Hacking/attack experiences...
I'm, for obvious reasons, only going to talk about the attacks I went through and the *legal* ones I did 😅 😜

Let's first get some things clear/funny facts:
I've been doing offensive security since I was 14-15. Defensive since the age of 16-17. I'm getting close to 23 now, for the record.

First system ever hacked (metasploit exploit): Windows XP.
(To be clear, at home through a pentesting environment, all legal)
Easiest system ever hacked: Windows XP yet again.

Time it took me to crack/hack into today's OS's (remote + local exploits, don't remember which ones I used by the way):
Windows: XP - five seconds (damn, those metasploit exploits are powerful)
Windows Vista: Few minutes.
Windows 7: Few minutes.
Windows 10: Few minutes.
OSX (in general): 1 Hour (finding a good exploit took some time, got to root level easily aftewards. No, I do not remember how/what exactly, it's years and years ago)
Linux (Ubuntu): A month approx. Ended up using a Java applet through Firefox when that was still a thing. Literally had to click it manually xD
Linux: (RHEL based systems): Still not exploited, SELinux is powerful, motherfucker.

Keep in mind that I had a great pentesting setup back then 😊. I don't have nor do that anymore since I love defensive security more nowadays and simply don't have the time anymore.

Dealing with attacks and getting hacked.

Keep in mind that I manage around 20 servers (including vps's and dedi's) so I get the usual amount of ssh brute force attacks (thanks for keeping me safe, CSF!) which is about 40-50K every hour. Those ip's automatically get blocked after three failed attempts within 5 minutes. No root login allowed + rsa key login with freaking strong passwords/passphrases.

linu.xxx/much-security.nl - All kinds of attacks, application attacks, brute force, DDoS sometimes but that is also mostly mitigated at provider level, to name a few. So, except for my own tests and a few ddos's on both those domains, nothing really threatening. (as in, nothing seems to have fucked anything up yet)

How did I discover that two of my servers were hacked through brute forcers while no brute force protection was in place yet? installed a barebones ubuntu server onto both. They only come with system-default applications. Tried installing Nginx next day, port 80 was already in use. I always run 'pidof apache2' to make sure it isn't running and thought I'd run that for fun while I knew I didn't install it and it didn't come with the distro. It was actually running. Checked the auth logs and saw succesful root logins - fuck me - reinstalled the servers and installed Fail2Ban. It bans any ip address which had three failed ssh logins within 5 minutes:
Enabled Fail2Ban -> checked iptables (iptables -L) literally two seconds later: 100+ banned ip addresses - holy fuck, no wonder I got hacked!

One other kind/type of attack I get regularly but if it doesn't get much worse, I'll deal with that :)

Dealing with different kinds of attacks:

Web app attacks: extensively testing everything for security vulns before releasing it into the open.
Network attacks: Nginx rate limiting/CSF rate limiting against SYN DDoS attacks for example.
System attacks: Anti brute force software (Fail2Ban or CSF), anti rootkit software, AppArmor or (which I prefer) SELinux which actually catches quite some web app attacks as well and REGULARLY UPDATING THE SERVERS/SOFTWARE.

So yah, hereby :P

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

The best I have seen and exploited was years ago with a web shop that allowed me to set my own check-out price by just inspecting the element and setting the desired price. It just happily advanced to the next step where they invoked the payment provider with my custom price. Unfortunately the shop doesn't exist anymore. I have encountered many more security leaks but this one was so easy and lucrative to exploit.

Alright, the blog seems to be running again and its not breaking yet which is a good sign :P.

Although nothing has changed on the front end yet, the backend has been partly rewritten to be more efficient and of course, post sorting based on posting date!

I'm aware of most of the front end issues so no need to tell me all of them again, I'll look at that tomorrow as I need sleep right now :(

If you'd find any bugs/security issues, please, don't exploit them but report them instead! I take security very seriously and will try to patch any security bug as soon as I can :)

I've recently red a blog post stating 'Google leaves x Million Android devices vulnerable to a new Exploit'
I don't really sympathize with Google, but it's simply the wrong message... It should be more like FUCK VENDORS, WHO WON'T SUPPLY UPDATES TO DEVICES OLDER THAN 1.5 YEARS
Seriously, it's them who make you stuck on outdated OS versions... Just imagine you could only install Windows Vista on your 2014 Lenovo ThinkPad, because it's considered outdated...
FUCK VENDORS (again, just in case)

The company i work for has a jenkins server (for people that don't know jenkins, it's an automated build service that gets the latest git updates, pulls them and then builds, tests and deploys it)

Because it builds the software, people were scared to update it so we were running version 1.x for a long time, even when an exploit was found... Ooh boy did they learn from that...

The jenkins server had a hidden crypto miner running for about 5 days...

