GNUCITIZEN

This is going to be one of these quick posts which just makes you think what the information security landscape will be like in 5 years. Before I move on with my commentary, here is a video which is essential for you to watch.

Got the idea? No! Let me explain. What you see in the video above is an application for the iPhone which gives you detailed characteristics of properties (houses) in USA. [...]

Two of the most popular Firefox extensions are at war, fighting for their own piece of land. More examples will follow.

Oh yes, the digital battlefield is taking unusual shapes. The latest manifestation of cyber warfare is a conflict between the Adblock Plus and the NoScript extensions. The story goes that NoScript used some JavaScript tactics and, of course, some obfuscations in order to cripple the Adblock Plus functionalities. [...]

When I was playing/introducing the partial disclosure practice an year and something ago, I did get contacted by numerous dodgy characters willing to buy yet undisclosed vulnerabilities for substantial amount of money.

Of course, requests of that nature were kindly ignored. I couldn’t believe that someone was willing to give me so much money for something I virtually spent 2-3 hours maximum to produce. [...]

With this post I would like to inform you that Jeriko moved in its own source code repository which you will be able to find here. There is also a discussion group here, if you feel like using it.

The version inside the new code repository is very different from the version you’ve seen before. [...]

On the 14th this month, Computerworld published an interesting article titled ‘Mafiaboy’ spills the beans at IT360 on underground hackers. Interesting read but nothing too exciting.

The article is yet another proof that we are all in big trouble. Simply put, the technology will continue to develop and the majority of people wont be able to keep up. As long as the situation remains the same, people and corporations will get exploited regardless how tight their security is. [...]

Perl, Ruby Python: use the language that suits your character. However, one of the things that differentiate python from the rest is its philosophy, which is: there should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it (where it is a problem). This philosophy gives python some interesting advantages over other similar languages. That will be explained later on. [...]

This morning I spotted several blog posts mentioning that Twitter has been hit by yet another XSS worm.

There is no merit in discussing how this has been done and for what purposes but this incident is yet another proof that the attack landscape is rapidly changing and moving towards web enabled infrastructures and the client-side. [...]

I wish I had the ultimate tool, whether that is a programing language such as perl, python and ruby, or whether it is a framework like metasploit and vulnerability scanner like nessus. I wish, but I know that such thing doesn’t exist and probably never will.

Lately I’ve been dropping a lot bash scripts on public forums and of course on work related projects. Many people came back to me asking why I chose bash. Python or perl would have been better! [...]

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve added more features to the Jeriko toolkit which I briefly covered in my post over here. For those of you who don’t know, Jeriko is a compilation of various bash scripts to ease manual penetration testing practices. The idea is to automate only the things which are sort of boring.

Anyway, now you have a few more scripts at your disposal. [...]

I’ve got quite a lot of good feedback on the security buzzword generator I announced yesterday. For those of you who do not know, the generator is a fun little utility part of the GNUCITIZEN campaigns which helps you with coming up with new and exciting buzzwords like a security pro.

We often laugh when a new buzzword makes its rounds in the media but the matter of fact is that buzzwords are important. [...]