HeX 2.0 RC1 is now

After long time development, we have finally reached the stage where we are brave enough to release version 2 of HeX, Release Candidate 1. This is the first public version for HeX 2.0 and we hope that by releasing this, people who are interested in it can help testing out this version. I won't be mentioning the new features that we are adding to HeX 2 here as I will put up all the information once we reach the 2.0 Release instead of RC. For the moment, we need people to test all the applications that we have added, a lot of them can be accessed via fluxbox menu so please help in testing.

Currently there are few known problems -

- Netdude is broken
- Autopsy is broken(sleuthkit issue)
- Gvim is broken(font not available)
- Flowtag is broken(Looking for older version of tk while new one is installed)
- NSM Console(Snort module where wrong path is defined in snort configuration file)
- Silktools(Flowcap and Rwflowpack)
- Ragraph is broken
- Zsh is missing

Most of the issues are already fixed in the development repository, therefore don't report to us if you encounter similar problem in HeX 2.0 RC1. If you encounter any other issues, please do report to us via mailing list -

http://groups.google.com/group/HeX-liveCD

Anyway here's the HeX 2.0 RC1 iso -

http://my.rawpacket.org/hex-i386-2.0-RC1-20080803.iso
http://my.rawpacket.org/hex-i386-2.0-RC1-20080803.iso.md5
http://my.rawpacket.org/hex-i386-2.0-RC1-20080803.iso.sha256

Alternatively, you can download from US mirror -

http://us.rawpacket.org/image/hex-i386-2.0-RC1-20080803.iso

Thanks to all the raWPacket members who have put the effort in HeX 2.0 development, you guys are walys rocking!

Enjoy (;])

Unimas: Open Source Security Tools Talks

First of all, thanks for the invitation from Unimas, and En. Ahmad who has put the effort to make it happen, me and Mel will be going to University Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas) tomorrow to give talks about Open Source Security Tools and how it can be very useful, either for corporate, or educational environment.

If you are interested in the topic, and you are currently studying in Unimas. Feel free to join us!

Enjoy ;]

Ubuntu: Netdude Manual Installation

I use netdude for pcap file editing, it's simple and straightforward since it is gui based, however the ubuntu package is rather old(0.3.x) and I need to use the latest version, here's quick way to get the latest version of netdude installed on Ubuntu 8.04.

Download the latest version of netdude, libpcapnav and libnetdude from here -

http://netdude.sourceforge.net/download.html

Then install all the necessary packages -

shell>sudo apt-get install stow

shell>sudo apt-get install build-essential

shell>sudo apt-get install libgtk1.2-dev

shell>sudo apt-get install libpcap0.7-dev

Decompress netdude, libpcapnav and libnetdude, and install them following the sequence - libpcapnav, libnetdude and netdude. It should be prety quick to get it done.

Enjoy ;]

EmergingBro: HowTo

First of all, make sure you have Bro installed on your machine, or you can download it at http://bro-ids.org. If you are using HeX, Bro is installed by default. Once installed, you may find the directory structure of Bro looks like this -

shell>ls -la

total 34
drwxr-xr-x 15 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:36 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 archive/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:35 bin/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:39 etc/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:35 include/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:35 lib/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 1024 Jul 10 18:01 logs/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:36 perl/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 5120 Jul 10 17:59 policy/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 reports/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:36 scripts/
drwxr-xr-x 4 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 share/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 11 22:50 site/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 var/

Please take note on few important directories -

policy directory contains all the policy and analysis scripts with the file extension .bro.

site directory contains site policy files which you can define or configure for specific site.

logs directory contains all the log files that are generated by bro.

etc directory contains bro configuration files, for start up and bro environment variable settings.

Obtain the latest signatures from Emerging Bro -

shell>cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.emergingthreats.net:/cvsroot/bro co emerging-bro

shell>cd emerging-bro

shell>ls -l

total 14
drwxr-xr-x 7 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:58 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:55 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 11:23 CVS/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:58 CVSROOT/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 1024 Jul 10 18:24 rules/
drwxr-xr-x 4 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 18:28 scripts/
drwxr-xr-x 17 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 11:23 sigs/

sigs directory contains all the individual signature in different category

rules directory contains main signature file for each category. For example emerging-bro-malware.sig contains all the signatures for MALWARE category.

scripts directory contains all the policy and analysis scripts that are contributed by the community members.

To perform quick test, you can use invoke the signature file using command line option -

Set Bro environment variables -

shell>. bro.cfg

Execute Bro -

shell>bro -s emerging-bro-all.sig -r whatever.pcap `hostname`

If you plan to run it in long term, it's best to edit the file generated during make install-brolite. The file name starts with your hostname, for example it is raWPacket.bro in HeX liveCD since my hostname is raWPacket. Just edit the following section in the file -

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
# To run signatures, uncomment the following line.
# @load brolite-sigs

@ifdef ( use_signatures )
# Load Bro signatures. This is the default file containing Bro
# signatures.
redef signature_files += "signatures";
@endif
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

To this -

@load brolite-sigs

redef signature_files += "emerging-bro-all.sig"

Please do note that other policy scripts must be loaded in order to have signatures invoked properly especially brolite.bro.

Enjoy ;]

DefCraft: Official Launching

After long consideration, I decide to start a company that focuses on security research, development and consultancy. The company name is straightforward - Defensive Craft (DefCraft).

The company offers a wide range of consulting services for specific domains, here's the list -

• Network and Web Application Security Assessment
• Network Security Architecture Planning & Deployment
• Network Security Monitoring Implementation
• Network Security Architecture Auditing
  
• Network Device Testing & Evaluation
• Network Based Forensics
• Network Profiling Operation
• Incident Response & Handling
• Digital Security Training

If you have any inquiry, please feel free to contact me.

Contact Number: 016 415 9873
Contact Email: defcraft at gmail dot com

For more information, you can check out at -

http://www.defcraft.net

The company has its own blog too which we will blog about what we do behind the lab -

http://blog.defcraft.net

On the other hand, I will still contribute my free time to various open source projects that I'm working on since this is part of company principle I'm emphasizing.

Emerging Bro

I'm sured not many have heard of Bro comparing to Snort in NIDS arsenal, while both are actually applying different approach in intrusion detection, they are the Open Source NIDS I like to use to complement each others in different setup and deployment.

I'm now working closely with Matt Jonkman from EmergingThreats(ET) to start the new project calls Emerging-Bro, basically the project is about converting set of latest signatures from Snort to Bro so that Bro operators can take advantage of it. You can find more information from the announcement here -

http://www.emergingthreats.net/content/view/80/1/

If you are Bro operators, you might have question of why I'm doing this as Bro is more focused on policy and analysis script development to detect network event(be it normal or abnormal) instead of relying on signatures matching in byte stream. There are reasons why I'm doing this and I'm going to explain here -

Edge
Emerging-Bro will only focus on latest or critical signatures from ET, therefore the project is basically more concerning about latest/critical attacks because most networks are more vulnerable to newly discovered attacks than the old one, therefore detecting and preventing them at network boundary is much important. Currently there are about 100 latest signatures converted from ET to Emerging-Bro, and if you think certain Snort signature should be included, please do let me know.

