Whale Oil, AI, and the Future Focus of Cyber

There was a point in our history when the world ran on whale oil. It was used to lubricate machinery, provide lighting, and powered the industrial revolution.  Within the span of a few years that technology collapsed and was rapidly replaced by new tech. I believe we are seeing the

Chasing Ghosts & The Small Business Gap

I've worked probably 50+ incident investigations in my time and there is a particular psychological phenomenon that I've seen occur multiple times, and even experienced myself early on, which I call Chasing Ghosts. Chasing Ghosts is what happens when individuals and organizations experience a compromise, work around the clock, and

Jailbroken AI Stack Smashing for Fun & Profit

I found a Jailbroken version of the recent Llama 3.1 Instruct model and decided to see how it would do at some basic exploit development tasks, if I would get any refusals, etc. I am using LM Studio as my chat wrapper to the model. I used a very

Testing a Hacker's LLM

One of my main use cases for LLMs consists of the following parameters: 1. Coding assist. Especially around debugging or weird things I'm trying to do. (I tend to make tiny coding mistakes in large code bases that take forever to find) 2. Security knowledge & speed up. I'm frequently working

The Psychology of Changing Attacker Priorities

The general priorities and goals of attackers have changed over time. I'm going to be speaking about trends and generalities, rather than absolutes. I see hacking as a series of epochs where the incentives and motivations of hackers change over time. Elements of each period flow into other periods and

Unusual Spear Phish

We received an email that was a little strange and so I decided to check it out. Email Contents The contents of the email were as follows: ________________________________________________________ Dear Suppliers, We attempted to contact a representative from your company several times over the last few weeks, but were unsuccessful. A request

The XZ Attack in the Context of Historical Blackhat Operations

Old school hackers already know everything I'm going to say in this post but this is for the benefit of people who weren't around in the security industry in the 90s and 2000s as well as for professionals who have little exposure to the true blackhat community. I have no

A Case for a Cyber Manhattan Project

Truth be told, I've been beating this drum for about 20 years, but in light of recent public awareness I think its a good time to revisit it. Recent news is full of stories of foreign adversaries hacking our critical infrastructure, interfering with satellites, jamming GPS, spying on our government

Creating a A-Stable 555 Timer Circuit using the NE555 Precision Timer

Hello, And today I'll show you how to assemble, read, and analyze the signal created via the 555 Timer Circuit using a NE555 IC, ( Integrated Circuit), on a Breadboard. In this tutorial we'll be using the NE555 model timer. Most Precision Integrated Timer Circuits, ( Like the standard HA17555, or HA17555S,

Investigating ELK Stack

Our internal lab network's logging and analysis system is built with several components and services, focusing on log aggregation and analysis. The central element is a Linux host that serves as the DNS and DHCP server, and also functions as the network gateway. For network security, this host runs UFW

Introduction to the Saleae Logic Pro 8 Logic Analyzer

The Saleae Logic Pro 8 USB logic Analyzer is an 8 channel logic analyzer with each input duel purposed for analog data recording. The device connects to a PC over USB and uses the Saleae Logic Software to record and view digital and analog signals. A logic analyzer is a

Arduino Uno R3 & First Project

I'm Matt, a new apprentice at Red Crow Lab. Today I'm sharing a blog post about the Arduino UNO. The Arduino UNO is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328P. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a

Where to Start in CyberSecurity

I've had a number of people ask me what skills they should focus on developing in order to build a career in CyberSecurity as a lot of the degree programs and certificates are failing to help them find jobs. I have some specific experience that allows me to provide some

Observations on Learning

Years ago when I was working for someone else my boss send me a guy who wanted to learn what I did. This person had a degree (maybe a PhD) in nuclear physics and had been working on the nuclear weapons program but he was looking to change fields. On

Long Term Security Research Approaches

Much of the time people engage in short term security testing such as penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, code reviews, etc. Often these are 1-2 weeks with some period for reporting. The approach to conducting these sorts of projects typically includes the following types of steps: * Heavy reliance on automated tools

The Reality of Hacking OT/ICS/SCADA

There is a lot of discussion about critical infrastructure security these days. Some of us have been looking at this problem for over 20 years, especially the issue of nation states infiltrating each other's infrastructures using cyber-attacks. The media and politicians are finally starting to catch up and notice what

The Little Things

Today I've been mentoring my apprentice in more of the soft skills area of work rather than the technical side. I walked him through some back and forth discussions with customers, how I create SOWs, what a good report looks like, etc. Recently I spaced a response to a customer

Chemical Hardware Hacking

One of the issues we sometimes run into when reverse engineering hardware are boards or chips that are covered in Conformal Coating. This is a sort of glaze that protects the board and components from moisture or damage, and can also make things more difficult for the reverse engineer. There

Dumping Firmware

Up to this point in previous posts I've talked about identifying chips, analyzing PINs, using tools like the BusPirate and JTAGulater, etc. Today I'm going to demonstrate a very important aspect of hardware analysis: Dumping Firmware. I'm using a Mikrotik mAP2nd router for demonstration purposes. First thing is to disassemble

Finding Dynamic Strings in ELF Binaries

I'm currently working on reverse engineering some binaries extracted from the firmware for an ARM device. After some static analysis identifying functions, argument handling, etc. I wanted to look for interesting dynamically created strings. The way I went about doing this was to setup a Raspberry Pi (since it also

rcFileScan Tool

I released a new tool today on the Red Crow Labs github ( https://github.com/redcrowlab/rcFileScan ) . This tool scans and parses ELF binaries and provides basic information about them, including certain types of basic vulnerabilities. Some examples include: * Security compile time options such as ASLR, DEP, NX, etc. * Reads

The Case of the Missing strcpy

For some of you this may be elementary, but it wasn't for me. I'm working on a tool that parses and scans ELF binaries, which I am going to release soon, and to test it I made a C program with the various things it scans for. One of those

Mapping a Career Trajectory in Cyber

I see a lot of discussion around new people breaking into cyber-security. I thought it might be helpful to outline how I did it. It may not all apply still, but at least some of it does. 1.) Take a job in IT, any job. Help desk, sysadmin, network eng.

The Process

I'm a fan of some of Ray Dalio's thought processes from his Principles, to his concept of building "machines" within a business. At Red Crow Labs we have built a "machine" for our main service offering: Hardware Analysis. Red Crow Labs have developed a standardized, repeatable, and in-depth process to

Security Program Pyramid

I created this about 8 years ago to help my clients think about resource allocation and prioritization. It could use some updates but I think it's still relevant and useful so I decided to share it. Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates and someone whose ideas I find useful,