Note: This is the second post of a two parts series on how to use IDS in a different way.

Intrusion Detection Systems are traditionally seen as Defensive tools. They can however be used for different purposes than initially designed for as highlighted in the previous post , where we discussed how IDS could be used as an offensive tool.
The popularity of pre-configured/packaged IDS environments such as SELKS or Security Onion provide various software packages and Graphical User Interfaces to navigate through large volume of data by parsing/categorising/filtering it automatically.

More importantly, such systems are starting to provide mo...
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Note: This is the first post of a two parts series on how to use IDS in a different way.

Intrusion Detection Systems such as Snort and Suricata are traditionally seen as Defensive tools, and in essence they are. They can alert on security issues occurring on your network such as Botnet Activities, network based attacks, hosts/servers activities and vulnerabilities.

That last point is important.

It is important because that same information used for defence activities, could be used by an attacker as part of an attack reconnaissance. For example, being able to identify a list of hosts that use outdated SSH/SSL servers, a vulnerable Flash Client or other vulnerable software/services; HTTP logs highlighting users web activities, clear text passwords, etc.
When looking at an IDS that way, it becomes a passi...
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Cloud storage providers such as Dropbox, Box, One Drive, etc. are increasingly being used for both personal and business reasons. On the Business side, often without the individual's company fully aware of what data is actually leaving their premises.

One of the issue with storing data in the cloud is Security. Looking at Dropbox in recent years, there has been a number of embarrassing blunders which resulted in their customers' data becoming available to anyone who knew where to look. We did blog about it several times: here, here and here. Many other security blogs also related those stories, such as this nice summary from Sophos.

To limit the risks relat...
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The arrival of WEB 2.0 brought dynamic content through the use of technologies such as Java, Flash and PHP.
Consequently it also widen the attack surface. Websites became prettier, more interactive, easier to update and also easier to attack!

The need for further functionality was, as it is often the case, at the cost of security.

The four diagrams below illustrates the differences between a WEB 1.0 and a WEB 2.0 architecture as well as highlighting the increased attack surface.
In a typical WEB 1.0 architecture, besides the physical, human and network security considerations, protecting the data is dependant of the Operating System and the application security layers. Typically, the application security layer is restricted to the Web Server (i.e.: Apache) if no other services/applications are exposed to the Internet.

Diagram 1 - WEB 1.0 Typical Ar...
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We have completed our latest website refresh and you may have to reload the various pages to see the new version.
This update brings more information about the different services we offer and how we position ourselves. It also provides better infographics which should make navigating through the site easier to the eye.
We are planning another minor update to our blog section in the coming weeks which will improve your RSS experience.

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I have recently been testing SELKS v2.0 which is an open source Network Security Monitor (NSM) based on an ELK framework: Elasticsearch (search and analytics engine) Logstash (log normalisation) Kibana (visualisation). The NSM core engine is provided by the first "S" which stands for Suricata (Network IDS) and the last "S" which stands for Scirius (Management GUI for Suricata).
SELKS is provided as a live Linux distribution based on Debian 8 (Jessie) which is also installable.

SELKS V2.0 is a great improvement from SELKS V1.0, so much so that I now consider it a serious contender to Security Onion (SO) at...
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In June 2015 I attended the Blackhat Mobile Security Summit in London, a 2 days event filled with talks from various researchers and security professionals, there was a 3rd day in the form of a workshop for anyone attending the Interop London hosting event
Blackhat is historically a USA based event with its main conference taking place in Las Vegas every year, lately they started to host similar (but smaller) conferences around the world such as in Singapore and Amsterdam (which I blogged about last year here).

This London edition was definitely on the "smaller" side and this actually had a few advantages:

You could attend all the sessions as none were run in parallel

It was easier to mingle among fellow participants and speakers

There was less "walking"! :)

The quali...
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This is part of my write up from the Hackfu 2015 Security Challenge.

The third and last challenge I solved was surprisingly very easy, but there might have been more to it...

The instructions given were:

An ELF Binary file: shipbinary

"Your mission is to analyse the executable binary and find a way to get it to run to its completion so that it ends up spitting out the access code for the ship's central server."

Below is how I solved that challenge:
We first run the following command to see all the printable/ASCII strings from the binary.
> strings shipbinary
Below is an extract of the most interesting result from the above command.
Enter Decryption Code:
burnthelandandboilthesea
Code Accepted.
Establishing Connection to Planet Abaddon...
out.txt
123.123.123.1 -c 1 | tail -1| awk '{print $4}' | cut -d '/' -f 2 ...
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This is part of my write up from the Hackfu 2015 Security Challenge..

The second challenge I solved was in fact quite easy because I solved a similar one for the SANS Summer challenge in 2014 (where it took me much longer to solve the first time I came across this type of steganography!)

The instructions given were:

An audio file to analyse

There is a hidden message in it, find it!

Below is how I solved that challenge:

Listening to the audio file only produces white noise.

Looking for strings added to the file does not produce anything.

Looking for hidden data using stenography extraction tool such as steghide does not produce anything either.

But, If you load the file in a windows software such as Sonic Visualizer, add a layer to show a Spectrogram ...
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