Authentic8 Blog Category: Threat Intelligence

Interview: HTTPS Interception, TLS Fingerprinting, and the Browser

Posted by: A8 Team
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Use HTTPS, they said. Make sure your browsers shows that green padlock, they said. You’ll be safe, nobody can eavesdrop, they said.

IT security teams and threat hunters, who are familiar with the inherent security weakness of the web’s underlying protocols, know better.

The problem with HTTPS internet connections is similar to the problem with VPN. Or, as Larry Loeb put it in his post HTTPS: Beware the False Sense of Security on this blog: “[U]sers think that it does more than it actually does.”

For starters, a basic HTTPS connection gets established when the browser (client) connects directly to an origin server to send requests and download content protected by TLS-based  encryption. Still, this communication is vulnerable to interception.

The reason is simple. Often, the browser doesn’t connect directly with the web server serving the website. Instead, data gets routed through a proxy or middlebox, a.k.a. "monster-in-the-middle" (MITM). HTTPS interception, for benign or malign reasons,

Interview: James Kettle Explains HTTP Desync Attacks (In Under 3 Minutes)

Posted by: A8 Team
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$70k - how's that for a bug bounty total netted from an almost forgotten web exploit?

At Black Hat USA 2019 in Las Vegas, James Kettle of Portswigger Web Security demonstrated how he pulled it off. The security researcher used an old (by internet standards) technique called HTTP Request Smuggling, which was first documented back in 2005.

It still works. Kettle's exploit schemes, dubbed Desync Attacks, leverage the HTTP protocol support for sending multiple HTTP  requests over a single underlying TCP or SSL/TLS socket.

HTTP requests are traditionally understood as isolated entities that are placed back to back. In his presentation of request smuggling attacks for cybersecurity researchers, Kettle showed how he was able to overcome this compartmentalization.

The British threat hunter's approach enabled him to splice requests into others, as he said, to "gain maximum privilege  access to internal APIs, poison web caches, and compromise what's possibly your most trusted login page."

How did he do it? And what does

10 Top Tools for Threat Hunters from Black Hat USA 2019

Posted by: Amir Khashayar Mohammadi
Published on:

So you weren't able to make it to Las Vegas this year, or didn’t get to check out all the latest and greatest tools at the booths and workshops? We've got you covered.

Check out these ten short reviews of useful tools presented at Black Hat USA 2019 for threat intelligence analysts, OSINT researchers, forensic investigators, and threat hunters:

King Phisher: Phishing Toolkit for Red Teams

King Phisher

Source: Github

King Phisher, created by SecureState, is a tool designed to simulate real-life scenario phishing attacks that may occur on a corporate network. It’s intended for red teaming, enabling the user to create complex attack scenarios to test internally if anyone in the organization fails to identify the bait.

This highly flexible tool allows you to run numerous phishing campaigns simultaneously, control the phishing email's content (embedded images, HTML, and more), map the location of all the phishing victims, and run SPF checks (Sender Policy Framework) for forging sender address during email delivery.

JavaScript Template Attacks: How Browsers Give Away the Store

Posted by: A8 Team
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Did you know? Attackers use  your locally installed browser base and JavaScript to draw up intricate exploit roadmaps for targeted attacks on your organization. Listen to our interview with security researcher Michael Schwarz to learn how JavaScript template attacks work and how to prevent them.

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“Free” browsers boast features and extensions that supposedly enhance security and privacy online. The same settings or plugins, it turns out, can be used by adversaries to achieve precisely the opposite effect.

That’s just one of the eye-opening findings reported in the research paper JavaScript Template Attacks: Automatically Inferring Host Information for Targeted Exploits.

The paper was authored by security researchers Michael Schwarz, Florian Lackner and Daniel Gruss of Graz University in Austria. They describe how JavaScript template attacks help attackers prepare pinpointed zero-day or side-channel attacks against large organizations, by exploiting the ubiquitous data leaks in “free” browsers and their extensions.

The researchers found an abundance of environment-dependent properties in Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and mobile

Covert Online Investigation Tools: How Yesterday’s DIY Is Today’s Negative ROI

Posted by: Claudia Berth
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Security Officers, are your online researchers still relying on custom-made covert investigation solutions cobbled together from disparate tools to save money? New research proves that the opposite is happening: It costs you extra.

A few years ago, providing research teams with out-of-the-box capabilities to perform anonymous online research was crazy expensive. The task of enabling cyber threat hunting, without the risk of crippling the network, for example, needed a separate six-figure line item on the IT budget. It’s no wonder that there are so many organizations that rely on a patchwork of make-do and DIY tools and methods.  

Today though, the DIY approach to enabling sensitive research on the open, deep, or dark web is unnecessary, as well as out of sync with the demands of our rapidly changing internet threatscape.

A new comparative analysis by Authentic8 shows how DIY costs leaps and bounds more money than the new, low maintenance, SaaS alternative available today.  

Covert Online Research Costs: DIY Approach vs. Silo Research Toolbox by Authentic8

Source (excerpt): Authentic8 Whitepaper

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