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These past months I have attained a bunch of security related certs: -CISSP -GCIH -CPT -CEH When applying for IA/Security positions, will employers prefer to see these certs paired with MCTIP (knowing the system) or CCNA/CCNP (knowing the network)?
Today a lot of websites that allow the upload of media content are implementing automatic sound signature checks to prevent the illegal distribution of videos containing copyrighted content. How does the sound recognition system work? How could such an algorithm be tricked? Could the sound be altered enough to change ...
My bank issued me a new debit card (VISA Electron) because the old one expired and to my surprise, the card number is almost the same as on my old card. I don't think there would be much chance that this is a coincidence so is it a common practice that card companies somehow reserve numbers for their clients and then u...
I am trying to set up a PAM module that lets one add a conditional password change scheme. The intended behavior is like this: passwd do you want to change authentication token for TestProgram?(s/n): in case he decides he does (s) 3.1.1 (s) > user:... 3.1.2 >pass:... 3.1.3 >newpass:... 3.1.4 >repeat newpass:... 3.1....
Recently I get involved in a security code review. I found many format string, buffer overflow and dangerous libc function call. Right now I need to write down a report with all the stuff founded in a clear and useful way. I want to know your experience in how you organize this kind of report .
I recently found a new professional certification: C\|CISO, currently in the grandfathering stage. It seems to be targeting security professionals that want to prove they are suitable for C level manager positions. Still, there is already another such certification, CISM, by ISACA. Is there any real difference between...
I'm working in a web site that doesn't use parameters on SQL queries. All the queries are adhoc and the way they are doing the input validation seems good to me, I'm not able to break it to do SQL Injection. They are validating the numeric input and if it's string they are doing this (e.g): sanitizedInput = "'" & Repla...
We had an incident where some of our managers were given passwords for the people they supervise using a particular company website. Ostensibly it was done so the managers could check in on the users and see that they're doing what they've been directed to do with this third party website. When I found out that a list ...
When reading about computer security, there are a lot of different areas mentioned: Application Security, Information Security, Network Security, IT Security, etc. What are the distinct fields within the realm of computer security, and what are the differences between them?
I am evaluating a service provider that performs the following functions with email: A user logs in to a web based application over an SSL connection. Email is composed in a web browser over the SSL connection. The email is then sent to the recipient's account with the same service provider. The original email stays o...
This question is sort-of spun off of a previous one. Why do law-abiding citizens need strong security? There are a lot of great security-focused answers there. However, I think the true question that is brought up is more about privacy and anonymity than it is just security. I'm looking for concrete examples that can...
What types of jobs within IT security lend themselves best to freelancing or working remotely, as opposed to being a standard office job?
In case you don't know, there is a website called join.me which lets you do screen sharing from a browser, using a flash program that is on the web page. Until I encountered this service, I had no idea that flash was able to do screen reading, as opposed to simpler tasks like using the web cam. But if it can do that, c...
I'm getting my hands on a system (one laptop, one hard drive) that were in custody of a LEO for a fairly significant period of time. The laptop runs windows XP professional, with a recovery partition, and the hard drive is a 2.5 inch 40 gb drive that has an NTFS file system Entirely for academic reasons i'm thinking o...
We have several smartphone with encrypted data on them (BES, iPhone, Android) and want to prevent an unauthorized person from downloading information from the device via USB. The visual assumption is that the USB file transfer mode is protected by a password; but then again, it is subject to implementation flaws and ...
What are some sample use-cases the NIST is supporting in this policy / whitepaper regarding PBKDF2? This Recommendation specifies a family of password-based key derivation functions (PBKDFs) for deriving cryptographic keys from passwords or passphrases for the protection of electronically-stored data or for t...
PFS has gained attention in our audit department because of its innate ability to limit our exposure if someone steals our private key. What pitfalls or common mistakes should I be aware of before implementing this? Anything administrative, implementation-specific, or platform-specific? Are there misconceptions reg...