I don't know why we don't have detectors for that stuff... (like cpu load being high for 15 minutes)

I even tried to strengthen our security... You know basic stuff LIKE NOT SAVING PASSWORDS TO A GOOGLE SPREADSHEET! 😠

But they shoved it asside because they didn't have time... I tried multiple times but in the end i just gave up...

I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.

First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.

Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!

Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!

Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.

Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.

So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.

watching the online course for CEH... dude used the Death Star as a tangible example of how exploits work.
IDK if I should love it for the nerdiness, or be slightly sad that someone needs that type of example of what a vulnerability vs an exploit is, when they're going for the Certified Ethical Hacker certification...
Might be better in an introduction to Network Security class?

Also, while discussing the security, usability, and functionality triangle, he reference the Staples "Easy Button" - does one thing, not very secure, and not very functional (in that it has more than one function)...

So my story has some little backstory.

I got into computers and technology because of my dad. He was very enthusiastic when I was little and when I grew older and started my apprenticeship as a software developer he was really proud. Note that he never learned anything like that. He just loved computers and games.

Now to the story itself.
I learned more and more, also about networking and came to the conclusion that our slow internet and rare internet problems probably come from stock/weird configurations. But my dads proud probably told him thats a thing he still has to do as the dad. But it annoyed me so much that I booted into kali linux, loaded an exploit to get the web admin passwort and cracked it within a minute. 😎

Finally I was able to configure everything correctly ( channels were spammed from neighbours so I switched to very unused and the disturbions got less ).

TL;DR: Dad didnt want me to configure our router and didnt give me the admin password, so I booted Kali Linux and used an exploit to get it myself 😎😎

So today I found a way to break into any Apple Mac (provided the exploit hasn't been fixed by the owner) and access all private files, as long as I have physical access to it, in less than 5 minutes.

After finding this, a quick Google on the method reveals this has been a workaround for years.

And to think I once praised Apple for their security standards.

Edit: this was done to an in-house Mac that my company own, and had been password locked by a member of staff who had been fired, but held important company documents on the computer. It was in no way a breach of privacy.

A developer said to me: developers may hurry to finish the project before deadline that they might miss many security bugs specially in the updates. That a creative hacker will later take his time and exploit them.

Is it correct ?

I've been interested in security for years but despite knowing the theory I've always had this disconnect with actually doing it, about two years ago I finally managed to find and exploit my first cross-site scripting vulnerability in my companies Product whilst doing some routine acceptance testing. It was a penny drop moment for me which has led to some very interesting projects and It was pretty badass.

Ideal dev job would be teaching kids code. Probably a side-gig at a local school.

Main gig would be writing code to exploit the "push to prod" Internet of Things things. Security on that is garbage. 🚮

1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.

2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.

3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.

4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.

5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.

6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.

7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.

8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.

9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.

10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.

Ibwish I had remembered this when the weekly theme was office pranks.

In the first or second year of high school we covered basic internet security. Stuff like don't follow suspicious urls, don't open suspicious emails and such.

Our teacher let us play around with some sort of simulated desktop environment, where we could execute some hacks like ad popups and such on each other's environment, if we fell for the trap.

Anyways, one hack I found interesting was a hack, that lockes a user out of their virual desktop, until he enters a password, that will be displayed on his environment.

Yes, a very interesting hack, because it contains two obvious yet major design flaws, which I could exploit 😈

1. It's case sensitive
In itself not a problem, but combined with #2, it's fatal.
2. "IlIlllIlI"
Depending on your font, you probably have no idea what exactly I just typed.

Let's just say, the font displayed uppercase i and lowercase L completely undifferentiable.

Guess whom I let suffer.

It was our teacher, who had to demonstrate us some things and who was connected to the same network.

I swear, nothing beats that feeling when your tearcher has go come to you and embarrassingly ask you to "unhack" them, because they can't type it 😂

Pentesting for undisclosed company. Let's call them X as to not get us into trouble.
We are students and are doing our first pentest at an actual company instead of assignments at school. So we're very anxious. But today was a good day.
We found some servers with open ports so we checked a few of them out. I had a set of them with a bunch of open ports like ftp and... 8080. Time to check this out.
"please install flash player"... Security risk 1 found!

System seemed to be some monitoring system. Trying to log in using admin admin... Fucking works. Group loses it cause the company was being all high and mighty about being secure af. Other shit is pretty tight though.

Able to see logs, change password, add new superuser, do some searches for USERS_LOGGEDIN_TODAY! I shit you not, the system even had SUGGESTIONS for usernames to search for. One of which had something to do with sftp and auth keys. Unfortunatly every search gave a SQL syntax error. Used sniffing tools to maybe intercept message so we could do some queries of our own but nothing. Query is probably not issued from the local machine.

Tried to decompile the flash file but no luck. Only for some weird lines and a few function names I presume. But decompressing it and opening it in a text editor allowed me to see and search text. No GET or POST found. No SQL queries or name checks or anything we could think of.

