kafrofrite

Disclaimer: I work as a sec engineer and part of my job includes finding vulnerabilities.

I think the effort is misplaced. We should be exploring ways to make our systems more resilient and I would expect those companies* to focus on that front. Vulnerability research is important, and we should aim to remove as many bugs as we can from our codebases but the pace of software development is increasing and so is the introduction of new bugs.

* I would also expect an increase on relevant research regarding novel paradigms of securing systems.

I was once asked what's my favorite starter Pokemon in some specific edition of the game. I was baffled to put it mildly. Some other guy from the team jumped in and pretty much said "disregard that question"

IIRC, around 2016 or so, Slack invited us in their office to pitch us the enterprise version and ask whether we would be interested in becoming one of their first enterprise customers. Among other requests, one colleague asked me to ask them to not kill their IRC gateway. One of their PMs looked at me and told me “No, we are not doing this”.

I guess there's merit for that, especially if you are in a cloud environment. In a previous company, I decided to set up dnf/kpatch for VMs that we considered critical. At the time I had a healthy disregard for reliability, mostly because we had enough trust in our terraform process so I decided to automate the whole thing through AWS System Manager across the fleet and guard the feature to work only for security patches targeting the kernel. Briefly, every VM that came up would have the necessary packages installed and from there live patching would execute periodically (I believe once a week) or manually. At some point after a quarter or something we had to devise a way to tag VMs to be excluded from this but this was relatively easy to do and most of the exclusions were testing infra anyway.

Please do share

Most probably what Apple means is that since their codebase is shared, the vulnerability exists across devices. This does not mean that the vulnerability is actively exploited in iOS nor that it will not be actively exploited as part of some other campaign.

> Has this happened before? That iPhones had a security hole that could be exploited over the web? Yes, there were exploits in the past that could be exploited remotely, including some that were used for jailbreaking.

I work as a security engineer and, yes, the CT logs are extremely useful not only for identifying new targets the moment you get a certificate but also for identifying patterns in naming your infra (e.g., dev-* etc.).

A good starting point for hardening your servers is CIS Hardening Guides and the relevant scripts.

I'm not a fan of Windows but Stuxnet didn't happen because of Windows. Iran decided to spin up a nuclear program and Israel and the US had concerns and wanted to stop it. They had the resources to develop something tailored for this unique situation, which included windows, Siemens PLCs (IIRC), Centrifuges etc. and developed the malware based on their target. Even if their target used a different stack, they'd find a way to achieve the same result.

I'll try my best to explain everything (trying to avoid too much security lingo, hopefully).

A password manager is a big database of passwords. There is a master password that decrypts the database and from there you can use your passwords. Notice that hashes are one-way operations thus not used in password managers. The benefits of using a password manager are that that users need to remember and handle only one password, that of their password manager, the rest of the passwords are unique and can be rotated quickly. Ideally, your password manager does a few more things, including taking precautions against leaving traces of passwords in memory etc.

There's another part of commercial password managers which is mostly convenience functionality. Passwords are synced across devices, specific members access specific passwords etc.

Some people do use local password managers, depending on their threat model (i.e., who's after them) and their level of expertise/time on their hands. Setting up something locally requires taking additional precautions (such as permissions, screen locks etc.) that are typically handled by commercial password managers.

Reg. Okta, Okta is an identity provider. In theory, identity providers can provide strong guarantees regarding a user, i.e., "I authenticated him thus I gave him those token to pass around". Strong guarantees can include a number of things, including Multi-factor Authentication, VPN restrictions etc.

Funny story: during an internal red team engagement on a previous employer of mine, we took over the local password manager of a subset of the security org, twice. The first time, they had a VNC, unauthenticated, with the password manager running and the file unlocked. The second time, a team conveniently used Git to sync their password manager file, with their password tracked.

Most providers had a semi-automated process that granted you permission to conduct your pentest (assuming you'd share any findings reg. their infra with them). In reality though, most of the findings didn't come from poking around but from tapping the wire. I'd spin up VMs and tcpdump for hours, then look at the logs for odd packets, plaintext etc. etc. which makes it hard to detect such shenanigans

Edit: We went through the process for everything, including having a provider ship us a back-up solution to pentest. My desk became everyone's favourite place in the building :P

Reminded me of a funny story. Maybe a decade ago, when moving to the cloud was all the rage, my then employer decided to check whether the cloud was any good. Long story short, he asked me to conduct penetration tests against the major providers. In one of the providers I pivoted through some network and hit a webpage that looked like some sort of control plane panel (but required authentication so...). I decided to google part of the HTML and... A stack overflow thread pops up with the code and parts of the backend code/logic. So much win.