lanmaster53.com

If you're my age (born in the early 1980s) and know how to code, then it has likely been a differentiator for you in your career. I can't think of a single thing I've done professionally where my ability to understand programming concepts and write code has not benefited me in some way. However, coding is fast becoming a more common skill set amongst the younger generations. Teaching our kids to code is now more of a necessity and less of a luxury. ... more

While I don't do active defense in any part of my professional life, I enjoy developing active defense techniques for web technologies. Lately I've been dabbling in active defense mechanisms for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, and as the developer of the HoneyBadger geolocation framework, incorporating the research into new reporting techniques and agents. ... more

Raise your hand if you've ever had sqlmap fail to find or exploit a vulnerability you knew to exist? I imagine there's a lot of folks with their hands up right now. Okay, put your hands down. ... more

So, a couple weeks ago Matt Svensson (@TechNerdings) dropped me a DM in Twitter:

Random other thing that I am curious if you guys have seen anything on... I just got an email from the local eye clinic. I hit the "spam" button on Gmail to report spam and unsubscribe. What I didn't realize is that it actually opens the unsubscribe link in the browser. Good news, easy unsubscribe. Maybe.....if you properly craft the spam...you could use the unsubscribe button to open a malicious web page?

Um... yeah! I immediately thought of how great a CSRF-via-email attack vector this was. Think about it. Users are trained not to click links, but in the case of Gmail, they're taught to click the handy-dandy "Report Spam" button to report it to the spam filter. But wait a second. The handy-dandy "Report Spam" button will go the extra step and unsubscribe the user from future attacks as well if the user so desires... and they do. ... more

We had an interesting conversation on the Proverbs Hackers mailing list today about getting tickets for popular conferences that have limited ticket sales. Security conferences most often thought of in this category are DerbyCon and ShmooCon. For anyone that has tried to get tickets to one of these conferences in the traditional fashion, you know the struggle is real. The conversation got me thinking about ways you can acquire a ticket that you may not realize are available. Below is the result of that thought exercise. ... more

(Originally posted at https://nvisium.com/blog/2017/04/05/handling-missed-vulnerabilities/.)

Robin "digininja" Wood wrote this interesting article about the impact of missing vulnerabilities during security assessments. He makes a lot of good points, and the reality is, it's something we all deal with. Robin talks about how missing a vulnerability can be the end of one's career, or at least a large step backward. While this is true, his article only addresses the impact at a micro level. I'd like to expand on that. ... more

So, I'm sorta OCD. Anyone that knows me will attest to that. When it comes to my computing environments, I can't stand clutter. That includes both the external and internal components of my computing environment. One particular point of interest for me is the number of applications installed on my system. I've always felt like limiting the amount of software on my system to only what I needed, and avoiding endless install and uninstall cycles, has resulted in a more stable system. I have no scientific proof to back this up, but it's always worked for me, so I like to keep my system clean and tidy. However, in my line of work, where one-off tools for testing and research abound, this is a daily challenge. ... more