Today in “Attack techniques so stupid, they can’t possibly succeed… except they do!” — we look at Invoice Scams. PayPal and other sites allow anyone (an attacker) to send anyone (their victims) an invoice containing the text of the attacker’s choosing. In this attack technique, PayPal sends you an email suggesting that the attacker alreadyContinue reading “Attack Techniques: PayPal Invoice Scams”
Tag Archives: InfoSecTTP
Attack Techniques: Trojaned Clipboard
Today in “Attack techniques so stupid, they can’t possibly succeed… except they do!” — the trojan clipboard technique. In this technique, the attacking website convinces the victim to paste something the site has silently copied to the user’s clipboard into a powerful and trusted context. A walkthrough of this attack can be found in theContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Trojaned Clipboard”
Attack Techniques: Remote Control Software
In yesterday’s post, I outlined the two most successful (and stupid simple) attack techniques that you might not expect to work (and you’d be so very wrong): Today, let’s explore number 3: “Please give me control of your computer so I can, uh, fix it?“ In this attack, an attacker convinces you that there’s someContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Remote Control Software”
Attack Techniques: Full-Trust Script Downloads
While it’s common to think of cyberattacks as being conducted by teams of elite cybercriminals leveraging the freshest 0-day attacks against victims’ PCs, the reality is far more mundane. Most attacks start as social engineering attacks: abusing a user’s misplaced trust. Most attackers don’t hack in, they log in. The most common cyberattack is phishing:Continue reading “Attack Techniques: Full-Trust Script Downloads”
Attacker Techniques: Gesture Jacking
A few years back, I wrote a short explainer about User Gestures, a web platform concept whereby certain sensitive operations (e.g. opening a popup window) will first attempt to confirm whether the user intentionally requested the action. As noted in that post, gestures are a weak primitive — while checking whether the user clicked orContinue reading “Attacker Techniques: Gesture Jacking”
Cloaking, Detonation, and Client-side Phishing Detection
Today, most browsers integrate security services that attempt to protect users from phishing attacks: for Microsoft’s Edge, the service is Defender SmartScreen, and for Chrome, Firefox, and many derivatives, it’s Google’s Safe Browsing. URL Reputation services do what you’d expect — they return a reputation based on the URL, and the browser will warn/block loadingContinue reading “Cloaking, Detonation, and Client-side Phishing Detection”
The Blind Doorkeeper Problem, or, Why Enclaves are Tricky
When trying to protect a secret on a client device, there are many strategies, but most of them are doomed. However, as a long-standing problem, many security experts have tried to chip away at its edges over the years. Over the last decade there’s been growing interest in using enclaves as a means to protectContinue reading “The Blind Doorkeeper Problem, or, Why Enclaves are Tricky”
Defense Techniques: Blocking Protocol Handlers
Application Protocols represent a compelling attack vector because they’re the most reliable and cross-browser compatible way to escape a browser’s sandbox, and they work in many contexts (Office apps, some PDFs handlers, some chat/messaging clients, etc). Some protocol handlers are broadly used, while others are only used for particular workflows which may not be relevantContinue reading “Defense Techniques: Blocking Protocol Handlers”
Attack Techniques: Steganography
Attackers are incentivized to cloak their attacks to avoid detection, keep attack chains alive longer, and make investigations more complicated. One type of cloaking involves steganography, whereby an attacker embeds hidden data inside an otherwise innocuous file. For instance, an attacker might embed their malicious code inside an image file, not in an attempt toContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Steganography”
Security: The Impact of Time
Two years ago, I wrote a long post about the importance of time, and how practical time machines can help reduce emergencies into more mundane workitems. Today, we revisit the same topic, with a focus on the Security impact of time. Races In many ways, the story of modern security is a story about races,Continue reading “Security: The Impact of Time”
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