to use and has many useful functions. Additionally, there are tools like Paterva's Maltego and SensePost's Yeti (a tool I wrote) which provide graphical tools for this purpose.

If we happen to have a list of IP addresses or IP netblocks of the target, then a further DNS trick is to convert the addresses into hostnames using reverse lookups to get the PTR record entry. This is useful since reverse records are easily brute forced in IPv4. Bear in mind that DNS does not require a PTR record (reverse entry) or that entries in the reverse zone must match entries in the forward zone. But the result can give you an idea of whether the host is a shared host, owned and hosted by the company or just remote hosted.

To test once more, try using dig, “dig 104.66.194.173.in-addr.arpa ptr”. While this too can be easily automated, the previously mentioned tools will also handle PTR records.

Search engines:

DNS interrogation and mining forms the bulk foot printing, but thanks to modern search engines like Google and Bing, finding targets has become much easier.

Apart from the normal searching for your target, as you would do in your initial phase, you can actually use the data that you discovered during the course of the DNS mining to try and get further information using search engines. Bing from Microsoft provides us with two really useful search operators: “ip:” and “site:”. When using the “ip:” operator, Bing will return a list of hosts that it has indexed that resolve to the IP address that you have specified. Alternatively the “site:” operator when used with a domain name, will return a list of host names that have been indexed by the search engine and belong to the domain specified. Quick and easy, and Bing also provides you with a very simple free API that you can use to automate these searches.

Address mapping

All this fuss with DNS is important, but it is only useful insofar as they lead us to addresses. The next step is discovering where the target exists within the IP address space. Luckily useful tools and resources exist to help us uncover these ranges, by automating a combination of manual techniques such as whois querying, traceroute and netblock calculators. In the previous section the whois tool was used to get the domain owner information. The same tool can be used to discover the ownership/assignment details of a specific IP address. Let's take www.facebook.com; one of the IP addresses that it resolves to is 69.63.190.10. “whois 69.63.190.10” produces the following output.

Figure 5: Getting the netblock and owner using whois

From the whois output we get really useful information. First is a netblock range 69.63.176.0-69.63.190.255 as well as the owner of this net block, namely Facebook, Inc. In this case we are lucky and the netblock is registered to facebook, but often you will only get the network service provider to which the netblock is allocated to. In that case, you will have to query the service provider in order to gain more info about the specific netblock. Online resources can also be very useful, for example ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) or any of the other regional registries (RIPE, AfriNIC, APNIC and LACNIC) provides a reverse whois search interface where one can search for organisation names and other terms, even performing wild card searches. Giving Facebook a second look, we try a search on the reverse whois interface found at http://whois.arin.net/ with the term “facebook”, and get a list of five additional network ranges.

Figure 6: Search results for ARIN reverse whois

SSL Certificates

Lastly, we turn to SSL. SSL may be more familiar as a “protection” against nasty eavesdroppers and men-in-the-middle, but it is useful for footprinters. How? It is really simple actually, one of the security checks performed by browsers when deciding on the validity of a SSL certificate is whether the Common Name contained in the certificate matches the DNS name of the host requested from the browser. How does this help? Say a list of IP addresses has been produced; the next step would be to perform a reverse lookup of all these addresses. However, if no reverse entry is present and Bing has no record of the IP, then some creativity is called for. If an HTTPS website is hosted on that address then simply browse to that IP address and, when presented with the invalid certificate error, message, look for the “real” host name.

Figure 7: Firefox reporting the common name contained in a SSL certificate for a host

Again, this is something that is easily automated, so we have included a module in Yeti to actually do this for you.

Conclusion

Foot printing might at first glance appear to be simple and mundane, but the more you do it, the more you will realise that very few organisations have a handle on exactly what they have and what they present to the Internet. As the Internet and networks evolve so will the way companies and organisations use it, and so will their footprint. A year-old footprint could be hopelessly outdated, and ongoing footprinting helps organisations maintain a current view of their threat landscape.

With the ongoing move away from local infrastructure to hosted infrastructure, the footprint expands, spreads and grows, and so will our quest to find as much as possible.

By the year 2015 sub-Saharan Africa will have more people with mobile network access than with access to electricity at home.

This remarkable fact from a 2011 MobileMonday report [1] came to mind again as I read an article just yesterday about the introduction of Mobile Money in the UK: By the start of next year, every bank customer in the country may have the ability to transfer cash between bank accounts, using an app on their mobile phone. [2]

I originally came across the MobileMonday report while researching the question of mobility and security in Africa for a conference I was asked to present at [3]. In this presentation I examine the global growth and impact of the so-called mobile revolution and then its relevance to Africa, before looking at some of the potential security implications this revolution will have.

