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Network Computing Editor Wins RSA Hacking Contest
richkarpi writes "Network Computing's security editor won the recent RSA Interactive Testing Challenge. He has up a blow-by-blow description of the events at their site: 'The most important factor in the contest besides basic web exploitation skills (cross site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cross site request forgeries (CSRF), etc.) was speed ... I squeaked out a win in the tie-breaking challenge the first day with only a few seconds to spare as my opponent was right behind in the hunt to combine three injectable fields into one long javascript function.'"
A real hacker would've cracked open the server the day before and gotten the answers before entering the competition.
Because typing speed is everything when you and your buddies are hacking the Gibson via a payphone.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I know this to be true because my friend in junior high said I am. Also I have this CD with Linux on it which when I put it in the CDROM drive and start one of the school's Dells it tells me how to reset the admin password and then I have r007!!!!!1 OMG p0n13zzzz!!!!111
This one time, I was hacking this really locked-up-the-wazoo Gibson. I'd set up a couple of IDS/IPS evasion bots, perimeter scanning came up clean. Small SQL injection issue merged with XSS showed that the backend database may have been either 768-bit encrypted or a simple 3DES matter, but I was running low on time and didn't get to check. Once the tables were writable to sa, I was able to jump in and jump out with no problem. One of their systems caught an early sniff, but was shut down with a smurf. Everything was PERFECT until their night noc ran a reverse udp traceroute back to one of the hosts I had set up after that, straight DOWNHILL. I got called twice by my isp asking about unusual activity, some other shit about access attempts to a federally monitored system, and they had everything in logs including the Schneier-level, rot-26 I thought would hide me. Fortunately I managed to find a reverse-folding routepath on their IIS Apache and I got out just in time while erasing the incriminating forum posts.
Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.
You forgot the most important line item of all: mountain dew!
/ feb8/images/2007-02-08_12-41-10.jpg (hiding behind the monitor)
And yes, I was drinking dew for the finals:
http://www.rsaconference.com/2007/US/press/photos
Mitnick warned me about hacker tricks like that... I for one am not going to RTFA!
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
The XSS FAQ
The Cross-site Request Forgery FAQ
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
Hacking Contest Eh? 14 year old Finnish kids armed with Generalized Quadratic Sieves need not apply?
This is half in jest, half wondering if any "pros" (ie NSA types) were in the competition? They definitely weren't listed in the TFA and I wonder if they'd be allowed to compete.
Of course, their cover could be working for the Mormons...
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I would have written the exact same sentence if my opponent was in a similar position at a Catholic, Baptist, Buddhist, etc, organization, or was technical staff for Seven-eleven, Sears, or pretty much any non-security company.
Read it again and you'll notice I also included myself in the category of "people you wouldn't expect in the finals of a web hacking competition". So unless you think I was also calling myself stupid, I wasn't belittling anyone. Merely pointing out that neither of us were the first folks you'd expect to see in the semi-finals.