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TechSNAP — News
TechSNAP

Systems, Network, and Administration Podcast. Every two weeks TechSNAP covers the stories that impact those of us in the tech industry, and all of us that follow it. Every episode we dedicate a portion of the show to answer audience questions, discuss best practices, and solving your problems.

Latest Episodes:

Episode 350: Trials of TLS Dec 29, 2017

Show notes

The trials and tribulations of the long journey to TLS 1.3, and the “middleware” that’s keeping us from having nice things. Plus a pack of Leaky S3 bucket stories and the data that was exposed.

Then we do a deep dive into some SMB fundamentals and practical tips to stay on top of suspicious network traffic.

Sponsored By:

iXSystems: Get a system purpose built for you. Promo Code: Tell them we sent you!
Digital Ocean: Apply our promo snapocean after you create your account, and get a $10 credit. Promo Code: snapocean
Ting: Save $25 off a device, or get $25 in service credits! Promo Code: Visit techsnap.ting.com

Links:

Why TLS 1.3 isn't in browsers yet — It has been over a year since Cloudflare’s TLS 1.3 launch and still, none of the major browsers have enabled TLS 1.3 by default.
TLS 1.3 middleboxes test — This page performs some tests to check for middlebox interference with TLS 1.3. For that it requires Adobe Flash and TCP port 843 to be open. If this is not the case, all tests will fail with N/A.
Drone maker DJI left its private SSL, firmware keys open to world+dog on GitHub FOR YEARS — AWS account credentials and firmware AES encryption keys were also exposed on GitHub,
Data on 123 million US households exposed — Leaky bucket might be a better description because when opened the database revealed the personal financial data of 123m American households – in effect everyone with an address in the US around the time of the file’s creation in 2013.
Massive US military social media spying archive left wide open in AWS S3 buckets — Three misconfigured AWS S3 buckets have been discovered wide open on the public internet containing "dozens of terabytes" of social media posts and similar pages – all scraped from around the world by the US military to identify and profile persons of interest.
Security Monkey — Security Monkey monitors your AWS and GCP accounts for policy changes and alerts on insecure configurations. Support is available for OpenStack public and private clouds. It provides a single UI to browse and search through all of your accounts, regions, and cloud services. The monkey remembers previous states and can show you exactly what changed, and when.
An Introduction to SMB for Network Security Analysts — At its most basic, SMB is a protocol to allow devices to perform a number of functions on each other over a (usually local) network.
StorageCrypter Ransomware: Security Threat or Clickbait? — Hats off to the most buzzword-loaded headline of the year: “StorageCrypt Ransomware Infecting NAS Devices Using SambaCry”.
DHCPDECLINE Follow Up — I think I have a hypothesis. When dhclient is offered an IP, it attempts to look it up in dhcpd.leases (under /var), and if /var has errors, the lookup fails and says "not found" (which is what the DHCPDECLINE line says in the log).
Please keep some BSD — Please don't get too Linux single-minded. Some FreeBSD plugs here and there are welcome.
Repairing a 1960s mainframe: Fixing the IBM 1401's core memory and power supply — Core memory was a popular form of storage in this era as it was relatively fast and inexpensive. Each bit is stored in a tiny magnetized ferrite ring called a core.

Episode 349: All Natural Namespaces Dec 21, 2017

Show notes

Network Namespaces have been around for a while, but there may be be some very practical ways to use them that you’ve never considered. Wes does a deep dive into a very flexible tool.

Plus what might be the world’s most important killswitch, the real dollar values for stolen credentials and the 19 year old attack that’s back.

Sponsored By:

iXSystems: Get a system purpose built for you. Promo Code: Tell them we sent you!
Ting: Save $25 off a device, or get $25 in service credits! Promo Code: Visit techsnap.ting.com
Digital Ocean: Apply our promo snapocean after you create your account, and get a $10 credit. Promo Code: snapocean

Links:

