Category: InfoSec
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“Secure” E2E Messaging Apps: More Than Meets the Eye
[This was originally published on RiskBasedSecurity.com.] Secure messaging apps, often touted as having end-to-end (E2E) encryption, have become extremely popular in recent years. This popularity has increased even more in the last two months, likely influenced by increased anxiety over the power wielded by “big tech” and endorsement by celebrated tech business leaders like Elon…
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A critique of the summary of “Latent Feature Vulnerability Rankings of CVSS Vectors”
Update: Corren McCoy has written a wonderful response to this blog where she goes into more detail about her conclusions as well as citing more portions of the original research that led to her conclusions. As she notes, there are several layers of condensing the original research at play here, which can dilute and distort…
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Commentary on Radware’s Top Web Exploits of 2020
At the close of each year we see at least one article covering the top vulnerabilities / exploits from the prior year. This is usually written on the back of having large detection networks across the Internet that get a comprehensive view of exploitation. It’s a great way to get real intelligence for criminal hacking…
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Five Dollar Security; You Get What You Pay For
The old phrase “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is” is very common, and usually well founded. After seeing an offer for a $5 “security status” of a website, we just had to test it out. Since the service is being offered by a Certified Ethical Hacker (C|EH) with 13 years…
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Sitting on Undisclosed Vulnerabilities (e.g. SolarWinds Stragglers)
The company SolarWinds is in the news, victims of an attack that compromised their Orion Platform software by inserting a backdoor into it, allowing for remote code execution. Like most big breaches, we hear the term “sophisticated” used for the attack. And like many breaches, we quickly learn that it might not have been so…
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Not all CVEs are Created Equal. Or even valid…
[I wrote this early 2019 and it was scheduled for January 7 but it apparently did not actually publish and then got lost in my excessive drafts list. I touched it up this week to publish because the example that triggered this blog is old but the response is evergreen. Apologies for the long delay!]…
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Thoughts on 0-days and Risk in 2020
[Stupid WordPress. This was scheduled to publish Nov 23 but didn’t for some reason. Here it is, a bit late…] On Friday, Maddie Stone from the Google P0 team Tweeted about the 0-day exploits her team tracks. As someone who checks that sheet weekly and tracks vulnerabilities, including ones ‘discovered in the wild’, this is…
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Why EVM Security Hasn’t Changed For More Than 15 Years
[This was originally published on RiskBasedSecurity.com in the 2020 Q3 Vulnerability Quickview Report. It was authored with Curtis Kang.] In our 2019 Year End Vulnerability QuickView Report, we presented a detailed history of public Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) vulnerabilities. We’ve seen little change to the overall EVM security picture since then. With the Presidential elections…
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The Hacker Jeopardy That Never Was
Many years ago, at early DEF CONs before 2000, I became a critic of Hacker Jeopardy after some of the questions had wrong answers. The host had written the questions and answers but got some wrong. The next year I offered to sanity check them before the game and did so, finding a few errors…
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More authorities, more CVEs; Oh, and more commentary.
On November 10, TechBeacon published a great article by Rob Lemos titled “More authorities, more CVEs: What it means for app sec teams” in which I was quoted, along with several other people. Like many articles of this nature, those who provide input often will talk for as long as half an hour and ultimately…