Leverage
The signature set that is developed by EmergingThreats usually give little time window for attacker and reduce the outbreak period significantly, hence you can pretty quick in detecting initial stage of new attacks. Bro operators can take advantage of this if they can monitor the new attack in time and quickly develope more complete detection scheme with Bro policy scripts.

Requests
Yes, according to Matt, there are requests about it, on and off there are people in Bro mailing list asking about the availability of Bro signatures, so why not doing it to help the community?

I think these gives enough reasons for me to work on the project. But providing latest signatures is not the end of Emerging-Bro, I greatly appreciate the help from Seth Hall to step up and discuss with me about the direction of the project and we both agree that it should be the platform for people to share or contribute their policy/analysis scripts as well. Currently he has his own development repository here and I will import them to Emerging-Bro.

For the moment, you can access and download all the signatures at -

http://www.emergingthreats.net/bro/

Enough for now, and this project is also part of the reason why I'm not much blogging last two weeks as I have paid my free time to it. I would like to thank Matt and Seth for the collaboration works, and also Bro developers for their endorsement!

Cheers (;])

Davix: Review

From Davix's main site -

DAVIX, a live CD for data analysis and visualization, brings the most important free tools for data processing and visualization to your desk. There's no hassle with installing an operating system or struggle to build the necessary tools to get started with visualization. You can completely dedicate your time to data analysis.

The clause above is definitely right above Davix liveCD!!!!!

When people ask me which liveCD I use frequently, I always advocate these 3 -

1. HeX liveCD (Network Based Forensics)
2. BackTrack liveCD (Penetration Testing)
3. Helix liveCD (Digital Forensics)

I have mentioned many times that I prefer liveCD which focuses on specific domain very well, and Davix is really one of those. Undoubtedly I would love to include Davix to my CD folder.

Before I start anything serious, lets view the screenshot after startup from the liveCD -

It's based on SLAX, and I guess most of people know how good SLAX is after trying out BackTrack, DAVIX takes advantage of SLAX modularity, stability and hardware supports, I have tested it with my own hardwares and it works pretty well.

If you are familiar with linux desktop solution, you will definitely recognize that it is using KDE from the screenshot. Though I'm not fan of KDE, but KDE is always simple and easy to use for general users. Many of system configuration can be done via gui so it saves a lot of hassle figuring how to get the system working for you.

On top of that, DAVIX offers very informative resources for users to have great kickstart in learning data capturing, processing and visualization by providing a set of firefox bookmark toolbars, you can easily access all the information requires to study the topic, this can reduce time in studying certain tools and learning visualization techniques, and it also saves you from googling hassle. I like the idea of toolbars organization in firefox.

On the other hand, DAVIX also comes with its own manual which is about 108 pages, you can access it via KDE menu -> DAVIX -> DAVIX Manual. If you are serious about learning data visualization with DAVIX, I suggest you to start with its manual instead of playing around with the desktop without knowing what to do. It contains the basic guide of how to use all the tools that are delivered in DAVIX, the best part is you can follow the manual and learn it practically with all the tools available in DAVIX.

There are 3 main categories listed in Kde menu, they are Capture, Process, and Visualize. The Capture contains tools for you to perform data logging, especially network data. The Process contains tools to perform data processing so that the output of data processed can be parsed by visualization tools. The Visualize mainly contains all the tools for you to visualize the data set by generating different kind of images, diagrams or graphs. As I have mentioned you can just learn all the tools shipped by DAVIX with the comprehensive manual itself.

So what are the tools shipped with DAVIX, there are way too many that I can cover here, however here are my favourites -

1. Rumint
2. Tnv
3. Afterglow
4. Inetvis
5. Etherape
6. Gnuplot
7. Rrdtools
8. Mrtg
9. Wireshark

This is more to preference thingy as I have used those tools previously and familiar with them, I will need to explore the potential of other tools which I never use before. If you want to learn how those tools work, you can actually refer to the DAVIX manual, and then refer to the data set example which you can properly find in /usr/local/share/*, different tools may support different kind of data formats so that may require some learning curves. But the real question lies in what kind of visualization techniques should be applied to the data set you have so that it makes most sense.

After talking about all the good things, I still think there are few things worth improved.

1. Log sample
As this is the liveCD for data analysis and visualization, except that it has the example data set in /usr/local/share/*, it should provide a set of sample logs(apache, postfix, exim, proftpd and etc). Then demonstrating how to format them to feed those visualization tools will be great.

2. Fat taskbar
You may notice in the screenshot that the taskbar is quite big(double taskbar), this is nothing wrong, but if I have to offer a liveCD for visualization purpose, I would prefer to have everything slicker to give bigger space to display the images that I have generated from the data.

3. Unified keyboard shortcut
This is just my idea, when I work with images, I always like to zoom in and out. Zooming in allows you to focus on detail, zooming out on the other hand can improve macro view to understand the ratio or distribution of data. I do know different tools have always defined different keyboard shortcut layout. If zoom(in/out) uses same set of shortcut key settings across all the tools in DAVIX, that would be really great. I'm glad DAVIX offers gqview as the main application to display images as that's my favorite one with its ease of use interface.

4. Installer
Currently it comes with BackTrack Installer which is quite experimental, it needs some works to get it installed, I have tested the installer and it works fine(if you know what you are doing), I'm looking forward for easy installer in future.

By the way, one might ask why should I use DAVIX, simple enough. Take the old cliche "A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words". Using correct visualization techniques to process your thousand lines log files, to be honest you can do more with less, it saves your times and brain power to focus on something more important.

Guess I should end my review about DAVIX here, in case you are interested to try out DAVIX -

DAVIX is also part of Raffael's upcoming book Applied Security Visualization which will be published by Addision Wesley.

Currently, DAVIX is only available to beta testers. To participate in testing, please contact jan.monsch at iplosion.com

Thanks to DAVIX development team for allowing me to participate in beta testing, later is better than never. I do know developing a liveCD require hard works if you want to build a solid one, kudos!

Update Note:
DAVIX developer Jan. P. Monsch has informed me that he has actually making the taskbar more slicker now in new version of Davix, thanks for taking positively on my input.

Enjoy (;])

Snort 3.0 Beta

If you are interested to check out what's offered by latest Snort, now you have it. Kudos to snort development team!!!!!

http://www.snort.org/dl/snortsp/

I haven't tried that out personally yet, but you should!