The Market for Stolen Account Credentials — But oh, how times have changed! With dozens of sites in the underground now competing to purchase and resell credentials for a variety of online locations, it has never been easier for a botmaster to earn a handsome living based solely on the sale of stolen usernames and passwords alone.
Hackers shut down plant by targeting its safety system — FireEye reported that a plant of an unmentioned nature and location (other firms believe it's in the Middle East) was forced to shut down after a hack targeted its industrial safety system -- it's the first known instance of a breach like this taking place.
FireEye Report on TRITON — We assess with moderate confidence that the attacker was developing the capability to cause physical damage and inadvertently shutdown operations. This malware, which we call TRITON, is an attack framework built to interact with Triconex Safety Instrumented System (SIS) controllers.
ROBOT Attack: 19-Year-Old Bleichenbacher Attack — Dubbed ROBOT (Return of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Attack), the attack allows an attacker to perform RSA decryption and cryptographic operations using the private key configured on the vulnerable TLS servers.
The ROBOT Attack - Offical Site
Robot-detect: Detection script for the ROBOT vulnerability — Tool to detect the ROBOT attack (Return of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Threat).
WannaCry: End of Year Retrospective — Since our Vantage team sinkholed and subsequently nullified the WannaCry attack on May 12th, 2017, we have been monitoring and maintaining the domain known as the WannaCry killswitch.
Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports — And, according to slides published this weekend by Der Spiegel, this information also includes crash reports from Microsoft's Windows Error Reporting facility built in to Windows.
Network namespaces — As the name would imply, network namespaces partition the use of the network—devices, addresses, ports, routes, firewall rules, etc.—into separate boxes, essentially virtualizing the network within a single running kernel instance.
namespaces - Linux manual page — A namespace wraps a global system resource in an abstraction that makes it appear to the processes within the namespace that they have their own isolated instance of the global resource. Changes to the global resource are visible to other processes that are members of the namespace, but are invisible to other processes. One use of namespaces is to implement containers.
Network Namespaces » ADMIN Magazine — With network namespaces, you can virtualize network devices, IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks, routing tables, ARP tables, and firewalls separately, as well as /proc/net, /sys/class/net/, QoS policies, port numbers, and sockets in such a way that individual applications can find a particular network setup without the use of containers.
How to Get the Network Namespace Associated With a Socket
Network devices as virtual Ethernet devices — Virtualize network devices as virtual Ethernet devices by configuring direct MacVTap connections or virtual switches.
Testing network software with pytest and Linux namespaces
Implementation of IEEE 802.1ab (LLDP) — LLDP is an industry standard protocol designed to supplant proprietary Link-Layer protocols such as EDP or CDP. The goal of LLDP is to provide an inter-vendor compatible mechanism to deliver Link-Layer notifications to adjacent network devices.
WireGuard Routing & Network Namespaces — This allows for some very cool properties. Namely, you can create the WireGuard interface in one namespace (A), move it to another (B), and have cleartext packets sent from namespace B get sent encrypted through a UDP socket in namespace A.
VRF for Linux — The concept of VRF was first introduced around 1999 for L3 VPNs, but it has become a fundamental feature for a networking OS. VRF provides traffic isolation at layer 3 for routing, similar to how you use a VLAN to isolate traffic at layer 2. Think multiple routing tables.
linux/vrf.txt at master · torvalds/linux · GitHub
Using VRFs with linux
Feedback - DHCPDECLINE over and over again
DHCP Snooping - Cisco
Hidden Backdoor Found In WordPress Captcha Plugin Affects Over 300,000 Sites — In a blog post published on Tuesday, WordFence security firm revealed why WordPress recently kicked a popular Captcha plugin with more than 300,000 active installations out of its official plugin store.

Episode 348: Server Neglect Dec 14, 2017

Show notes

Authors of one of the most infamous botnets of all time get busted, researchers discover keyloggers built into HP Laptops, the major HomeKit flaw no one is talking about, and the new version of FreeNAS packs a lot of features for a point release.

Plus an update on the show and what to expect, and we attempt something TechSNAP could never do as a video production, a live double FreeNAS upgrade!

Sponsored By:

Digital Ocean: Apply our promo snapocean after you create your account, and get a $10 credit. Promo Code: snapocean
Ting: Save $25 off a device, or get $25 in service credits! Promo Code: Visit techsnap.ting.com
iXSystems: Get a system purpose built for you. Promo Code: Tell them we sent you!

Links:

