Category Archives: Security

ChooseMyPlate.gov

The US government has announced it is replacing the infamous pyramid of food with a pie. Oh, wait, I mean a plate cut up into pieces that look like pie.

Eating healthy never looked so good.

However, I am a bit confused by the text they have below their new illustration.

Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk.

First, what? Switch from pie to milk? I just adopted the new pie diet and already they are asking me to switch?

Second, if I’m going to drink any milk at all, I’m going to drink healthy milk — whole raw milk — and not some rehydrated reconstituted dried lint from dirty socks blue-tinted water low-fat milk substitute. I’d drink camel milk long before I would agree to poison myself with the stuff left over when you remove the milk (fat) from milk.

Research clearly shows [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18831752] that whole milk causes more lean body mass gains than non fat milk. Which proves fat doesn’t make you fat [http://stronglifts.com/the-4-most-popular-fat-myths-debunked/]. Excess calories do. As long as you have a caloric deficit, it doesn’t matter if you drink non fat or whole milk.

It doesn’t matter as long as you know the risks from the process used to make milk non fat and what you are missing.

Reuters Quotes Me on Michaels Breach

Reuters interviewed me and published a story called “Expert cites new hack tactic in Michaels data breach

Ottenheimer estimated that Michaels was likely facing tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs related to replacing the 7,200 PIN pads, including training employees to regularly check that the equipment has not been compromised.

I’m glad they included the security procedures comment, although I sound more conservative than I realised at the time. The cost breakdown of their upgrade is affected by many factors such as planned depreciation of existing equipment, logistics and shipping, installation and configuration of the hardware/software.

But PIN pad security and compliance is not just about the technology. Michaels management also will have to update and test their procedures and provide company-wide training to prevent or detect further compromise. That is why a new replacement estimate could easily reach into the hundreds of thousands, unless it already was in plan and budget, as I explained previously.

LAFS Storage Illustration

Some go for the Lulz, but also there are sites for LAFS (Least Authority File System). Here are two interactive ones based on the Tahoe-LAFS

  • Tahoe Storage Illustration is a simple javascript page; it lets you enter data, pseudo-encrypt it, distribute it, and then wipe out cells of it to see how data could survive a failure.
  • Tahoe-LAFS Storage Grid is a real instance where you can test the UI.

Neither demonstration addresses the giant elephant of storing data with a provider — managing authorisation and authentication — but the latter site comes with warnings.

This gateway is not secure! Please set up your own gateway

Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BeEF

Michele Orru just presented “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BeEF” at the 2011 CONfidence in Krakow.

What will you do during a pentest if you should get access to some target internal resources while having no exploitable external ones for the escalation? Well, there could be many responses on this provocative sentence, starting from Social Engineering techniques to the exploitation of victims browser inside the target.

We will see how BeEF can help resolving almost impossible pentest situations while directly exploiting the victims inside the target, using their machines as pivot to gather access to internal as well external resources, and how it’s much easier now to extend BeEF functionality writing your own modules to suit your needs.

Great stuff, and not just because every conference should have at least one presentation modelled after Dr. Strangelove. This could actually spark a contest that spans security conferences — each one gives an award for best Dr. Strangelove security talk.

Although I’m obviously biased I would like to think my comparison to Stuxnet hysteria I presented earlier this year was more historically aimed and made more sense as a threat analysis.

Is anyone, and I mean anyone, really so worried about the Browser Exploitation Framework (BeEF) that they are proposing changes to national security? I don’t see it. Seems to me more of the opposite reaction to the BeEF — browser exploits are out there, and BeEF is doing what BeEF does…mooing and grazing and dumping excrement (filling logs).

If it were my choice I might have tried “BeEF, the other pentest meat”, “BeEF, it’s what’s for pentests”, “What’s on your (zombie) grill?” or even “Ground BeEF: Cutting the legs off a browser”.

But on the other hand I admit I’m still in favour of as many presentations using Dr. Strangelove as possible to drive the message. The more Strangelove the better.

In related news, the presentation talked about the effort to port BeEF from PHP to Ruby. I vote they rename the new Ruby version “DeCalf” (e.g. not written in Java).