Early last year we presented at 44con with a talk titled: “Penetration Testing considered harmful today“. 44con have just released the video so we figured it was worth a quick recap (for anyone not willing to tolerate the whiny voice!) The original slides (in PDF) are available (here) The central thesis of the talk is that penetration testing has established itself as a necessary activity for securing a network and is now pushed forward by a multi million dollar industry despite …
Author: haroon meer
(This talk was given at 44Con in London (2010)) Brief details on it can be found here. The point of the next four slides is merely to establish some sort of credibility. Essentially it’s to try and establish that when I talk about pen testing, I do actually have some background in it. This is the central thesis of the talk, and I’ll try to explain why I believe this is true.. In 2010 we wrote a blog post titled …
For the first time in a decade I didn’t attend BlackHat USA in Las Vegas. I learned that South Africa in August is much colder than i recalled, but also had the chance to observe the conference from through a twitter-lense. It seemed as if there was more talk about parties, than content so I decided to grab all the tweets i could (#blackhat through the twitter search API) to do some simple grouping*. Whats clear straight off is that …
(because we can’t have enough posts with exclamation marks in them) Our previous post (and research) seemed to go by pretty silently initially and then suddenly was everywhere. Andy Greenberg wrote a piece over at Forbes which really does deserve special mention. Tech journalists so often sensationalize security stories that many security researchers are quite afraid to even talk them. I certainly was, but his piece was fair, balanced and covered all the interesting points. +1 to him. The Forbes …
(aka: Shoulder Surfing: There’s an App for that!) We rarely talk about it these days, but shoulder surfing is a pretty old (but reliable) attack. This is why most password prompts are masked. Many modern mobiles (and tablets) however will highlight keys pressed on the keyboard making old style shoulder surfing attacks trivial (and reasonably automatable) again. In an effort to (help) bring back the 90’s we decided to do some fiddling and built a quick app(on top of the …
In February this year we launched ThinkstScapes as a Security Intelligence subscription service. It was originally aimed chiefly at adding context & clarity to newly published research and conference proceedings. The subscription also catered for periodic updates and commentary via “Ad Hoc” updates. We just wrapped Quarter-1, so figured a quick round-up of Q1 would make sense. Interestingly the adhoc updates turned out to be quite popular with customers (forcing us to pay far more attention to them) and in …
I wrote a piece for Al Jazeera on cyber-war, asymmetry and the recent news around possible military reprisal for cyber attacks. You can read the full piece [online here.] …
*oops* We forgot to mention that we updated iTried in the App Store. (iTried is the tiny app that takes a photograph on your Mac whenever the screensaver is disturbed). The new version will allow you to post the pic to twitter whenever it takes one (or whenever it can) which gives you 2 cute possibilities: The ability to remotely see who has been at your Mac The all important ability to track you own haircut over time ;> Check …
We wanted to quickly announce the availability of http://cc.thinkst.com (a resource in need of it’s own domain & a better name.) CC is a simple application that aims to give us a single point where one can search and browse infosec conference talks and materials*. Quick OverviewOne of the cool things about having all of this data in a central db is that we are just as easily able to search by topic (http://cc.thinkst.com/searchMore/foo/) as we are by speaker (http://cc.thinkst.com/searchMore/halvar/)Finding …
The folks over at the Infosec Network have recently started doing interviews with security researchers. They have interviewed some real rock stars so far ([Charlie Miller], [HD Moore], [Joanna Rutkowska], [David Litchfield], [Matthieu Suiche], [Dan Kaminsky], and [Jeremiah Grossman] ) so i was pretty flattered when they asked me.. My interview is up [here] complete with dodgy photo and embarrassingly bad answers.. …