Our New Contact Page
Mirai IoT Botnet Co-Authors Plead Guilty — Krebs on Security — The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday unsealed the guilty pleas of two men first identified in January 2017 by KrebsOnSecurity as the likely co-authors of Mirai, a malware strain that remotely enslaves so-called “Internet of Things” devices such as security cameras, routers, and digital video recorders for use in large scale attacks designed to knock Web sites and entire networks offline (including multiple major attacks against this site).
Pre-Installed Keylogger Found On Over 460 HP Laptop Models — The Keylogger was found embedded in the SynTP.sys file, a part of Synaptics touchpad driver that ships with HP notebook computers, leaving more than 460 HP Notebook models vulnerable to hackers.
HP keylogger - ZwClose Blog Post — TL;DR: HP had a keylogger in the keyboard driver. The keylogger saved scan codes to a WPP trace. The logging was disabled by default but could be enabled by setting a registry value (UAC required)
Apple Releases iOS 11.2.1 Update With HomeKit Fix — According to Apple's release notes, the update re-enables remote access for shared users of the Home app. Apple broke remote access for shared users when implementing a fix for a major HomeKit vulnerability last week.
FreeNAS 11.1 Released — The FreeNAS Development Team is excited and proud to present FreeNAS 11.1! FreeNAS 11.1 adds cloud integration, OpenZFS performance improvements, including the ability to prioritize resilvering operations, and preliminary Docker support to the world’s most popular software-defined storage operating system. This release includes an updated preview of the beta version of the new administrator graphical user interface, including the ability to select display themes. This post provides a brief overview of the new features.
Process Doppelgänging Attack — Dubbed ‘Process Doppelgänging‘ by Tal Liberman and Eugene Kogan of EnSilo, the attack was demonstrated during Black Hat Europe 2017 security conference in London earlier today. Doppelgänging, a fileless code injection technique, works in such a manner that an attacker can manipulate the way Windows handles its file transaction process and pass malicious files even if the code is known to be malicious.
Process Doppelgänging - Black Hat Europe 2017 — By using NTFS transactions, we make changes to an executable file that will never actually be committed to disk. We will then use undocumented implementation details of the process loading mechanism to load our modified executable, but not before rolling back the changes we made to the executable. The result of this procedure is creating a process from the modified executable, while deployed security mechanisms in the dark.

Episode 347: A Farewell to Dan | TechSNAP 347 Nov 30, 2017

Show notes

We say farewell to Dan, but don't despair, we've still got a ton of great topics to cover as we say goodbye. We compare the handling of recent data breaches at imgur & DJI, share some in-depth guides on beefing up your security posture & see Dan off with some of your finest feedback and the world's tastiest roundup.

Episode 346: Neutral Nets | TechSNAP 346 Nov 20, 2017

Show notes

We get depressed over some new stats confirming our worst fears about the huge number of outdated and unpatched android systems. But, in some good news, Github wants to help you, and your open source projects, stay secure with their new Security Alerts feature. We discuss the details and what it needs to be relevant.

Plus some handy tips for getting out of a sticky situation in git, a net neutrality PSA, and some big news from Dan.

Episode 345: Namespaces GOTO Jail | TechSNAP 345 Nov 18, 2017

Show notes

We can't contain our excitement as we dive deep into the world of jails, zones & so-called linux containers. Dan shares his years of experience using the time-tested original bad boy of containers, FreeBSD jails. Wes breaks down cgroups, namespaces & explains how they come together to create a container. Plus we discuss similarities, differences, workflows & more!

And of course your fantastic feedback, a record setting round-up & so much more!

Episode 344: SSL Strippers | TechSNAP 344 Nov 08, 2017

Show notes

You may think that’s a secure password field, but don’t be fooled! We’ve got the disturbing tale of some negligent websites & their fraudulent fonts. Then, some top tips to evaluate the security of your banking institutions & best practices for verbal passwords. Plus, a controversial discussion of opsec, obfuscation, security & you!

Episode 343: Low Security Pillow Storage | TechSNAP 343 Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

We've got some top tips to turn you from ssh-novice to port-forwarding master. Plus the latest on the confusing story of Kaspersky, the NSA & a bone-headed contractor. Then, our backup sense is tingling, with the story of $30,000 lost to a forgotten pin.

And of course your fantastic feedback, a record setting round-up & so much more on this week's episode of TechSNAP!

Episode 342: Cloudy with a chance of ABI | TechSNAP 342 Oct 24, 2017

Show notes

We air Microsoft's dirty laundry as news leaks about their less than stellar handling of a security database breach, plus a fascinating story of deceit, white lies, and tacos; all par for the course in the world of social engineering, and we find out that so-called-smart cards might not be so smart, after it is revealed that millions are vulnerable to a crippling cryptographic attack & more!

Episode 341: HAMR Time | TechSNAP 341 Oct 17, 2017

Show notes

We've got bad news for Wifi-lovers as the KRACK hack takes the world by storm; We have the details & some places to watch to make sure you stay patched. Plus, some distressing revelations about third party access to your personal information through some US mobile carriers. Then we cover the ongoing debate over HAMR, MAMR, and the future of hard drive technology & take a mini deep dive into the world of elliptic curve cryptography.

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