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
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,
The Truth About TikTok - Part 1 This post provides a detailed analysis of TikTok on android and many of the steps and techniques that were used to examine the application. The goal of this post is to enable users to be better informed about what apps such as these are doing on their mobile devices. First,
AI: I Made It Up Trying to identify some unusually labeled SPI PINs and decided to see what ChatGPT had to say about it: Me: "I have some SPI PINs labeled as follows: This seemed very strange to me so I asked it another question: And that settles that . . . . The key takeaway is that you
What I Have Done - Hacking Malware I was looking back through my old talks and papers (2005-2015) and realized some of them still apply today so I've decided to make some article posts rehashing them with a few updates in some cases. This is the first one. This is from a talk I gave with a
What I am Doing - Fun With Signals A friend of mine and I both ordered flipperzero devices recently. His seems to have been seized by customs and mine showed up a couple of days ago so I decided to setup a basic test to try it out. DISCLAIMER: Before doing any of this stuff make sure you
