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”
Tag Archives: InfoSecTTP
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 guess — 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”
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