Enjoy ;]

Earthquake? or Storm .....

The terrible disaster .....

The beijing.exe is actually the storm variant, I thought they are making use of festivals only, it seems they don't even let any single chance going with the use of disaster(popularity counts), that's going too far from humanity.

If you run it, it's really disaster!

Peace :[

For Real?

It's year 2008 now, but .....

ZzZzzzz .....

Peace ;]

Good Read on Bro's Signature Engine

The ICIR blog is always informative, and I'm quite please with the latest post about Bro's Signature Engine.

I just learned few things that I don't know from the post, and it appears that Bro uses flex's regular expression syntax. It is important to understand which condition to use when writing the signature .

Otherwise, take the good read on Things To Keep In Mind When Writing Signatures, that section is particularly useful if you are interested to write Bro sigs.

Peace ;]

Forensics Tools

I have to do some forensics work, and the tools below are very handy -

http://www.afflib.org/

http://www.pyflag.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi

http://ftimes.sourceforge.net/FTimes/

http://p2pmarshal.atc-nycorp.com/

Cheers ;]

M$: Server Hardening & Auditing

Don't laugh, sometimes you have to deal with this whether you like it or not.

I'm looking for tools to perform M$ Windows Server Hardening & Auditing, I know Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and IIS Lockdown but are there other tools you use to assist you in Hardening & Auditing operation such as hardening regedit keys, auditing Active Directory and so forth.

If your job is managing M$ Server Farm, how do you perform your task to make sure all servers have same set of configuration and policy, and they are all monitored properly?

I would like to hear from you, and recommend me good tools and methods of doing these. There's no real secure OS, there's only capable or bullshit sysadmin!

Wake up sysadmin, system security is part of your job .....

Enjoy ;]

HeX 021: Learning PCRE and its performance

PCRE stands for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions, it is mainly used for pattern matching. If you want to learn more about PCRE, take a good read of its manual -

shell>man pcre

shell>man pcrematching

shell>man pcrepartial

shell>man pcrepattern

shell>man pcreperform

So why do you need to learn regular expressions(regex), here's the answer -

http://geek00l.blogspot.com/2006/12/regex-magic-for-netsexcanalyst.html

Next look at the tool that comes with pcre - pcretest, as the name implies, you can use pcretest to test your regex. Lets go -

shell>pcre --help
Usage: pcretest [options] [input file [output file]]

Input and output default to stdin and stdout.
This version of pcretest is not linked with readline().

Options:
-b show compiled code (bytecode)
-C show PCRE compile-time options and exit
-d debug: show compiled code and information (-b and -i)
-dfa force DFA matching for all subjects
-help show usage information
-i show information about compiled patterns
-m output memory used information
-o set size of offsets vector to
-p use POSIX interface
-q quiet: do not output PCRE version number at start
-S set stack size to megabytes
-s output store (memory) used information
-t time compilation and execution
-t time compilation and execution, repeating times
-tm time execution (matching) only
-tm time execution (matching) only, repeating times

If you have already read the man pages above, you should be able to understand some of the options, I normally use the option -C to check the compiles-time option first -

shell>pcretest -C
PCRE version 7.7 2008-05-07
Compiled with
UTF-8 support
Unicode properties support
Newline sequence is LF
\R matches all Unicode newlines
Internal link size = 2
POSIX malloc threshold = 10
Default match limit = 10000000
Default recursion depth limit = 10000000
Match recursion uses stack

Other option I usually use is -t to test on the time compilation and execution of particular regex I write.

shell>pcretest -t
PCRE version 7.7 2008-05-07

re>

So you may see the prompt goes to interactive mode - re>, it is for you to define your regex, bear in mind that your regex must use forward slash as delimeter, for example -

re>/[a-z0-9]+/

This means your regex is [a-z0-9]+, once you enter you will see this -

Compile time 0.0028 milliseconds
data>

You may notice the compile time for this regex is 0.0028 milliseconds, now you try to put any data to see if they match the regex,

data>ABC

Once you hit the enter, you will see this -

Execute time 0.0008 milliseconds
No match

The execution time is 0.0008 milliseconds and there's no match, lets change the data -

data> abc
Execute time 0.0004 milliseconds
0: abc

We can now see the execution time is 0.0004 milliseconds and the data seems to match the regex.

You can also figure out multiple regex compile time on the fly by defining them in a file instead of using interactive mode. For example I write the lines below to a file - pcre-testing.txt

/\d{,10000}/

/([a-z0-9]+)?/i

Do remember that if you want to test multi regex at once, you have to split them with a blank line, you can't do like this and it will incur errors -

/\d{,10000}/
/([a-z0-9]+)?/i

Now we can run this -

shell>pcretest -t pcre-testing
PCRE version 7.7 2008-05-07

/\d{,10000}/
Compile time 0.0032 milliseconds

/([a-z0-9]+)?/i
Compile time 0.0054 milliseconds

There are other options that you may want to try out, but I think I have given you enough guide to carry on, you may be interested in reading some of my related posts here -

http://geek00l.blogspot.com/2007/11/regex-learning-tool-kregexpeditor.html

http://geek00l.blogspot.com/2007/07/visualregexp-nice-regex-learning-tool.html

I advocate pcretest because it comes with pcre and available in HeX, and you can evaluate the performance of the regex quickly.

Enjoy (;])

HeX 2.0: Sneak Peak

We bring you the HeX 2.0 quick preview(it's really just view)!!!!!

FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE, is it real?

Sguil Client 0.7 is here!

Where's the monkey, morphing into lobster?

Stop snorting, oink oink!!!!!

Don't you think it is sexy when shark is on the wire?

Ask for more? Be patient!!!!!

Cheers (;])

MSN IM -> Blogspot -> Pr0ning

I came across this seductive message, and it contains the link that I can't resist to click since it is asked by horny ladies, the link must be legitimate -

http://cux7850mdmk.blogspot.com

Once you click on it, that blog will bring you to another site which is -

http://66.111.45.170/cams/1/

You can see below what is loaded when you go to the blog that is setup with malicious purpose -

The cut-down zoom in version -

META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://66.111.45.170/cams/1/"

I manually check http://66.111.45.170/cams, and you might enjoy the screenshot -

Lets see what is in http://66.111.45.170/cams/1/, the content location is actually at -

http://66.111.45.170/cams/1/index.htm

And the index.htm contains -

meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.xxxblackbook.com/?s=register&r=lc129795"

Now you should be happy to land at this page, and lets register as a member.

