Trello fascinated me upon its release in 2011. I’ve written before about my time management (lack of) skills, and Trello appeared to be my solution - it offered a sleek view of all of my outstanding tasks. Try as I might, I could not make Trello work for me. Over and over again, I would fail to use it. I just could not make myself stick with it. There was a captivating quality about Trello, however, because it was constantly mentioned in tweets, blogs, and articles....

A developer at work asked a general question to the group: “I’m thinking about using either LastPass or 1Password, anything I should know?” As the team’s newest “Security Guy”, I answered with this brief response: LastPass is easier to get started with as someone who’s never used a password manager before. Their product is seamlessly >integrated into browsers and mobile devices, although it’s not the prettiest. LastPass stores your encrypted password vault on their servers....

Since my last post, I’ve left my position with the consultancy. I’m now working for a medium-sized corporation in a senior application security role. One of my many tasks is to contribute to the development of an Application Security program. This post will serve as my thoughts on setting up an AppSec Program. Measuring current performance The Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) is a study of existing software security initiatives used by 95 companies of varying size across six verticals....

This morning, while I was trying to proxy traffic to this site in Burpsuite, I ran across an SSL handshake error. Googling the issue returned this helpful article that got me started on the right path. The crux of the problem was that the JRE didn’t have the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy files installed. However, since this article was published, Portswigger began bundling the JRE with Burpsuite itself....

Recently, I celebrated a birthday. Typically, this is a joyous time, and I have many things to be grateful for. However, this birthday comes during a difficult year. As my wife and I were discussing this the other day, I realized that life can be a lot like the Atari game ‘Asteroids’. Atari Asteroids You, as the ship, must be able to re-orient and overcome challenges (blast asteroids) frequently and rapidly....

In a previous post I discussed the complicated process of configuring S3 to use Letsencrypt to obtain a TLS certificate. That post served as a reference for me to re-implement Letsencrypt every 90 days. Since then, my 90-day Letsencrypt certificate expired, and I was at a loss for how to re-instate it. Using my own post as a reference didn’t help me with the arcane letsencrypt errors I was encountering....

I planned a post covering the Manager Feedback Cycle, but this blog post at Effective Managers covers most of what I was going to communicate. One thing I would add to this resource, is that both managers and subordinates should strike a balance in communications frequency: If communications are infrequent, important details can get overlooked, and it becomes harder to resolve conflicts. If communications are too frequent, the subordinate will feel like they’re being micro-managed while the manager will feel like the subordinate can’t solve problems on their own....

Apple gets a lot of flak in the InfoSec community, even though it’s an open secret that much of the InfoSec community has begun to use Apple products. I myself have been using a Mac laptop for the past ten years because they produced the first laptop I thought was worth spending money on. A lot of money. I’m a fan of Apple for more than just their products, however. I admire their stance on social issues that I care about....

It’s early 2016, and there are a multitude of content management systems and blog platforms out there: Wikipedia’s List of Content Management Systems The security blog I contribute to, Penetrate.IO runs on the venerable Wordpress and requires constant updates to stay one step ahead of attackers. This becomes tiresome after a while, especially since the only thing I’m interested in hosting is a series of articles. These don’t require server-side computation, simply hosting....

I had the need to proxy traffic from Burpsuite to another proxy during web app testing this week. There are a few ways to do this, but this method was the easiest since I already had Burpsuite’s TLS certificate installed. For more information on this, see the Burpsuite help. To configure an upstream proxy for Burpsuite, such as OWASP ZAP, follow these steps: First, configure your upstream proxy that will sit between Burpsuite and the web application to listen on a different port since they both bind TCP 8080 by default....

This post was inspired by a client who came to me and said “I do not understand all of these findings, can you explain them to me?”, referring to my web application penetration test deliverable. We spoke for an hour, as I described the findings to him. I corrected him when his understanding was shaky, and I confirmed where his understanding was solid. He had a development background, and was studying for a security certification, but he was managing a large security project for a well-known company and I was surprised to learn he was a security newbie....

What I hope are some reasonable basic security practice recommendations

On a recent engagement I supported the lead by developing a PowerShell payload for a RubberDucky. The gist is that it will run a handful of standard Windows commands and then e-mail the results to a specified address. It proved to be very helpful and I’ve included it below with comments: # Set execution policy to allow unrestricted script scope Set-ExecutionPolicy 'Unrestricted' -Scope CurrentUser -Confirm:$false #Create results file in current user's temp directory $results = $env:temp + '\results....

Inspired by Jack Daniel’s “Shoulders of InfoSec Project”, this post will be focused on the people and technologies behind one of the most prevalent attacks on web sites: SQL injection. According to OWASP, injection is the number one attack vector for web applications. Injection attacks can target many different contexts in a web application: HTML, PHP, ASP, Javascript, SQL, etc. Any context in which an interpreter parses input to execute instructions is potentially vulnerable to an injection attack....

URL Syntax https://admin:[email protected]:80/bio.txt;pp=1&qp=2#Three URL Part URL Data Scheme https User admin Password pass123 Subdomain www Domain example.com Port 80 Path /bio.txt Path Parameter pp=1 Query Parameter qp=2 Fragment Three Safe Characters RFC1738 section 2.2 outlines the safe characters to use in an HTTP URL Scheme: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789$-_.+!*'(), Safe characters can be used in URLs without any form of encoding as they aren’t reserved for special use in the construction of the URL....