That's all I could do for today. So we'll have to think of stuff for next week. We've already planned xss so maybe we can do that on this server as well.

We also found some older network printers with open telnet. Servers with a specific SQL variant with a potential exploit to execute terminal commands and some ftp and smb servers we need to check out next week.

Hella excited about this!

If you guys have any suggestions let us know. We are utter noobs when it comes to this.

Malwares are nasty applications, that can spy on you, use your computer as an attacker or encrypt your files and hold them on ransom.

The reason that malware exists, is because how the file system works. On Windows, everything can access everything. Of course, there are security measures, like needing administrator permissions to edit/delete a file, but they are exploitable.

If the malware is not using an exploit, nothing is there to stop a user from unknowingly clicking the yes button, when an application requests admin rights.

If we want to stop viruses, in the first place, we need to create a new file-sharing system.

Imagine, that every app has a partition, and only that app can access it.

Currently, when you download a Word document, you would go ahead, start up Word, go into the Downloads folder and open the file.

In the new file-sharing system, you would need to click "Send file to Word" in your browser, and the browser would create a copy of the file in a transfer-partition. Then, it would signal to Word, saying "Hey! Here's a file that I sent to you, copy it to your partition please!". After that, Word just copies the file to its own partition, signals "Ok! I'm done!", and then the browser deletes the file from the shared partition.

A little change in the interface, but a huge change in security.

The permission system would be a better UAC. The best way I can describe it is when you install an app on Android. It shows what permission the app wants, and you could choose to install it, or not to.

Replace "install" with "grant" and that's what I imagined.

Of course, there would be blacklisted permissions, that only kernel-level processes have access to, like accessing all of the partitions, modifying applications, etc.

What do you think?

So, there was this time I was a security intern for google, It was my first day as an intern tho :p and I got a little excited about exploring stuff and all at the workplace. Me having a large appetite was mesmerized by the food supplied over there.
I might have sat approximately 2 hours over there fantasizing about how much could I save over food by eating a lot over here and taking some to home.
Then came the SE/SDE guys over my place and we started discussing how there was a loophole here and how one could exploit it. All were heads over heels how was I making calculations for "my" property. All seemed to be pretty interested except for one guy. This guy was over excited how I was managing this and slacking off over the first day. He happened to be a senior lead architect, turns out he shows too much interest in anything he finds suspicious. This wasn't supposed to be rant, but yeah. My story.

After brute forced access to her hardware I spotted huge memory leak spreading on my key logger I just installed. She couldn’t resist right after my data reached her database so I inserted it once more to duplicate her primary key, she instantly locked my transaction and screamed so loud that all neighborhood was broadcasted with a message that exception is being raised. Right after she grabbed back of my stick just to push my exploit harder to it’s limits and make sure all stack trace is being logged into her security kernel log.
Fortunately my spyware was obfuscated and my metadata was hidden so despite she wanted to copy my code into her newly established kernel and clone it into new deadly weapon all my data went into temporary file I could flush right after my stick was unloaded.
Right after deeply scanning her localhost I removed my stick from her desktop and left the building, she was left alone again, loudly complaining about her security hole being exploited.
My work was done and I was preparing to break into another corporate security system.
- penetration tester diaries

PHP is so insecure and vulnerable that it makes me feel unsafe. It has so many features and settings that can lead to security risks, such as register_globals, magic_quotes, and allow_url_fopen. It also has so many functions that can execute arbitrary code or commands, such as eval, exec, and system.

It is like PHP was designed by a bunch of hackers who wanted to exploit every possible loophole.

Microsoft announced a new security feature for the Windows operating system.

According to a report of ZDNet: Named "Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection", which allows applications to use the local CPU hardware to protect their code while running inside the CPU's memory. As the name says, it's primary role is to protect the memory-stack (where an app's code is stored during execution).

"Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection" works by enforcing strict management of the memory stack through the use of a combination between modern CPU hardware and Shadow Stacks (refers to a copies of a program's intended execution).

The new "Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection" feature plans to use the hardware-based security features in modern CPUs to keep a copy of the app's shadow stack (intended code execution flow) in a hardware-secured environment.

Microsoft says that this will prevent malware from hijacking an app's code by exploiting common memory bugs such as stack buffer overflows, dangling pointers, or uninitialized variables which could allow attackers to hijack an app's normal code execution flow. Any modifications that don't match the shadow stacks are ignored, effectively shutting down any exploit attempts.

Ok so I'm parts UI/UX designer in a corporate setting so I use graphic editing software like Photoshop rather extensively.

Obviously, I'm confronted to a lot of admin rights restrictions, which is to be expected.

What I'd like to know is why the f*** does ADDING A FONT in W10 require admin rights ?

What's potential security loophole could one exploit using TrueType font installation exactly ? Or are they afraid someone's going to remove all system fonts from the Fonts folder ? Anybody that does that shouldn't be allowed access a computer afterwards.