It's rather easy to get someone to click on "look legitimate" link than from the email spam these days. We see the use of meta http-equiv="refresh", and you can find the information about it here -

http://www.html-reference.com/META_httpequiv_refresh.htm

During discussion at freenode #rawpacket, my friend scholar pointed me out related information here -

http://spamtrackers.eu/wiki/index.php?title=Blogspot

Enjoy ;]

Network Flow: Uni-Directional VS Bi-Directional

If you are working on network flow research, you should have heard about Uni-Directional and Bi-Directional Network Flow. I will try to explain what are they here. Lets take the quick look of what network flow is first -

Network Flow is the sequence of packets or a packet that belonged to certain network session(conversation) between two end points but delimited by the setting of flow generation tool. To cut it short, it provides network traffic summarization by metering or accounting certain attributes in the network session.

The endpoints here are defined as below -

Layer 2 Endpoint - Source Mac Address | Destination Mac Address
Layer 3 Endpoint - Source IP Address | Destination IP Address
Layer 4 Endpoint - Source Port | Destination Port

Before we dive into understanding of UniFlow and BiFlow, lets look at the definition of Uni and Bi here -

http://www.yourdictionary.com/uni-prefix

http://www.yourdictionary.com/bi-prefix

Uni - one; having or consisting of one only; regarded as a single entity

Bi - using two or both; joining two, combining or involving two

In the context of Uni/Bi Directional Flow, Uni means single, Bi means both. Now, let make it more clearer.

Uni-Directional = Single Directional

Bi-Direction = Both Directional

I put up the illustration in the diagram below.

Uni-Directional Flow

Bi-Directional Flow

Now I will make a simple example, host A sends 90 bytes to host B and host B replies with 120 bytes. Here's the output -

Uni-Directional Network Flow
Srcaddr Direction Dstaddr Total Bytes
Host A -> Host B 90
Host B -> Host A 120

Bi-Directional Network Flow
Srcaddr Direction Dstaddr Total Bytes Src Bytes Dst Bytes
Host A <-> Host B 210 90 120

The Srcaddr and Dstaddr are the endpoints here. In Uni-Directional Flow, you only see the total bytes that sent by Host A(attribute of Host A) but nothing about Host B in the first flow record. Then the next record shows Host B sends 120 bytes to Host A(attribute of Host B). The total bytes is accounted from single endpoint(either Host A or B) only. But in BiFlow, you can see that Host A sends 90 bytes(Source Bytes) and Host B replies with 120 bytes(Destination Bytes). The total bytes is the accumulation of source and destination bytes. To summarize them -

Uni-Directional Network Flow Model - One direction at a time, every flow record contains the attribute of single endpoint only.

Bi-Directional Network Flow Model - Both direction at a time, every flow record contains the attribute of both endpoints.

Theory is tough sometime, here's the practical sample -

Cisco NetFlow uses Uni-Directional model for flow generation

Argus uses Bi-Directional model for flow generation

To draw good picture of Uni-Directional and Bi-Directional Network Flow, it's best to do comparison of them.

1. Network Flow data which is generated by Argus 3 natively
2. Network Flow data which is generated by Cisco NetFlow version 5

The flow records below are generated from the same network session. You can examine closely by clicking on them.

Cisco NetFlow(UniFlow):

Argus(BiFlow):


Flow record property:
SrcAddr = Source Address
Sport = Source Port
Dir = Direction
DstAddr = Destination Address
Dport = Destination Port
SrcPkts = Source Packets
DstPkets = Destination Packets
TotPkts = Total Packets
SrcBytes = Source Bytes
DstBytes = Destination Bytes
TotBytes = Total Bytes

Sometimes I like to think that UniFlow is stateless and BiFlow is stateful.

I will continue writing this Network Flow series, and I hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned for the next one - Traffic Matrix. And of course the HeX 021 series too.

Argus 3 Tip:
You can convert Argus BiFlow to UniFlow by using -M rmon option.

Peace (;])

Network Flow: TopN

There are a lot of questions popping up on and off in argus mailing list regarding how to generate TopN output from argus data, but frequently you may find the questions are too rough to give complete answer.

I'm going to discuss about TopN this time, TopN is the technique that widely used in many industries, what is it for?

TopN is used to retrieve the first N records from the data based on certain object and ordered by its property. Since I'm talking about Network Flow, I would like to make the example using it.

Data: Network Flow Record
Object: Protocol, Network, IP(host), Port, etc
Object Property: Packet Count, Byte Count, etc

Bear in mind that I'm avoiding the use of Flow terminology but layman one so that this example can be understood easily.

If you want to use TopN technique to generate information from the network flow data, first you need to know what you are looking for. Lets go with a simple one -

I want to find out Top 5 IP ordered by Total Packet Count

Total Packet Per IP(host) = (packet send + packet receive) Per IP(host)

Now you run the argus client command to parse the data and generate exactly the result which looks like this -

shell>racluster -M rmon -m saddr -nr testing.arg3 -w - | \
rasort -m pkts -w - | \
ra -L0 -N 5 -s saddr pkts

SrcAddr TotPkts
172.16.1.108 993
193.231.236.41 824
211.185.125.124 178
172.16.1.103 56
211.180.229.190 36

The command above is to generate Top 5 IP ordered by Packet Count. Don't ask me about the command line, it looks complicated for now but that's not my point here, look at the output instead. Host 172.16.1.108 sends or receives 993 pakcets, followed by 193.231.236.41 and so forth.

Now if you want to locate Top 5 IP ordered by Byte Count. You can just run -

shell>racluster -M rmon -m saddr -nr testing.arg3 -w - | \
rasort -m bytes -w - | \
ra -L0 -N 5 -s saddr bytes

SrcAddr TotBytes
172.16.1.108 599949
193.231.236.41 579050
211.185.125.124 18901
172.16.1.103 4964
216.168.224.69 3458

You want to use TopN, you should draft out the TopN output you are looking for, I have seen questions like this -

1. Which is the most active network?
2. Who is the most active sender?
3. Who is the most active receiver(got ddos?)

Or worse,

How can I find out the top talkers?

These kind of questions are too loose, you should at least specify the property, such as most active sender that is ordered by packet count, or most active network that is ordered by byte count and so forth. You have to bear in mind that packet and byte are not going inline, you can have one host sending many small size packets which won't hit TopN byte count at all.

With this kind of idea in mind, you can build the list of TopN which can draw you a good picture of network activeness to solve different issues.

For the next round, I will introduce Traffic Matrix, stay tuned!

Enjoy (;])

Laptop: Alternatives For Security Road Warrior

Which laptop model are you using? This is my question today. I have been looking for laptop of choice for myself, as a security road warrior, I prefer it to be -

1. Lightweight(small/medium size and compact)

2. Black and solid look

3. Miminum 150G of Disk and 4G of Rams

4. Great keyboard touch build(old thinkpad?)

5. 12-14inch display

6. Good battery life

7. FreeBSD/Linux Compatible or I will use VMware/VirtualBox

Currently there are 3 laptop models I have in my mind -

1. Macbook Black

2. Thinkpad T61

3. Dell Xps m1330

What do you think and what's your favorite laptop if you work in security industry, and you need to travel frequently? I'm looking forward for any good suggestion and sharing. Thanks!

Peace ;]

HeX 021 Series

I will start this HeX Zero To One(021) Series in my blog while HeX 2.0 is in active development, and all of them will be imported to HeX Handbook. In future you will see my post with the title prefix of HeX 021: belongs to the series.

Enjoy ;]

HeX: From Zero To One

These days, I have encountered questions like this,

1. How can I be an efficient network security analyst?

2. Is there a quick path or short cut to be one?

3. I'm just system administrator/programmer and don't know crap about security, I'm interested in it but don't know where to start?

4. There are so many resources in the internet, what's the specific knowledge required to be network security analyst so that I can be more focusing on particular subjects?

If you are a student, or just starting to work as network security analyst, I hope this post will shade some lights for you -

I would like to point out 3 posts that I have written -

http://geek00l.blogspot.com/2008/05/hex-handbook.html

http://geek00l.blogspot.com/2007/07/hex-livecd-analogy.html

http://geek00l.blogspot.com/2007/03/netsecanalyst-handbook.html

The HeX System that we are developing is the key to answer almost all your questions, but you might not be able to know where to look at if I throw you HeX liveCD without giving you hints or tips. The HeX Handbook which is derived from my own Network Security Analyst Handbook is actually designed to lead you to the right path.

If you read my post about HeX liveCD analogy, I mentioned this -

The HeX liveCD can only make up to this part(see below) -

Obtain Network Based Data -> Utilizing NSM Based Tools -> Generate Output

The rest depends on how analyst able to perform it -

Output Interpretation -> Output Analysis -> Output Summarization -> Report

Clearly enough, the HeX itself can't do everything for you, you have to help yourself starting from Output Interpretation process.

If you apply the reverse thinking, what are the obstacle you have encountered during Output Interpretation? You have used the tools to generate the output for you, for example - snort, bro-ids or even simple tcpdump. Apparently if you find yourself can't understand those output, you can't interpret them correctly. Now the important question is "Why can't you understand those output?" There are few answers to it -

1. You may not have enough network protocol knowledge.

2. You may not familiar with the tools because different tools tend to generate the output in different ways or results.

3. You may not update yourself with current security trends(follow bug traq, cve and so forth)

4. You are being lazy

Now I flash back again to my Network Security Analyst Handbook post, I have put the book into four sections -

Sec 1 - Net Sec Analyst: The RoadMap
Sec 2 - Net Sec Analyst: The Workflows
Sec 3 - Net Sec Analyst: The Tools
Sec 4 - Net Sec Analyst: The Case Study

For the Section 1 and Section 2, I have elaborated them as -

Network Security Analyst: The RoadMap
What are good foundations and technical knowledge that should be acquired to become good network security analyst? I hope The RoadMap can answer question like that, until now I haven 't seen any books discussing about this topic yet.

Network Security Analyst: The WorkFlows
What are the methodologies and mechanisms that are used by network security analyst to handle their tasks? The routine daily tasks, the automated and manual process of performing analysis, situation handling and so forth.
This is more of how to think or work like a network security analyst. I will try to standardize the common work flows but you are free to extend it to your own way.

If you have gone through Section 1 and 2, you should be able to do this -

Output Interpretation -> Output Analysis -> Output Summarization -> Report

Unfortunately we don't offer these in HeX version 1.x, but this is going to change, we are currently working on integrating things that are discussed in Section 1 and 2 into HeX version 2.x which will be released sometime around June. As Section 3 is already integrated into HeX, you should be able to complete Section 1-3 with HeX, all you need is discipline!

This is not a myth, the HeX Handbook will guide you to complete Section 1-3 using HeX System itself, you don't need more.

For the Section 4, I already have other plan and maybe you can see them in HeX 3.x, who knows.

If you want to learn to be a competent network security analyst, you can start with HeX. It will take you from 0 to 1.

Now I start to think that University should offer this kind of course for students, as far as I know country like Philippine has their Universities offering malware analysis course and therefore you can see a lot of them working in AntiVirus Industry, if our country want to produce competent network security analyst, they should offer security related courses in University. Not wait until they are out of school and busy with works.

Enjoy ;]

Training: Practical Network Flow Analysis

This time, me and spoonfork will bring you our new and upcoming training which is -

Understanding Network Conversations:
Practical Network Flow Analysis

Here's the description of our training -

Network Flow data represents a summary of conversation between two end points. It provides valuable information to assist investigation and analysis of network and security issues. Unlike deep packet inspection, flow data does not rely on packet payloads. Instead the analyst relies on information gathered from packet headers and its associated metrics. This provides the analyst a neutral view of network traffic flow by tracking network sessions between multiple endpoints simultaneously. In addition, having network flow data will provide a better visibility of network events without having the need to perform payload analysis.

With the implementation and deployment of Network Flow technologies, an analyst can discover different types and classes of network activities, be it normal or abnormal. In this training we will show you how to interpret Network Flow data and perform practical Network Flow Analysis.

While high level theory explanations are extremely useful, hands-on exercises are even better. Each chapter is accompanied by practical hands-on exercises such as exporting network flow data from Unix and Cisco-based routers, performing simple operations such as IP accounting, network baselining, and identifying different kinds of network anomalies and attacks.

Who should attend?

Network Security Analyst
Network Administrator
ISP Network Architect
System Administrator

Bonus

+ First 10 registrants get free seat for HITB Conference Kuala Lumpur in October 2008

+ Human Resources Development Fund(HRDF) Claimable

For more information, check it out at -

http://training.hitb.org/flowanalysis/

Cheers (;])

HeX: Handbook

While we are in the active development of HeX 2.0, we will start a side project mainly for documentation purpose. We call it HeX Handbook, the link is here -

https://trac.security.org.my/hex/wiki/HeXHandbook

Currently there's nothing yet, but I will import all the contents from my incomplete Network Security Analyst Handbook to there, and I'm now trying to design the standard template so that whoever want to contribute can follow the template.

If you are using HeX, and you know different way of doing analysis using the tools in HeX, we would like to hear from you. By the way, if you are good in language translation, please do let me know.

Thanks to scholar who always gives me very fruitful input!

Cheers (;])

Como: Installation on Ubuntu

I found this without intention while searching for tool that can convert pcap format to netflow v5 format, its name is Como, the project which is developed by Intel people. If you want to know more about Como, check out their publications here -

http://como.sourceforge.net/publications.php

Here's the quick way to get it installed on Ubuntu -

shell>sudo apt-get install cmake

shell>wget \
http://como.sourceforge.net/download/como-1.5.tar.gz

shell>tar xvzf como-1.5.tar.gz

shell>mkdir build-como

shell>cd build-como/

shell>cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/stow/como-1.5 ../como-1.5

shell>make

shell>sudo make install

Once you have it installed, you can run it via command line interface but make sure you have configured its paths and modules. The configuration file is como.conf which can be found under directory /usr/local/stow/como-1.5/etc/como, you can also enable its module in run time. Here's the available modules -

shell>ls -la /usr/local/stow/como-1.5/libexec/como-1.0/

total 596
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-05-23 10:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-05-23 10:34 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21281 2008-05-23 10:34 apps.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18778 2008-05-23 10:34 assoc.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 23131 2008-05-23 10:34 autofocus.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15151 2008-05-23 10:34 dhcp.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21425 2008-05-23 10:34 ethtypes.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25640 2008-05-23 10:34 ewma.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16434 2008-05-23 10:34 flowcount.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27356 2008-05-23 10:34 flow-reassembly.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16169 2008-05-23 10:34 frames.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20629 2008-05-23 10:34 hwtm.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14416 2008-05-23 10:34 ipssi.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14736 2008-05-23 10:34 macssi.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13290 2008-05-23 10:34 nfexlist.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16080 2008-05-23 10:34 pattern-search.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20117 2008-05-23 10:34 protocol.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27098 2008-05-23 10:34 scanner-detector.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17405 2008-05-23 10:34 ssid.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21645 2008-05-23 10:34 superaddr.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25659 2008-05-23 10:34 topaddr.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25433 2008-05-23 10:34 tophwaddr.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21516 2008-05-23 10:34 topports.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15122 2008-05-23 10:34 trace.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19080 2008-05-23 10:34 traffic.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27192 2008-05-23 10:34 tuple.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20970 2008-05-23 10:34 unknown-ports.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39547 2008-05-23 10:34 worm-signature.so

To enable any of module at run time, you can just execute -

shell>/usr/local/stow/como-1.5/bin/como topports

It also provides http access to the data but I keep getting the error below while connect to http://localhost:44444 -

Module "" not found in the current configuration

I believe I have the modules configured properly but I can't get rid of the error, anyway that's all for Como and I will write more about it after some testings.

Peace ;]

Argus 3 Release

This is nothing new, argus 3 is finally released after long testing period. Thanks to everyone who involves in the argus 3 development and testing cycle especially Carter. You can download it at -

- http://qosient.com/argus/downloads.htm

If you are using FreeBSD, good new is argus 3 port is available now and you can check out the information about it here -

- http://www.freshports.org/net-mgmt/argus3/
- http://www.freshports.org/net-mgmt/argus3-clients/

I will try out the argus 3 ports on FreeBSD and see how it goes, have fun!

Enjoy ;]

HeX: Hardware Compability List

We started this list a while ago, and if you have tried out HeX and for the basic part it works properly, please update the list or at least email me about it.

https://trac.security.org.my/hex/wiki/Hardwares

So what are the basic things that must work in order to be included in the list, here you go -

- boot properly
- display properly
- ethernet adapter is supported

Please help out to improve the list, thanks!!!!!

Cheers ;]

SecurityDistro: Interview

Thanks to Dakrone who has committed HeX to SecurityDistro which I don't know myself, and interestingly Josh from SecurityDistro sent me the interview questions via email and here's the interview result -

http://securitydistro.com/articles/407/Interview-with-CS-Lee-creator-of-HeX.php

Thanks to Josh for his kindness and free promotion from SecurityDistro.

I would like to thank to all the team members for progressive HeX development, and feel great to have you guys working together with me.

Cheers ;]

Network Flow Analysis: The Tools

I need to keep track of all the network flow analysis tools and study their offerings, this link contains many tools which may be useful for that purpose -

http://www.switch.ch/network/projects/completed/TF-NGN/floma/software.html

Enjoy ;]

Blog: Quick Update

I haven't been updating my blog lately, here's the quick one.

- I'm not in the mood of blogging but learning.

- I'm preparing myself for many things now which I can't tell yet.

- I'm learning network protocols that I'm not familiar with.

- I'm learning the advance usage of wireshark, and I'm glad the presentation slides of Sharkfest are available online here.

- I will spend 2 months of my free time on non-tech stuffs soon, which means I will still online but more for casual browsing, email checking and light reading. I need to be more focus!

- I will still blog even though the mood is not with me.

Cheers ;]

CERT: Vulnerability Analysis Blog

CERT has launched its Vulnerability Analysis Blog which you can find at -

http://www.cert.org/blogs/vuls/

Another useful resource for security professional.

Cheers ;]

Dnstop: Statistical Tool for DNS Traffics

I learn about dnstop when reading rolland's presentation slide, thanks to his comment in my blog.

You can find his presentation at -

http://homepage.mac.com/roland.dobbins/FileSharing5

The presentation title is Listening to the Network: Utilizing Telemetry to Detect and Classify Network Traffic, I enjoy reading it as I have learned some new tricks or two from his presentation. One of the tool he has mentioned in the presentation is dnstop and I figure it is available in either Ubuntu packages repository or FreeBSD ports, I decide to try it out.

Just like the top command in Unix based system, it can run as real time monitor for your dns traffic by listening to the network device or it can also do post processing by reading the pcap file. The command option for dnstop is pretty straight forward and you can find them in man dnstop. It also provides a set of run time option to show different results from the statistical analysis output. To perform real time monitoring of dns traffic, you can listen to the device -

shell>sudo dnstop -4 lnc0

It looks pretty straightforward, you can also read the pcap file by specifying them -

shell>dnstop -4 -b ip -l 9 testing.pcap

Queries: 1005 new, 34812 total Wed Apr 30 18:10:46 2008

Sources Count %
-------------- --------- ------
192.168.42.149 3644 10.5
192.168.42.56 1965 5.6
192.168.42.33 1791 5.1
192.168.42.78 1790 5.1
192.168.42.163 1530 4.4
.....

I truncated the output here, then if you press 1, it will show the first level query names -

Queries: 44 new, 34856 total Wed Apr 30 18:11:55 2008

Query Name Count %
------------ --------- ------
com 13200 37.9
in-addr.arpa 8843 25.4
my 5950 17.1
org 3145 9.0
net 2630 7.5
biz 223 0.6
de 92 0.3
.....

If you press 3, it shows third level query names -

Queries: 0 new, 34856 total Wed Apr 30 18:13:10 2008

Query Name Count %
----------------------------- --------- ------
waumail.com 2805 8.0
208.218.in-addr.arpa 1883 5.4
excitedd.com.my 1388 4.0
sharishit.com.my 1112 3.2
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org 938 2.7
.....

If you press !, it will show the sources that are performing first level query names -

Queries: 0 new, 34856 total Wed Apr 30 18:15:14 2008

Source Query Name Count %
-------------- ------------ --------- ------
192.168.42.149 in-addr.arpa 3007 8.6
192.168.42.78 in-addr.arpa 1009 2.9
192.168.42.56 in-addr.arpa 845 2.4
192.168.60.253 com 833 2.4
192.168.125.201 my 697 2.0
.....

There are many other options which you can figure it out yourself and this is really great tool for dns traffic analysis. For more information, you can find at its home page -

http://dns.measurement-factory.com/tools/dnstop/

Btw, I like the use of the word 'telemetry' here and enjoy some dns voodoo .....

Cheers (;])

Thinking: Enumerating Goodness & Security Through Obscurity

I read about this and this.

Enumerating Goodness has its own weakness though, the mimic attacks that look legit will create false negative and be categorized as Goodness.

Security through obscurity is not a great idea and to certain people it sounds dumb as if the application/software that you are trying to protect is vulnerable, you will be eventually exploited, however it does asist for defensive side because it helps to prevent against automated tools and also requires offensive side to perform more steps to achieve what they are trying to do and this leaves more footprints to be examined and traced by the defensive side. It can be considered as early warning of its kind if you know how to make use of it.

This is just my personal thought and feel free to discuss about the topic. There's no perfect model or principle.

Export Cisco NetFlow in Single Screenshot

I'm digging into network flow analysis for a while. The single screenshot below is to show how to export Cisco Netflow version 5 to the flow monitor at 172.16.1.55, simple and straightforward. The router model is Cisco 7200 series.

Note to myself.

Cheers ;]

Malaysia Tourism, visit the malwares!!!!!

If you are security.org.my reader, you may find the latest post about Malaysia Tourism Website is serving malwares to everyone. This is not big surprise as Malaysia Internetwork is largely contributing to malwares distribution globally according to Google.

So this "Malaysia Can" spirit continues, we are distributing malwares to people around the world efficiently. I'm wondering how much our lovely government has spent to setup and maintain the web sites, let us know if you have clue.

Enough crap, lets look at the term of usage in the Tourism Malaysia website -

All the information contained herein is correct at the time of publication. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the contents, Tourism Malaysia shall not be held liable for any errors, omissions or inaccuracies which may occur.

That's great, don't blame them as they have thrown the best effort!

Now time to do some analysis by looking at these two scripts -

http://www.852599.cn/mp3/list.htm
http://www.852599.cn/mp3/MZ.htm

The MZ.htm is the java script, here's the content -

This looks like the black hat SEO technique that quite commonly used by China and Russia hackers which we have seen to increase the counter stat, and of course the charset does tell the story here. On the other hand, the file list.htm doesn't look to be so straight forward to understand -

I truncated the line t="68,105,109....." so that it can be read properly here. The list.htm is VBScript and that's why it won't work on other browsers except Internet Explorer. If you look at the last line, it calls MZ.htm using iframe technique. In order to know what this VBScript, we have to de-obfuscate it and the easiest way is to replace the function execute to msgbox so it looks like this -

msgbox(rechange(t))

Then load the file to Internet Explorer and viola, check out the screenshot below -


Now we can find the location of the malware -

http://www.852599.cn/mp3/setup.exe

I downloaded the executable file and tried to scan it using ClamAV with no result, therefore I uploaded it to Virustotal to scan through different Antivirus Softwares. The result is decent, out of 31 types of Antivirus Software, only 12 recognize it as malware. If any of users who are using those Antivirus Softwares that still don't detect it, congratulations! The result of scanning is here.

I would like to thank to my friend - tehtb who is the decent Windows Programmer, I was silly to tell him maybe we can use print function and he pointed me out msgbox function works well here.

Enjoy (;])

Google Http Redirection

Thanks to Google, you can now redirect anyone to yahoo.com from google.com. Click below -

Google to Yahoo

Basically you can redirect to any site you want, the http request looks like this -

http://www.google.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=FnzbwS&num=67575&adurl=
http://www.yahoo.com

I think Google doesn't verify ai= or num= field, you can just put whatever input to it and still get it parsed properly, for example -

http://www.google.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=abcdef&num=12345&adurl=whatverURL

This is the trick from one of the spam I received today which redirects me to download malwares and it still works now, hopefully Google fixes it as soon as possible.

Peace ;]

HITB Dubai 2008 Wrap Up

First of all, thanks to HITB crews, sponsors, speakers and all the attendees to make this happen again. We also thank to Dhillon(HITB Founder) for giving us(me and spoonfork) opportunity to present this time. Lets talk about some craps first -

1. Dubai hotel is expensive!
2. The hotel foods are always the same!
3. Pizza express is nice!
4. We always have great support from Army!
5. Dubai Gold Souk has too much golds!
6. Rufio and Niresh are upset because of .....!
7. I met all the cool people there!
8. The conference party is real fun because we get to hang up with beers!

Here's the sum up of all the presentations that I have attended -

Bruce Schneier
Schneier On Security

Bruce talks about the distance between the feeling and reality of security. I'm not really a guy who emphasizes on conceptual or semantic, however I think people will never get it right between the believe and reality, the line is blur because you can never educate the masses about the technologies that keep evolving from time to time.

Jeremiah Grossman
Hacks Happen
Jeremiah is statistics man, and of course the numbers tell you the changes of threat landscape and that's not really big surprise. He concluded all the quantitative data from different sources to give you macro view of current vulnerabilities and threats state. The web attack is popular as it becomes important business platform, remember the popularity brings paparazzi. And again we can't really defend ourselves from "just surface or 1st day' attack(I don't call it 0 days as the technique is already used) because we don't understand them. The summary is pretty simple, hacks happen .... all the time. That guarantees we won't be jobless too ;P

Christopher J.Rouland
Advances in Intrusion Detection and Prevention

I don't know Christopher personally, I attended his talk because the topic has something to do with intrusion detecion, seriously there's nothing really new or advance if you are following cutting edge intrusion detection technologies for long time. Most of the time Christopher is just explaining what IBM ISS offers and they are better than other vendors in comparison. Their system also emphasizes on session data by importing NetFlow data and we can't consider it as new stuff(think NSM). We are seeing more and more vendors taking session data seriously now.

Alessio 'mayhem' Pennasilico
VoIP (in)Security - Italians Do It Better

Alessio talked about his experience of making fun with voip system during CCC in Italy, I like his term of spitting, you should check out his presentation slide once it is up online. I would say fear the embassy who can reach you anytime, that's really entertaining talk from Mayhem. He also demonstrated the device which can change the voice at the end of the talk.