I am a final year CS student, and would like to study info sec. Till today, I've been reading infosec mailing lists, some Phrack papers etc., but all in a very casual way. I am interested in learning security in depth, and have gathered that there are some courses like Network+, Security+ etc that provide good exposure...
Sometimes my kaspersky Internet Security blocks this attack. What is this and how can I prevent/solve it for ever?
I'm having problems setting up Single Sign On on my Mac (Snow Leopard). My program was giving the error accept_sec_context: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more information: \ Key table entry not found (000d0000:96c73ab5) When using the Mac built in library (/usr/lib/libgssapi_krb.dylib). It works fine...
I am looking for a hashing algorithm somewhat like bcrypt, except that I would like validation to be extremely cheap. As an anti-spam measure I would like to require my clients spend say, half a second of compute time, before they submit information. I would like to assign them information to hash and then on my end q...
When performing vulnerability scans using Nessus, against a host running Apache, one expected result is always "HTTP TRACE / TRACK Methods Allowed". While this result only has a base CVSS of 4.3, I always recommend that it be corrected. The fix is easy enough that I have never received push back. What are the real lif...
Suppose I type this in my browser https://www.mysite.com/getsecret?username=alice&password=mysecret and an attacker is watching all traffic from me to my ISP. What information is protected by HTTPS? Is the URL revealed? Are the parameters of the get request revealed? Also, does HTTPS provide integrity for the url? I...
Is there any non-commercial certificate authority capable of issuing valid certificates for web applications? I mean, the certificate must be accepted by browsers, like those of commercial CAs?
We are using OpenSSL for generating IV's and other random data. We initialize it using RAND_poll and, on Windows, RAND_screen. The question is though, if the seed generated by those methods is good enough (RAND_screen at least sounds to me like it is). Also, I was wondering how exactly RAND_poll works, as I could not ...
Certificates can have a class level (or validation level). What is the impact of these levels on deployed web applications? More specifically: Is the certificate level included in the certificate itself? Can a level 1 certificate be used to deploy a web application including a paid service? Do pop-ups appear on the us...
Because of the BEAST exploit it seems everyone is saying you should stop using AES and instead use RC4. I am wondering if it wouldn't be better to continue using AES instead for the following reasons: To exploit BEAST the attacker has to get the client to execute their javascript code. If they can do this then you hav...
I'm a professional software developer with a high interest in web application security. I'd say that I probably have a better understanding of the security of web applications than the average developer. My problem is, that my knowledge is heavily focused on the theoretical part of web security - meaning, I've read lot...
I've always heard someone justify the means for export restrictions with "it's for governmental control/spying". In most reasonable countries, the justice system asks people to adhere to the "spirit of the law". What is "spirit of the law" regarding cryptography I should be aware of? Are there any themes that are c...
APNS is an iPhone technology that assists with mobile push. 3LM is a BIOS-level security technology embedded in certain Android phones. I recently got off the phone with Boxtone and they said they leverage those technologies to enforce corporate policy (password length, remote wipe) to each device. I'm right now wee...
Someone created a file (web.config) in a location that basically caused IIS to not work. Is there any way I can determine who created this file? The creator/owner says "Domain Administrators". This is a Windows 2008 R2 server.
I am exploring using VMs to separate my administrative actions from standard user actions in Windows 7. The goal is to limit my risk and exposure when using "RunAs" to open an application or file share and separate that from any other application or file that may be on my machine. What is the technical process to ge...
According to the following paper, it is possible to decrypt HTTPS traffic by inspecting AJAX calls and using the size parameter as a cryptographic oracle. Should I be sending a variable length payload alongside every HTTPS GET or POST? Is that sufficient in protecting myself from this attack? Should the HTTPS respo...
I'm trying to increase security for my cloud-based / multi-tenant environment. I'm considering having clients access an obscure URL such as GUID.myCloud.com. I will then respond to that guid-based request with customer-specific data. Considering that the certificate itself has a Subject name of *.myCloud.com, does t...
