How Red Teams Hack Your Site To Save It
Nerval's Lobster writes "The use of a Red Team and penetration testing can strengthen an organization's security posture. But how does a Red Team member actually think like an attacker, and use that mindset to exploit security vulnerabilities? Gillis Jones works for WhiteHat Security, where his job rests within the TRC (Threat Research Center). It's here that he performs hands-on site assessments, which involve manually confirming all the issues reported by an automatic scan of a particular Website or application. His job includes checking the application's POST and GET requests for reflection of any inputs. He also checks for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), which includes stored, reflected, and DOM XSS vulnerabilities. Those checks let him determine the Website’s basic security posture. If user input isn’t encoded or sanitized, that’s a good indicator of other problems. And if that’s the case, then Jones (or someone like him) will move on to checking for SQL Injection (SQLi) vulnerabilities and other issues."
...frequently, corporations will hire security experts to see how easy it is to penetrate the building's security. Usually, a combination of people holding doors open and looking like a utility worker will get people in. This is just the version of that for the future, using technology.
A red team is an independent group that seeks to challenge an organization in order to improve effectiveness.
This valuable information can be used by terrorists to hack critical infrastructure! oh my!
With all due respect, WhiteHat Security is the Denny's of web application testing shops.
Sure, they're one step above TrustWave (who are just "checklist compliance" shills and would qualify as the McDonalds of testing), but it's hardly what many places would call a proper "red team" approach.
The run automated tools and do a basic level of validation against those tools. The problem is that with web applications, the automated tools only get about 40% of issues and have a 50% false positive rate (or higher) in my experience. Their tools are pretty fancy compared even to the commercial scanning bits, but they aren't perfect.
There are plenty of boutique shops (and even some larger ones) that do more in-depth testing with more experienced testers. I'm not claiming that Mr Jones here isn't experienced, but more pointing out the general trend within some of the testing shops like WhiteHat.
Big whoop.
There's a nice little article over at the 360 Security blog on how penetration testing is a valuable exercise AND how sometimes penetration testing fails to improve security outcomes. It should not come as too much of a surprise to know that its one of those things where "you get out what you put in".
Disclosure: I do red-team penetration testing for a living, and rarely have I seen anyone squeeze full value out of the exercise without a lot of coaching and encouragement!
http://360is.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/360is-guide-to-understanding.html
This was already posted here.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
In the last decade they were called security researchers. Never heard of calling them 'red teams'.
Having been through a TrustWave audit, I have to agree.
Although the TrustWave person did manage to crack the systems using publicly available exploits and such. It was very much a "checklist compliance" process.
Management, as always, will take the advice of someone they just paid thousands of dollars when the exact same advice from the techs has been denied over and over.
I'm confused... are we at war with Eurasia today?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Joke's on you, my website backend is all in XML! /duck
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I get all my penetration testing news from sites like redtube and youporn.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Every product, website, and idea should be tested against its opposition. If you own it, it helps you to test it against the opposition using fake opposition before you release it to the public.
This is why the military has war games and big buildings have fire drills.
However, one thing you find is that penetration testing from outside is not enough. Some of the worst enemies turn out to be within: either helpful employees who aid the bad guys, or people who panic and respond badly. Even worse are the malicious employees or people creating "job security" through logic bombs.
It's great that people run these minimum-level tests. Any website should face them. But there can be a false sense of security created when other threats are forgotten.
I've been a pen tester, and what this guy is doing is not pen testing - it's vetting out false-positives a tool is telling him. As good as tools are, they'll never reveal vulnerabilities that may lead to the overall compromise of an environment. Things like business process flaws (like being able to manually modify prices or submit negative values during balance transfers), blind SQL injection (tools are worthless for those), parameter tampering (like changing an ID showing stuff that isn't yours) and parameter addition. You need an actual person who can look at something and think it's Not Quite Right.... something a tool just can't do.
I was under the impression Blue team was always trying to hack or destroy someone, usually Red team. Or is this supposed "Red" team really just Blue team with a red mask on? Someone needs to start spy checking.
This type of black-box penetration-test is pretty worthless in practice. Sure, you can patch some vulnerabilities afterwards, but these tests aim to get in fast, not to explore the whole attack surface. That takes way too much time and effort. Also, all you can really find with this type of test are beginners-mistakes. Sure, they are vulnerabilities too, but if you are vulnerable because of beginners mistakes, than you have a far deeper problem.
What is needed instead is a careful white-box analysis of the system(s) to be secured and then improvements in architecture, design and implementation that provide resilience. Sometimes it will be necessary to tell the customer to throw the system away and start over with people that actually have some idea what secure coding means. Sometimes things can be fixed or additional security measures will be effective.
In all cases the black-box perspective is by far the worst and something that itself is resides on amateur-level.
There is one exception: Black-box penetration testing can be used to create awareness that all is not well. But usually the people doing it do not understand that by far their most important duty is to impress on the customer that they will _not_ find all vulnerabilities or even a major part of them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
.. enough said ..
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
A company I used to work for 10-15 years ago took the approach of reward based incentives towards security. It was widely publicised that the Red Team existed and their job was to try to break the organisations security and too see what weaknesses existed, Conversely anyone that caught a member of the Red Team attempting to hack their machine, bypass security protocols, social engineer security information or any such other violation of security protocols and then reported that violation would receive prizes. The by product of this was employees who were constantly on the watch for people breaking security protocol as it was a chance to get some juicy rewards thus making everyone far more security aware. Not sure if they still do it but it was damn effective at the time as half the battle is getting staff to actually pay attention to security.
Please /. enough with that WhiteHat publicity. It's the second time this month. We had dealt with them in the past. They spend more time and resource on PR than anything else. If you are into the market for such service. Make yourself a favor and look at some well establish and serious firms not WhiteHat.
"You dumbass, you're supposed to kill the red guys."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TwbtcpnERU