Category Archives: Pen Testing & Vuln Mgmt

Intruder Pro Game Launched in GPT Store

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Thanks to the launch of the OpenAI GPT Store, I am proud to announce the immediate availability of a new penetration testing game and hack-the-box simulation platform – Intruder Pro. 

Though not a product of MicroSolved, it is personally designed by our CEO and Security Evangelist, L. Brent Huston. 

The GPT is a text-based role-playing game that simulates real-world penetration tests and hack-the-box games. It leverages real-world tools, and teaches you a bit along the way. 

Even better, you can get a new simulation with new targets and new services to exploit every single game! The system can also provide coaching and score your efforts at any time in the game.

Feedback has been great, and people all around the world are playing, learning, and gaining insights about information security all at the same time. 

Check it out by clicking here and let me know on Twitter (@lbhuston) what you think! 

Keeping Track of Your Attack Surfaces

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In the modern, digitally connected realm, the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” could have calamitous implications for organizations. As cyber adversaries incessantly evolve in their nefarious techniques, staying ahead in the cybersecurity arms race is imperative. One robust strategy that has emerged on the horizon is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) programs. These programs are pivotal in enabling organizations to meticulously understand and manage their attack surface, thus forming a resilient shield against malicious onslaughts such as ransomware attacks.

A deeper dive into CTEM unveils its essence: it’s an ongoing vigilance protocol rather than a one-off checklist. CTEM programs provide a lucid view of the potential vulnerabilities and exposures that adversaries could exploit by continuously scanning, analyzing, and evaluating the organization’s digital footprint. This proactive approach transcends the conventional reactive models, paving the way for a fortified cybersecurity posture.

Linking the dots between CTEM and ransomware mitigation reveals a compelling narrative. Ransomware attacks have metamorphosed into a menace that spares no industry. The grim repercussions of these attacks underscore the urgency for proactive threat management. As elucidated in our previous blog post on preventing and mitigating ransomware attacks, a proactive stance is worth its weight in digital gold. Continuous Threat Exposure Management acts as a linchpin in this endeavor by offering a dynamic, real-time insight into the organization’s attack surface, enabling timely identification and remediation of vulnerabilities.

MicroSolved (MSI) stands at the forefront in championing the cause of proactive cybersecurity through its avant-garde CTEM solutions. Our offerings are meticulously crafted to provide a panoramic view of your attack surface, ensuring no stone is left unturned in identifying and mitigating potential threats. The amalgamation of cutting-edge technology with seasoned expertise empowers organizations to stay several strides ahead of cyber adversaries.

As cyber threats loom larger, embracing Continuous Threat Exposure Management is not just an option but a quintessential necessity. The journey towards a robust cybersecurity posture begins with a single step: understanding your attack surface through a lens of continuous vigilance.

We invite you to contact MicroSolved (MSI) to explore how our CTEM solutions can be the cornerstone in your quest for cyber resilience. Our adept team is poised to guide you through a tailored roadmap that aligns with your unique organizational needs and objectives. The digital realm is fraught with peril, but with MicroSolved by your side, you can navigate through it with confidence and assurance.

Contact us today and embark on a journey towards transcending the conventional boundaries of cybersecurity, ensuring a safe and secure digital sojourn for your organization.

* Just to let you know, we used some AI tools to gather the information for this article, and we polished it up with Grammarly to make sure it reads just right!

Example of Pole Mounted Device Threats Visualized

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As a part of our threat modeling work, which we do sometimes as a stand-alone activity or as part of an deeper assessment, we often build simple mind maps of the high level threats we identify. Here is an example of a very simple diagram we did recently while working on a threat model for pole mounted environments (PME’s) for a utility client. 

This is only part of the work plan, but I am putting it forward as a sort of guideline to help folks understand our process. In most cases, we continually expand on the diagram throughout the engagement, often adding links to photos or videos of the testing and results. 

We find this a useful way to convey much of the engagement details with clients as we progress. 

Does your current assessment or threat modeling use visual tools like this? If not, why not? If so, drop me a line on Twitter (@lbhuston) and tell me about it. 

Thanks for reading! 

Pole Mounted Environment Threats

Car Dealership Threat Scenario – Wireless Printer Hacking AP Fraud

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Today, I wanted to talk about a threat scenario that we have modeled recently. In the scenario, the victim was a car dealership, and the target was to commit accounts payable fraud. The testing scenario is a penetration test against a large group of car dealerships, but our research shows the threat to be valid against any number of organizations. 

Here’s the basics of the scenario:

  • The team found a car dealership with an extensive wireless network. Though the network was encrypted and not available to the public, the team was able to compromise the wireless credentials using a wifi pineapple in a backpack, while pretending to shop for a new car.
  • The team used the credentials to return later, appearing to wait for a service visit and working from the customer lounge. (The coffee and snacks were great! )
  • The team logged into the wireless network and quickly identified many devices, workstations and such available. Rather than focus on the workstations or attempt an attack on the users – the team instead focused on the shared printers.
  • One printer was identified with the name “BackOffice”, and access to the print spool was easily obtained through known default passwords which hadn’t been changed on the device.
  • Our team made notes of attack their recon attack path, and left the dealership.
  • Once away from the dealership a couple of simple social engineering calls were made to the accounts payable folks, pretending to be a vendor that we had observed at work at the facility. Without any real information, the accounts payable team member explained when we could expect payment, because accounts payable checks were processed every Thursday morning. The social engineer thanked them and completed the call.
  • On Thursday morning, the team showed up at the dealership again, pretending to wait for a service appointment. While in the lounge, they accessed the compromised network and printer. This time, taking deeper control of the printer’s file buffer.
  • The team waited for the accounts payable staff to submit their weekly check printing to the printer. Indeed, around 10:45, the printer file showed up in the printer spool, where our penetration testing team intercepted it. 
  • The team quickly edited the file, changing one of the checks in amount (increasing the amount by several thousand dollars) and the payee (making the check payable to a fictional company of our choosing). They also edited the mailing address to come to our office instead of the original vendor. (PS – we alerted the manager to this issue, so that the bill could be paid later — never harm a client while doing testing!!!)
  • The file was then re-sent to the printer and released. The whole process occurred in under 3 minutes, so the AP person never even noticed the issue.
  • One expected control was that perhaps the AP staff would manually reconcile the checks against their expected checks, but this control was not in place and the fake check was mailed to us (we returned it, of course!).

This is a pretty simple attack, against a very commonly exploitable platform. Poor wireless network security and default installs of printer systems are common issues, and often not given much thought in most dealerships. Even when organizations have firewalls and ongoing vulnerability scanning, desktop controls, Anti-Virus, etc. – this type of attack is likely to work. Most organizations ignore their printers – and this is an example of how that can bite you.

These types of threat scenarios are great examples of our services and the threat modeling, fraud testing and penetration testing available. If you’d like to learn more about these kinds of activities, or discuss how to have them performed for your organization – get in touch. You can contact us via web form or give us a call at (614) 351-1237. You can also learn more about our role and services specific to car dealerships here.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions – @lbhuston on Twitter.

3 Lessons From 30 Years of Penetration Testing

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I’ve been doing penetration tests for 30 years and here are 3 things that have stuck with me.

I’ve been doing penetration testing for around 3 decades now. I started doing security testing back when the majority of the world was dial-up access to systems. I’ve worked on thousands of devices, systems, network and applications – from the most sensitive systems in the world to some of the dumbest and most inane mobile apps (you know who you are…) that still have in-game purchases. 

Over that time, these three lessons have stayed with me. They may not be the biggest lessons I’ve learned, or the most impactful, but they are the ones that have stuck with me in my career the longest. 

Lesson 1: The small things make or break a penetration test. The devil loves to hide in the details.

Often people love to hear about the huge security issues. They thrill or gasp at the times when you find that breathtaking hole that causes the whole thing to collapse. But, for me, the vulnerabilities that I’m most proud of, looking back across my career are the more nuanced ones. The ones where I noticed something small and seemingly deeply detailed. You know the issues like this, you talk about them to the developer and they respond with “So what?” and then you show them that small mistake opens a window that allows you to causally step inside to steal their most critical data…

Time and time again, I’ve seen nuance vulnerabilities hidden in encoded strings or hex values. Bad assumptions disguised in application session management or poorly engineered work flows. I’ve seen developers and engineers make mistakes that are so deeply hidden in the protocol exchanges or packet stream that anyone just running automated tools would have missed it. Those are my favorites. So, my penetration testing friend, pay attention to the deep details. Lots of devils hide there, and a few of those can often lead to the promised land. Do the hard work. Test every attack surface and threat vector, even if the other surfaces resisted, sometimes you can find a subtle, almost hidden attack surface that no one else noticed and make use of it.

Lesson 2: A penetration test is usually judged by the report. Master report writing to become a better penetration tester. 

This is one of the hardest things for my mentees to grasp. You can geek out with other testers and security nerds about your latest uber stack smash or the elegant way you optimized the memory space of your exploit – but customers won’t care. Save yourself the heartbreak and disappointment, and save them the glazed eyes look that comes about when you present it to them. They ONLY CARE about the report.

The report has to be well written. It has to be clear. It has to be concise. It has to have make them understand what you did, what you found and what they need to do about it. The more pictures, screen shots, graphs and middle-school-level language, the better. They aren’t dumb, or ignorant, they just have other work to do and need the information they need to action against in the cleanest, clearest and fastest way possible. They don’t want to Google technical terms and they have no patience for jargon. So, say it clear and say it in the shortest way possible if you want to be the best penetration tester they’ve seen. 

That’s hard to swallow. I know. But, you can always jump on Twitter or Slack and tell us all about your L33T skillz and the newest SQL technique you just discovered. Even better, document it and share it with other testers so that we all get better.

Lesson 3: Penetration tests aren’t always useful. They can be harmful.

Lastly, penetration tests aren’t always a help. They can cause some damage, to weak infrastructures, or to careers. Breaking things usually comes with a cost, and delivering critical failure news to upper management is not without its risks. I’ve seen CIOs and CISOs lose their jobs due to a penetration test report. I’ve seen upper management and boards respond in entirely unkind and often undeserved ways. In fact, if you don’t know what assets your organization has to protect, what controls you have and/or haven’t done some level of basic blocking and tackling – forget pen-testing altogether and skip to an inventory, vulnerability assessment, risk assessment or mapping engagement. Save the pen-testing cost and dangerous results for when you have more situational awareness. 

Penetration testing is often good at finding the low water mark. It often reveals least resistant paths and common areas of failure. Unfortunately, these are often left open by a lack of basic blocking and tackling. While it’s good news that basics go a long way to protecting us and our data, the bad news is that real-world attackers are capable of much more. Finding those edge cases, the things that go beyond the basics, the attack vectors less traveled, the bad assumptions, the short cut and/or the thing you missed when you’re doing the basics well – that’s when penetration tests have their biggest payoffs.

Want to talk more about penetration testing, these lessons or finding the right vulnerability management engagement for your organization? No problem, get in touch and I’ll be happy to discuss how MicroSolved can help. We can do it safely, make sure it is the best type of engagement for your maturity level and help you drive your security program forward. Our reports will be clean, concise and well written. And, we’ll pay attention to the details, I promise you that. 🙂 

To get in touch, give me a call at (614) 351-1237, drop me a line via this webform or reach out on Twitter (@lbhuston). I love to talk about infosec and penetration testing. It’s not just my career, but also my passion.

3 Reasons You Need Customized Threat Intelligence

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Many clients have been asking us about our customized threat intelligence services and how to best use the data that we can provide.

1. Using HoneyPoint™, we can deploy fake systems and applications, both internally and in key external situations that allow you to generate real-time, specific to your organization, indicators of compromise (IoC) data – including a wide variety of threat source information for blacklisting, baseline metrics to make it easy to measure changes in the levels of threat actions against your organization up to the moment, and a wide variety of scenarios for application and attack surface hardening.

2. Our SilentTiger™ passive assessments, can help you provide a wider lens for vulnerability assessment visibility than your perimeter, specifically. It can be used to assess, either single instance or ongoing, the security posture of locations where your brand is extended to business partners, cloud providers, supply chain vendors, critical dependency API and data flows and other systems well beyond your perimeter. Since the testing is passive, you don’t need permission, contract language or control of the systems being assessed. You can get the data in a stable, familiar format – very similar to vulnerability scanning reports or via customized data feeds into your SEIM/GRC/Ticketing tools or the like. This means you can be more vigilant against more attack surfaces without more effort and more resources.

3. Our customized TigerTrax™ Targeted Threat Intelligence (TTI) offerings can be used for brand specific monitoring around the world, answering specific research questions based on industry / geographic / demographic / psychographic profiles or even products / patents or economic threat research. If you want to know how your brand is being perceived, discussed or threatened around the world, this service can provide that either as a one-time deliverable, or as an ongoing periodic service. If you want our intelligence analysts to look at industry trends, fraud, underground economics, changing activist or attacker tactics and the way they collide with your industry or organization – this is the service that can provide that data to you in a clear and concise manner that lets you take real-world actions.

We have been offering many of these services to select clients for the last several years. Only recently have we decided to offer them to our wider client and reader base. If you’d like to learn how others are using the data or how they are actively hardening their environments and operations based on real-world data and trends, let us know. We’d love to discuss it with you! 

Sometimes, It Happens…

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Sometimes things fail in interesting ways. Sometimes they fail in dangerous ways. Occasionally, things fail in ways that you simply can’t predict and that are astounding.

In a recent assessment of a consumer device in our lab, we found the usual host of vulnerabilities that we have come to expect in Internet of Things (IoT) devices. But, while testing this particular device, which is also tied to a cloud offering for backup and centralization of data – I never would have predicted that a local device would have a full bi-directional trust with a virtual instance in the cloud.

Popping the local device was easy. It had an easy to compromise “hidden” TCP port for telnet. It took my brute force tool only moments to find a default login and password credential set. That’s pretty usual with IoT devices.

But, once I started poking around inside the device, it quickly became apparent that the device configuration was such that it tried to stay continually connected to a VM instance in the “cloud storage and synchronization” environment associated with the device and vendor. How strong was the trust? The local device had mount points on the remote machine and both systems had full trust to each other via a telnet connection. From the local machine, simply telnet to the remote machine on the right port, and without credential check, you have a shell inside the cloud. Not good…

But, as clear of a failure as the scenario above was, the rabbit hole went deeper. From the cloud VM, you could see thousands of other VMs in the hosted cloud environment. Connect from the VM to another, and you need the default credentials again, but, no sweat, they work and work and work…

So, from brute force compromise of a local piece of consumer hardware to a compromise of thousands of cloud instance VMs in less than 30 minutes. Ugh… 

Oh yeah, remember that storage centralization thing? Yep, default credentials will easily let you look through the centralized files on all those cloud VMs. Double ugh…

Remember, I said bi-directional? Yes, indeed, a connection from a VM to an end-point IoT device also works with assumed trust, and you get a shell on a device with local network visibility. Now is the time you kinda get sick to your stomach…

These kinds of scenarios are becoming more common as new IoT devices get introduced into our lives. Yes, the manufacturer has been advised, but, closing the holes will take a complete redesign of the product. The moral of this story is to pay careful attention to IoT devices. Ask questions. Audit. Assess. Test. There are a lot of bad security decisions being made out there in the IoT marketplace, especially around consumer products. Buyer beware!

Getting Smart with Mobile App GeoLocation to Fight Fraud

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If your mobile application includes purchases with credit cards, and a pickup of the merchandise, then you should pay attention to this.

Recently, in our testing lab and during an intelligence engagement, we identified a fraud mechanism where stolen credit cards were being used via the mobile app in question, to fraudulently purchase goods. In fact, the attackers were selling the purchase of the goods as a service on auction and market sites on the dark web.

The scam works like this. The bad guys have stolen credit cards (track data, likely from dumps), which they use to make a purchase for their client remotely. The bad guys use their stolen track data as a card not present transaction, which is standard for mobile apps. The bad guys have access to huge numbers of stolen cards, so they can burn them at a substantial rate without impacting their inventory to a large extent. The bad guy’s customer spends $25 in bitcoins to get up to $100 in merchandise. The bad guy takes the order from the dark net, uses the mobile app to place the order, and then delivers the receipt and/or pickup information to the bad guys customer. The customer then walks into the retailer and shows the receipt for their mobile order, picking up the merchandise and leaving.

The bad guy gets paid via the bitcoins. For them, this is an extremely low risk way to convert stolen credit card info to cash. It is significantly less risky for them than doing physical card replication, ATM use or other conversion methods that have a requirement for physical interaction.

The bad guy’s customer gets paid by picking up the merchandise. They get up to $100 value for a cost of $25. They take on some risk, but if performed properly, the scam is low risk to them, or so they believe. In the odd event, they simply leave the store after making their demands for satisfaction. There is little risk of arrest or prosecution, it would seem, especially at the low rate of $100 – or at least that was how the bad guy was pitching it to their prospective customers…

The credit card issuer or the merchant gets stuck. They are out the merchandise and/or the money, depending on their location in the world, and the merchant agreement/charge back/PCI compliance issues they face.

Understanding the fraud and motivations of the bad guys is critical for securing the systems in play. Organizations could up their validation techniques and vigilance for mobile orders. They could add additional fraudulent transaction heuristics to their capability. They could also implement geo-location on the mobile apps as a control – i.e.. If the order is being physically placed on a device in Ukraine, and pick up is in New York, there is a higher level of risk associated with that transaction. Identifying ways  to leverage the sensors and data points from a mobile device, and rolling it into fraud detection heuristics and machine learning analytics is the next wave of security for some of these applications. We are pleased to be helping clients get there…

To hear more about modern fraud techniques, application security testing or targeted threat intelligence like what we discussed above, drop us a line (info at microsolved dot com) or via Twitter (@lbhuston). We look forward to discussing it with your team.

Hosting Providers Matter as Business Partners

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Hosting providers seem to be an often overlooked exposure area for many small and mid-size organizations. In the last several weeks, as we have been growing the use of our passive assessment platform for supply chain assessments, we have identified several instances where the web site hosting company (or design/development company) is among the weakest links. Likely, this is due to the idea that these services are commodities and they are among the first areas where organizations look to lower costs.

The fall out of that issue, though, can be problematic. In some cases, organizations are finding themselves doing business with hosting providers who reduce their operational costs by failing to invest in information security.* Here are just a few of the most significant issues that we have seen in this space:
  • “PCI accredited” checkout pages hosted on the same server as other sites that are clearly under the control of an attacker
  • Exposed applications and services with default credentials on the same systems used to host web sites belonging to critical infrastructure organizations
  • Dangerous service exposures on hosted systems
  • Malware infested hosting provider ad pages, linked to hundreds or thousands of their client sites hosted with them
  • Poorly managed encryption that impacts hundreds or thousands of their hosted customer sites
  • An interesting correlation of blacklisted host density to geographic location and the targeted verticals that some hosting providers sell to
  • Pornography being distributed from the same physical and logical servers as traditional businesses and critical infrastructure organizations
  • A clear lack of DoS protection or monitoring
  • A clear lack of detection, investigation, incident response and recovery maturity on the part of many of the vendors 
It is very important that organizations realize that today, much of your risk extends well beyond the network and architectures under your direct control. Partners, and especially hosting companies and cloud providers, are part of your data footprint. They can represent significant portions of your risk, and yet, are areas where you may have very limited control. 
 
If you would like to learn more about using our passive assessment platform and our vendor supply chain security services to help you identify, manage and reduce your risk – please give us a call (614-351-1237) or drop us a line (info /at/ MicroSolved /dot/ com). We’d love to walk you through some of the findings we have identified and share some of the insights we have gleaned from our analysis.
 
Until next time, thanks for reading and stay safe out there!
 
*Caveat: This should not be taken that information security is correlated with cost. We have seen plenty of “high end”, high cost hosting companies with very poor security practices. The inverse is also true. Validation is the key…

Old School Google Hacking Still Works…

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Did some old school Google hacking last night.

“Filetype:xls & terms” still finds too much bad stuff.

Check for it lately for your organization?

Try other file types too. (doc/ppt/pdf/rtf, etc.)

Information leakage happens today, as it always has. Keeping an eye on it should be a part of your security program.