What set of books would you recommend to study for the GCIA certification without buying official study material? Also, please tell whether your suggestions are based on having completed GCIA certification yourself, or if they are based on other experience such as work as an analyst or knowledge of the GCIA requirement...
Various APIs (such as Facebook or Amazon S3) require a secret key to authenticate access to the service. Obviously, if source code is public, the key should not be in the source! What about for a closed source website?
What logs and event IDs should I be paying attention to when looking at a Windows-based machine (workstation, server, Domain Controller)? Assuming I can aggregate them into a report what information should I include in Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) reviews?
There seems to be some misconceptions regarding what a switched network will protect us from, and what technologies/precautions a secure environment requires when segmenting trusted users from hostile users. Can anyone elaborate on what the real risks of switched networks, and if there are any real benefits from a sec...
I recently heard that Firefox makes a second HTTP request when the sourcecode is requested. Is this true? Does this mean the webserver may issue alternate source from the original? Lastly, is there a tool that I should use (or shouldn't use) specifically when looking at rogue HTTPS source code?
HTTPS is subject to several MITM attacks, that is clear. However I think it would be helpful to the ITSec crowd if there was a way to force a certain browser behaviour when accessing known-trusted sites. Based on my (average) knowledge of MITM vectors, it would be beneficial to secure specific domains with client/bro...
Suppose a leaf node creates a certificate for a different domain, acting as a CA. Do most popular frameworks, or SSL chain validation tools verify the constraints? Are there any I should be concerned with, and remove from my production environment? Should I be concerned with CA's issuing certificates without basic co...
I would like to improve wireless security and certain other on-net security scenarios with a permanent ARP table entry. The idea being that someone on the same subnet or WiFi network will have a more difficult time spoofing my access point. What clients support / don't support the feature of a permanent ARP entry? How...
According to Google, Microsoft Security Essentials is currently detecting some versions of the Chrome browser as malware. Could someone have hacked Google and put a virus into some Chrome updates? Or, is there another reason an antivirus product might flag legitimate software as bad? http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/0...
I'm playing around with the idea of running a mini-CA with my (hobby) website, likely only used internally with a few select developers for internal emails, client authentication, staging/development server certs etc. I'm reluctant to extend this style of authentication to my more technically minded users as an optiona...
The recent trend in HTTPS attacks is to attack the HTTP protocol. What should I do to increase my site's security if the only protocol I want is HTTPS? Some easy to implement ideas are Implement HTTPS Strict Transport Security Issue the authentication page over SSL Use HTML Form-posts for the login page's submit butt...
An article on Kerberos goes like this: The problem is, Charon cannot give you the password directly, because then you would know it. [....] So instead of giving you the mail server's password, Charon gives you a mail service TICKET. This ticket contains a version of your username that has been ENCRYPTED USING the MAIL...
In the early days of NT4, I would never delete an account from the domain because I would lose the correlation between the SID and username in event logs and all related audit trails. Is this a practice I should continue in Windows 2008R2? How should locations with seasonal user accounts handle this? For example a sch...
I was wondering exactly how powerful can keyloggers be? For example someone wanted to access his bank account (which of course is through HTTPS), he will "enter" his password using a combination of type delete highlight delete highlight-drag-drop cut (from another program etc) copy (from another program etc) and basi...
I am aware that to delete something completely we will have to use a program that over-writes the deleted file such that it is unrecoverable. Is there anyway to tell that this has happened? Or is the resultant state so random that no one can tell that it has just been "cleaned" ? Ok so we have a 100GB C:\drive and all ...
I am looking for ways to harden a linux system so that even when gaining full root access (through legit or non-legit means), some secrets remain inaccessible. But first a little background. Many of the different linux security models (SELinux, TOMOYO, etc.) concentrate on limiting what processes can do by policy and m...
