Protecting users from password theft

A very good article from Chris Eng (Veracode), about how developers can design a strong password scheme in the applications to protect users from password theft. 

Suppose that your database is stolen (hope no) is  the data protected? the thiefs could revert back the passwords easily?  In my lasts pentest the passwords were stored in clear texts..... so it's common practice to have the password stored in an insecure way, or even clear text.

Here is a good practice for your developers or customers:

Veracode - How to protect your users from password theft

-CMM

PCI for dummies

Qualys, the leader provider of vulnerability scans, has published a free e-book entitled "PCI for dummies", if you want to get a grasp of what it is the PCI (Payment Card Industry), and learn how to comply with it, you can download your copy here:

http://www.qualys.com/forms/ebook/pcifordummies/

Enjoy 

-CMM

DVL 1.5 - a hacking playground

A new version of the most vulnerable distribution was released yesterday. This Linux distribution is known for providing resources to learn security and hacking.  It's loaded with training material, vulnerable software, and tools. 

It's a very interesting distribution to have in your lab, for testing

your tools in a controlled environment.

The new version 1.5 (Infectious disease) it's a 1.6 GB ISO image, and it's available to download here

Happy hacking

-CMM

Web Application vulnerability scanners comparison

Today a saw a message from "Anantasec" in the mailing "pen-test" about a evaluation/comparison of Web Application scanners. 

The products analyzed are IBM Appscan (7.7.620 SP2), HP Webinspect (7.7.869)  and Acunetix (6.0), all commercial products.

The analysis only evaluate the results of the scans against 16 applications, it doesn't compare features, options or capabilities of the products.

After reading the report i have some doubts about the origin of it. Maybe could be a biased analysis for Acunetix? It's an Anonymous writer, a blog with just one post.. it makes me wonder. (damn, no interesting metadata in the document )

Personally i used all the scanners and i'm happy with Appscan, i'm missing the scheduling option of Webinspect. Also Acunetix improved a lot in the latest versions, and could be an interesting option when considering price/value.

An interesting fact of the analysis is that each of the scanners performed better when scanning the demo application of their company :)

 

Here is the report from Anantasec, draw your own conclusions

Remember to use more than one tool for the task, to have complimentary result, and also that the scanner will not discover all the vulnerabilities on the application, so don't rely on them.

I always use ProxyStrike when doing the manual analysis of the application, and i discover XSS and SQL that none of the scanners mentioned before does. Btw a new version is coming!

If you want more options on Web application scanners don't forget the Open Source options, right now there is a clear leader in this field, W3aF, it's very complete and even have more plugins or checks than the commercials one, and is multi-platform.

What are you using?

-CMM

Information Gathering III: Yasni and 123people

After the posts about Information Gathering about individuals using Spokeo and Pipl, now it's the turn of Yasni and 123People.

has an standard search page, where you have to put the name of the person you want to search information about. The result page is organized in "All, Personal, Business, News, Other Web pages and Comments", and the quantity and quality of the results is very good.

An interesting feature of Yasni is the Tag cloud about your target, in some cases is useful to check if it is really your target (assuming you know something about him/her).

Yasni also offers an "Agent search", which they say it will perform an exhaustive deep web search, and will return the results in 24 hours. I'm waiting for the firsts examples to arrive :)

The last people search engine i will review in this miniseries is "123people", one of the most used service on the net, and personally one of the best in the results organization. 

123 people results are organized in "web links, Amazon, Phone Numbers, Videos, News, Microblogs, Pictures, Blogs and Documents, and Social network profiles", 123people also has a Tag cloud like Yasni. 

123People has an email alert service, for receiving updates about your targets.

Right now we can say that the results are very similar between  the different services and we have to wait to see which will reign the people search engine terrain.

I have my preferences with 123people and Pipl,  but i recommend to use as much as possible when  performing an information gathering about a target.  All this services are oriented to the web and the social networks, there are other kind of services that will provide more information but they aren't free and the information is only available for certain countries, i will write a post about this services soon.

What's is your choice? 

-CMM