In February 2017, I co-authored a blog detailing our build of an 8-GPU password cracker. Over the past 8 years, it’s had millions of views and thousands of comments. To all the concerned writers, nothing has melted down and we continue to run 2 nearly identical 8-GPU crackers today. Both are currently running 8 NVIDIA […]
We are grateful for the loyal support of our #_shellntel readers throughout the years. Please continue to read about the latest IT news, tech trends, and cybersecurity threats on our new blog at www.synercomm.com/blog or link directly to our #_shellntel articles at www.synercomm.com/blog/tag/shellntel/. All of our existing content was moved, and all new articles will be published here going forward.
Whether doing security research or troubleshooting networks, network sniffers and packet analysis can be invaluable tools. If you're a network engineer like me, you've probably been holding onto your favorite 4 or 8-port 10/100 hub for 25 years now. The reason is that hubs (not switches) make great network taps. By design, all Ethernet transmissions […]
Whether you are vulnerability scanning to meet compliance requirements or doing it as part of good security practices, there is a universal need. At the time of this article, there are essentially three equally capable and qualified scanning solutions. They include products from Tenable, Rapid7 and Qualys. My point is that each of these scanning solutions, if configured correctly, should produce accurate and similar results.
In penetration testing, it’s important to have an accurate scope and even more important to stick to it. This can be simple when the scope is limited to a company’s internet service provider (ISP) or ARIN provided IP ranges. But in many cases, our client’s public systems have grown to include multiple cloud hosted servers, applications, and services.
Pwnagotchi is an A2C-based “AI” powered by bettercap and running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W that learns from its surrounding WiFi environment in order to maximize the crackable WPA key material it captures. This material is collected on disk as PCAP files containing any form of handshake supported by hashcat, including full and half WPA handshakes as well as PMKIDs.
Palo Alto Networks firewalls have the ability to create security policies and generate logs based on users and groups, and not just IP addresses. This functionality is called User-ID. User-ID™ enables you to map IP addresses to users on your network using a variety of techniques.
One of the greatest, yet seemingly unknown, dangers that face any cloud-based application is the deadly combination of an SSRF vulnerability and the AWS Metadata endpoint. As this write up from Brian Krebbs explains, the breach at Capital One was caused by an SSRF vulnerability that was able to reach the AWS Metadata endpoint and extract the temporary security credentials associated with the EC2 instance's IAM Role.
With over 15 years in information security, I feel like I've seen it all. And while I can't claim to be a great penetration tester myself, I can say that I work with some truly talented pentesters. I can also feel confident stating that I've read more pentest reports than most. So, having this background… I get asked by businesses and defenders all the time, "What advice would you give?" and, "What lessons can be learned?"
This blog/article/rant will cover a brief background of password cracking as well as the justification for SynerComm’s 14-character password recommendation.