I have a few computers at home on which i hack for fun. Until now google has been able to answer my questions. But now I need your help. What ways are there to elevate from a non-admin user to NT system? Source code, how to's and explenation on how they operate would be awesome!
As the Title said: I have the cipher, the key and the counter increment function but I miss the IV (initial counter). Is there anyway for me to decrypt the message? EDIT: do we need some plaintext? How much of it?
I've been with this confusion of getting a certification for a long time!! With the aim of becoming a Security Analyst/Tester, and for a good kick start, which one of these two is good? GSEC or GHIC?? I took a look at the objectives of both these certs. GSEC objects to end to end concept with a basic toolset/practical ...
This is a follow up to a snippet from another answer. There, user Ninefingers writes: (...) only allow outbound connections, ever. Do this in spite of NAT as IPv6 will make those NAT defences disappear. Can someone please explain what this means? Or, rather, how this affects the average user that has his Windows 7 PC...
I use IMAP and I only access my email through SSL. However, the settings for encrypted email access seem a bit more complicated that https. Can someone explain the security implications of the different combinations? I'll use the available settings from Thunderbird as an example: IMAP security: Connection: None \| STAR...
We want to distribute digital content (think pictures) to a select number of partners (around 1000, worldwide) to use as visual reference. We would like however to prevent them from copying or in any way reusing this content. Or, if they do, to be apparent that this is not the original source of the content. Until now ...
I want to build a more-or-less self-contained box that I can plug two or more endpoints into (routers, mainly) that will simulate a WAN. I want to be able to mess up traffic in all sorts of ways, both "passive" (for example, natural network problems like latency, packet loss, bandwidth restrictions) and "active" (such ...
I know just the basics of backtrack and I want to ask some questions about it: Can you attack an ftp server using backtrack? an email server? I have a Centos virtual private server and backtrack is on my PC, Can I change the IP-address of backtrack to my VPS IP-address and do phishing using my VPS IP-address? Can I ...
The thought of having a 3rd party send javascript, and images to end users seems to be a scary thought, but that is exactly what we are doing when I place advertisements onto my site. Does serving advertisements from AdSense, or any of the online marketing companies decrease the safety of my browsing session? What is...
I'm looking at IE's privacy options screen and am trying to figure out how it breaks javascript, workarounds to that, and how I can gracefully degrade my user experience. Is there a guide that directly describes the IE reaction to the P3P header? How about corresponding Javascript samples for each known good/known bad...
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are well known to speed up the performance of a website, but they create the obvious security risks if someone were to change the code that resides on the CDN. What are the security risks of a CDN? Is there content I shouldn't serve on a CDN (e.g. javascript, raw unwrapped json results...
Visual Studio now includes a Package Manager that downloads and updates software packages from the internet. The common name for this is "Nuget" The problem I have is that anyone can pretend to be someone else, by spoofing the owner field. This opens up a whole can of worms with regard to updates, and verifying the a...
I recently faced one issue. It appeared my outlook launched a dialog saying it needed password. It looked like this I noticed the "->" character in the domain name which usually it auto fills. Also the image it is showing is the default windows 7 user image. I have changed it and it doesn't reflect that. e.g. if I lau...
I've attended several CTF contests and I'd like to implement a CTF system for my students. I asked Google about designing such system but it's fruitless. Any ideas?
Some of our more technical users are arguing to use Activesync for their phones, while the corporate standard is limited to Blackberry and any device that supports Goodlink. One argument is the theoretical exploit where someone extracts the Goodlink blob via JuiceJacking and decrypt the data from there. Is this possib...
If I'm using websites that do not use HTTPS, but I'm on a WEP-protected Wi-Fi network, are my cookies safe from being sniffed by third-parties? Are cookies only at risk during login, or am I at risk any time I use HTTP?
I am using a web browser to access DNSSec enabled sites. My current name server doesn't (won't) support DNSSec for at least a year. What are my alternatives? Do any ISPs currently offer DNSSec? Any other viable secure companies?
