EP041

EP041 – Handsomeware
Music provided by: Denis Kreynin https://soundcloud.com/denis-kreynin

Greetings & Banter
We started to produce some videos to compliment what we’re discussing in episodes. Check them out on YouTube here! Also, I’m probably supposed to beg you to subscribe and thumbs up episodes when we put them out, but we’re not making money off this so do what you want 🙂

You can also subscribe to our podcast on Google play music now, so that’s cool. listen from your browser or subscribe on android.

Projects & Homework
Learning by doing! There’s a project called Mutillidae that is a purposefully vulnerable web server with a back-end database so people can have a safe and “free” way to test out attacker techniques to break into systems. We’ll be assigning homework over the coming episodes that can help you understand the mechanics of the attacks which are beneficial for becoming a penetration tester and also defending against these attacks.

The tool can be found at irongeek’s website here, but please take precautions that you’re not exposing this purposefully vulnerable system to the big bad Internet. If you don’t have at least a firewall blocking Internet people from accessing this system, I can pretty much assure you that you will have this system compromised which would be a very nice foothold for bad guys into the soft gooey centre of your network.

This week’s homework is SQL injection. Obligatory reference to little Bobby Tables

Topic for this week: Ransomware
Ransomware has been getting a lot of press over the past 6 months, which is incidentally when we started to put this show idea together. It’s a form of extortion where the files are encrypted so you can’t access them without paying to decrypt them.

Introduction: this Securestate article has a pretty good overview of how it’s acting now.

2nd perspective: Bromium has a good overview too including a video you can watch under the demo heading if couldn’t describe it well enough. Warning: It’s a security vendor website and they’re a little heaving on the FUD for the first minute, but after the 1:30 mark they show you what you see as the victim and also what’s happening behind the scenes to your computer.

Just an example that shows this is mainstream, here’s an article on the attempted extortion of the Ottawa Hospital , how pervasive the attack was, and their response in comparison to another hospital that was struck.

We love to talk about the cat and mouse games played between attackers and defenders. This is just another example.

The good guys aren’t the only ones that stumble over cryptographic implementations. Here’s one flawed, and backdoored implementation, and here’s another one that breaks easily.

Finally, some good news: This is Kaspersky’s tool to decrypt your encrypted system called CoinVault.