The bit about the mobile revolution is easy: According to the Economist there will be 10 billion mobile devices connected to the Internet by 2020, and the number of mobile devices will surpass the number of PCs and laptops by this year already. The mobile-only Internet population will grow 56-fold from 14 million at the end of 2010 to 788 million by the end of 2015. Consumerization - the trend for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business organizations, resulting in the convergence of the IT and consumer electronics industries - implies that the end-user is defining the roadmap for these technologies as manufacturers, networks and businesses scramble desperately to absorb their impact.

Africa, languishing behind in so many other respects, is right there on the rushing face of this new wave, as my initial quote illustrates. In fact the kind of mobile payment technology referred to in the BBC article is already quite prevalent in our home markets in Africa and we're frequently engaged to test mobile application security in various forms. In my presentation for example, I make reference to m-Pesa - the mobile payments system launched in Kenya and now mimicked in South Africa also. Six million people in Kenya use m-Pesa, and more than 5% of that country's annual GDP is moved to and fro directly from mobile to mobile. There are nearly five times the number of m-Pesa outlets than the total number of PostBank branches, post offices, bank branches, and automated teller machines (ATMs) in the country combined.

Closer to home in South Africa, it is estimated that the number of people with mobile phones outstrips the number of people with fixed-line Internet connections by a factor of ten! And this impacts our clients and their businesses directly: Approximately 44% of urban cellphone users in South Africa now make use of mobile banking services. The reasoning is clear: Where fixed infrastructure is poor mobile will dominate, and where the mobile dominates mobile services will soon follow. Mobile banking, mobile wallets, mobile TV and mobile social networking and mobile strong-authentication systems are all already prevalent here in South Africa and are already bringing with them the expected new array of security challenges. Understanding this is one of the reasons our customers come to us.

In my presentation I describe the Mobile Threat Model as having three key facets:

• Security: The challenge of ensuring Confidentiality, Integrity and Authenticity for the data and transactions on the device;
• Privacy: The implications of mobility (and especially convergence) for citizens and their rights to talk, move, think and act unobserved; and
• Control: The challenge presented by the mobile revolution to governments fighting crime, gangsterism and terrorism.

All of these issues are real and complex, but I'm restricting myself to the security question here. I encourage readers to peruse the presentation itself for a full breakdown of the Threat Model because for this article I think it suffices to consider just the conclusion of my presentation, and it's this:

The technical security issues we discover on mobile devices and mobile applications today are really no different from what we've been finding in other environments for years. There are some interesting new variations and interesting new attack vectors, but it's really just a new flavor of the same thing. But there are four attributes of the modern mobile landscape that combine to present us with an entirely new challenge:

Firstly, mobiles are highly connected. The mobile phone is permanently on some IP network and by extension permanently on the Internet. However, it's also connected via GSM and CDMA; it's connected with your PC via USB, your Bluetooth headset and your GPS, and soon it will be connected with other devices in your vicinity via NFC. Never before in our history have communications been so converged, and all via the wallet-sized device in your pocket right now!

Secondly, the mobile device is deeply integrated. On or through this platform is everything anyone would ever want to know about you: Your location, your phone calls, your messages, your personal data, your photos, your location, your location history and your entire social network. Indeed, in an increasing number of technical paradigms, your mobile device is you! Moreover, the device has the ability to collect, store and transmit everything you say, see and hear, and everywhere you go!

Thirdly, as I've pointed out, mobile devices are incredibly widely distributed. Basically, everyone has one or soon will. And, we're rapidly steering towards a homogenous environment defined by IOS and Google's Android. Imagine the effect this has on the value of an exploit or attack vector. Finally, the mobile landscape is still being very, very poorly managed. Except for the Apple AppStore, and recent advances by Google to manage the Android market, there is extremely little by way of standardization, automated patching or central management to be seen. Most devices, once deployed, will stay in commission for years to come and so security mistakes being made now are likely to become a nightmare for us in the future.

Thus, the technical issues well known from years of security testing in traditional environments are destined to prevail in mobile, and we're already seeing this in the environments we've tested. This reality, combined with how connected, integrated, distributed and poorly managed these platforms are, suggests that careless decisions today could cost us very dearly in the future...

[1] Mobile Africa Report 2011, Regional Hubs of Excellence and Innovation by Dr Madanmohan Rao, Research Project Director, MobileMonday March 2011

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17115946

[3] http://prezi.com/as-szhrug5zr/examining-the-impact-of-the-adoption-of-mobile-devices-throughout-africa-and-the-subsequent-rise-of-security-related-risks-sensepost-information-security/