When compared to more traditional DNS name servers, what are the benefits / drawbacks of using a Windows 2008 R2 as a public ns record for a company. What limitations, or security issues would I encounter? Does the answer change if the in-house skillset is limited only to Windows based products?
I have my files on a second hard drive (disconnected for now). This drive was connected to a system infected with Virus:W32/Virut. I have formatted my main hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP. Now I want to connect the second hard drive to get my files (mostly text-based and no executable. However, I am not sure if c...
I'm adding support for SAML/ADFS/Azure ACS and read that untrusted metadata poses a risk. Considering that ADFS does background refreshes of the metadata, as do some RPs, can someone explain the risk, and how that relates to the automatic refresh feature? My thought is that I should disable Auto-Refresh to avoid being ...
Is S/MIME an abstracted system for general MIME type encryption, whereas PGP is more for email? Why would I want to choose one over the other, or can I use both at the same time?
According to my own experience, most companies selling security tokens for authentication like RSA, Verisign or Aladdin share little information about the internals of their products like algorithms and backend infrastructure. How can I compare those companies and their products to each other? How can I make an educate...
Though IPv6 is not here yet it one day we will all lose our familiar IPv4 addresses and be communicating over the internet solely with IPv6 addresses. What interests me is the implications this has for those who scan the internet hunting for common vulnerabilities. At the moment a common method for internet worms is to...
We all know not to do it, but someone emailed my credit card number and cvv code to my gmail. I'm wondering if the risk is so low I don't have to call to cancel my card. The email is sent from a reputable ISP's email account, via its ADSL dialup (the ISP is the biggest in the country) to my gmail address. Is it safe to...
Our IT department uses TeamViewer to provide support to users at remote locations. More recently we've noticed that users are using TeamViewer to get support for their lab equipment from vendors. Though I support the idea, it does bug me a little bit that someone could either accidentally or maliciously leave a sessio...
It has been mentioned in security forums that the latest malware pathogens permit malefactors to record your keystrokes and send them to a server. As a result I've put a command in my ~/.profile to delete the ~/.Macromedia directory everytime start up a new Terminal window. However I am curious as to how flash does thi...
I brought this really great laptop, but I cannot find something that I can lock the laptop physically to the desk or prevent a thief from grabbing this laptop. There is no "universal" hole there that 99% of the laptops have... not that ive noticed at... (I mean thing like that: http://www1.dealextreme.com/productimages...
I use a portable USB drive (Seagate FreeAgent Go Flex) to keep all my personal stuff, and though the HDD company does offer a password scheme to control access to it, that would work only on windows, as one could easily mount it in Linux and bypass it. I'm looking for a solution that would encrypt the entire drive, mak...
When it comes to fraud screening for card not present transactions (credit card / debit card) there are a number of techniques / services that can be utilized to mitigate risks from fraudulent transactions. Examples being: BIN validations Device Profiling Geo validations My question however is about card present tran...
I always thought NAT was some kind of a security feature and I still think it is, because if it didn't existed the internet, respectively the clients behind NATs, would be even more insecure, since for example port 445 would be directly open to everyone scanning clients etc. But there seem to be some attacks, in which ...
Possible Duplicate: Does a blocked email with a malware name “EngineError” indicate a flaw in Forefront Protection? A privious post on this topic was closed as "unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation...
I would like to set up a security barrier to my test/dev environments. I'm under a more or less typical LAMP on dedicated servers. Thing is, I have some facebook apps, a widget for other devices, and other apps that need to connect to my site via an API(also, ajax calls!). But I want my test/dev sites not accessible fr...
In an answer to What is the difference between SSL, TLS, and HTTPS, it's said that HTTPS is HTTP over SSL/TLS. That is, an SSL/TLS connection is established first, and then normal HTTP data is exchanged over the SSL/TLS connection. So, if I use stunnel to create an SSL tunnel, and then pass HTTP traffic through it, wo...