Marc Weber Tobias

How We Cracked Their Codes: A Case Study in Compromising the Most Popular High Security Lock in America - Medeco m3 and Biaxial
I'm not into lock domain or I know nothing about it at all, however I'm really impressed with Marc's work to crack the lock, and respect his 40 years passion in the same domain. I'm just 5 years old in network security industry and hope I can keep my passionate to network security field like he does.

Cesar Ceurrudo

Token Kidnapping

Cesar is the CEO of ArgenISS who sponsored our conference party, he showed us the weakness of design flaw in latest windows technology by kidnapping the token of particular process threads and you can gain the access priviledge to do anything you want. This is not something that can be fixed easily and therefore he has informed Microsoft before the presentation. If you want to know more about it, feel free to check out his presentation slides.

Walter Goulet, Viviana Basso and Benjamin Hagen
Real World Attacks Against 3G Networks Using Subscriber Devices

This is the talk from Motorola guys, they discuss their experience of penetration testing for 3G Networks, their conclusion is pretty simple, most of the security issues derive from the deployment phase where the party that setting up the network has to meet the timeline and leave most of the devices with default setting. As long as they are connected to the IP networks, you can basically probe them easily.

Alexander Kornbrust
Practical Oracle Forensics

I'm not database expert and don't know anything about Oracle at all(I use MySQL or PostgreSQL), I like Alexander's formalized approach to perform forensics process on Oracle Database System, he classifies different kind of malicious attackers with different kind of purposes and attentions, by knowing what kind of malicious attackers you are dealing with, you know what kind of sql statement will be queried by them, and that's really good lead to figure things out. Alex is really a bright guy and he shares his stuffs, he has written the scripts to retrieve all the necessary information to find culprits and evidences from the database system. I'm wondering if similar approach can be applied to MySQL and PostgreSQL and maybe should start looking up on this.

Petko D Petkov

For My Next Trick… Client-Side Hacking
Adrian 'pagvac' Pastor
Cracking into Embedded Devices and Beyond!

Pdp and Adrian are both thinktankers from Gnucitizen, I'm one of their blog readers(as always you can't forget about offensive security techniques while you are in defensive side), they are concluding their works of client side hackings and embedded devices cracking. If you are their blog reader, you should be familiar with all the stuffs they are sharing during the presentation, I like their single slide explanation where they only show the meat of particular hacking trick so that you can understand them easily. I think they are trying to deliver the mindset of "hacking through simplicity" and it will just work most of the time.

Mel(Spoonfork) and I presented Defensive Network Security, this is the first time we deliver our talk in Dubai, I hope whoever have attended our talk enjoy it and thanks to the 22 years old Amy for not sparing even 5 minutes.

I miss some of the presentations as both presentation tracks were running at the same time, anyway I will grab their presentation slide once they are online. Overall I enjoy the HITB conference in Dubai this time(congrates to Rufio as the new CTF overlord this time, hopefully you will suffer for another few years).

This conference party was organized on the cruise, and I bet everyone was enjoying the alcohols after "long fasting". See you guys in next HITB Conference again!!!!!

Cheers (;])

HeX is 1 year old now

Me and Chfl4gs_ decided to start the development of HeX System since mid of April 2007, and it's much improved with the involvement of other active members. Today it turns one year old.

Happy birthday to HeX, and thanks to the raWPacket team members to make it happen.

Happy packetysis!!!!!

Enjoy (;])

HITB Dubai 2008

Here I come!

Enjoy (;])

Sguil: Excitement!!!!!

As the active member of NSM community, I got the first hand information about the acquisition of Sguil by Cisco. My friend Hanashi hits it first in his blog. Here's the full announcement -

Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire SguilTM Open Source Monitoring Project Acquisition Furthers Cisco’s Vision for Integrated Security Products

SAN JOSE, Calif., and LONGMONT, Color., April 1st, 2008 – Cisco and the SguilTM project today announced an agreement for Cisco to acquire the SguilTM project, a leading Open Source network security solution. With hundreds of installations world-wide, SguilTM is the de facto reference implementation for the Network Security Monitoring (NSM) model. SguilTM-based NSM will enable Cisco’s customer base to more efficiently collect and analyze security-related information as it traverses their enterprise networks. This acquisition will help Cisco to cement its reputation as a leader in the Open Source movement while at the same time furthering its long-held vision of integrating security into the network infrastructure.

Under terms of the transaction, Cisco has acquired the SguilTM project and related trademarks, as well as the copyrights held by the five principal members of the SguilTM team, including project founder Robert "Bamm" Visscher. Cisco will assume control of the open source SguilTM project including the Sguil.net domain, web site and web site content and the SguilTM Sourceforge project page. In addition, the SguilTM team will remain dedicated to the project as Cisco employees, continuing their management of the project on a day-to-day basis.

To date, SguilTM has been developed primarily in the Tcl scripting language, support for which is already present inside many of Cisco’s routers and switches. The new product, to be known as “Cisco Embedded Monitoring Solution (CEMS)”, will be made available first in Cisco’s carrier-grade products in 3Q08, with support being phased into the rest of the Cisco product line by 4Q09. Linksys-branded device will follow thereafter, though the exact deployment schedule has yet to be announced.

“We’re extremely pleased to announce this deal,” said Cisco’s Chief Security Product Manager Cletus F. Simmons. “For some time, our customers have told us that our existing security monitoring products did not extend far enough into their network infrastructure layer. Not only was it sometimes difficult to intercept and monitor the traffic, but there were often political problems at the customer site with deploying our Intrusion Detection Systems, as management had heard several years ago that they were ‘dead’. Now, with SguilTM integrated into all their network devices, they’ll have no choice!”

Although the financial details of the agreement have not been announced, SguilTM developer Robert Visscher will become the new VP of Cisco Rapid Analysis Products for Security. “This deal means a lot to the SguilTM project and to me personally,” Visscher explains. “Previously, we had to be content with simply being the best technical solution to enable intrusion analysts to collect and analyze large amounts of data in an extraordinarily efficient manner. But now, we’ll have the additional advantage of the world’s largest manufacturer of networking gear shoving it down their customers’ throats! We will no longer have to concern ourselves with mere technical excellence. Instead, I can worry more about which tropical island to visit next, and which flavor daiquiri to order. You know, the important things.”

About Cisco Systems

Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

About SguilTM

SguilTM is the leading Network Security Monitoring (NSM) framework. It is built for network security analysts by network security analysts. Sguil’s main component is an intuitive GUI that provides access to a wide variety of security related information, including real-time IDS alerts, network session database and full packet captures. SguilTM was written by Robert “Bamm” Visscher, who was apparently too cheap to buy a book on Java or C.

With this deal, Sguil will go into active and sharp development very soon and kudos to the Sguil team, I would say Cisco has made the best decision ever!!!!!

I bet the stubborn of using TCL works this time .....

Enjoy (;])