I'm a *nix sysAdmin for last 5 years. For last one year I've been engaged with PCI-DSS and SAS70 audits at our company and got introduced with Information Security. I have found my interest in InfoSec and reviewing the possibilities on career switch from sysAdmin to InfoSec. What I've found is that three layers of skil...
I'm a system admin with little security experience. I want to schedule the copying of our backups to protect our data in case of fire. The best solution would be to copy the data onto a new hard-disk and lock it in a safe. Practically, however, the chances of someone doing this regularly are slim. I therefore want ...
Lets assume I am responsible for an application in my company and I decide to hire security experts to perform a security audit. Lets assume further that my company owns the source code of the application and I am allowed to hand it over to the hired experts. Are there any good reasons to prefer a blackbox penetration ...
I was running a vulnerability scan against a Windows Server of mine, TCP port 135. I got the following output: By sending a Lookup request to the portmapper TCP 135 it was possible to enumerate the Distributed Computing Environment services running on the remote port. Using this information it is possible to conn...
I'm not talking about decrypting the connection while the SSL/TLS is happening (MITM) but after the connection is closed and I have a pcap file of the entire negotiation/data transfer process. How can I decrypt the data that was passed in the connection? Is there a way to get the session key (without waiting a few year...
Is there any benefit for a security-paranoid website to disallow HTTP requests that have a Referer: from 3rd party sites? The pitch is that if such a HTTP request were to come in, then certain XSS attacks would be prevented, and certain OpenID iFrame threats as well. The user experience would have all users in that ca...
Many people wil often brag about the length of their password, like "yeah nobody is ever going to crack my password cause its 22 characters long." I was thinking, if you knew the exact length of their password, you could essentially lower the space and calculations necessary to brute force their password. My question i...
I'm running Mac OS X and I have the system firewall enabled and I have stealth mode enabled. I opened up my system console and noticed that I'm getting tons of blocked connection attempts from places I'm not familiar with. I checked the locations of some of these addresses and some are from China and Japan. These ar...
Do the IP addresses in an email header include information from the device from which the mail is being sent, or from the mail server?
We know that key loggers are the most effective and most annoying means of getting compromised over login id/password on the web or any application.... and your whole privacy is breached. Is there a way to detect key loggers yourself, instead of relying on an anti-virus solutions for this purpose ? What is the logic ...
If a website has a private forum (membership is not free) where people may ask health questions and paid Doctors are around to answer them, do normal HIPAA compliance rules apply? In any forum, people are aware (or at least, they ought to be aware) that anyone else with access to the forums will see their posting. So I...
Despite all my work to harden my website, someone has managed to hack it. When loading the homepage in IE8, the page appears to load normally. Then, the status bar briefly displays a request to a domain that is just a jumble of letters followed by .com. It opens a Windows Media Player window, and as that opens the IE...
If I go to http://facebook.com, I am not redirected to https://www.facebook.com. If it doesn't have https in the URL, can the login be secure? Usually I am redirected to an https page on other sites? How is Facebook managing its login?
There are a few JavaScript AES implementations available such as Gibberish-aes So assuming the AES algorithm has been implemented correctly in this library then it should be as secure as any other language implementation ? And if not why not ?
I am working on a cloud-based solution and I would like to encrypt / decrypt the data locally using either a SmartCard or local Machine certificate. I'm hoping to do this in Javascript, but may resort to Silverlight, ActiveX, or Flash (in order of preference) My idea is to use this in conjunction with broadcast encryp...
I have found a tonne of information on password policy all over the Internet and several best practices checklists. However from a username point of view I could not find much. I thought it would be really helpful to have something like this to prevent harvesters from being able to build dictionaries or username enume...
It's clear there there is no consistent set of features among any of the popular authentication providers. Below is an attempt to aggregate the similarities and differences I've noticed, but I would appreciate your advice on what additional features that are missing, and what are the important features to consider w...

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