Information security and technology tales
Introduction At Gearset, we have a modest fleet of PostgreSQL (“Postgres”) database instances running in Amazon Web Services’s (AWS’s) Relational Database Service (RDS) offering. These database instances hold data for the variety of services that comprise our product and internal systems and they run across several geographic regions, in our production, staging, and other environments. We run all…
Introduction I recently attended a new cyber security conference in London called CyberThreat18 hosted by the National Cyber Security Centre and SANS Institute. Over the two-day period, the event included a Capture The Flag (CTF) competition, broken into four sessions, in which teams and individuals raced to crack the challenges and collect the most points. This is a write-up of one of the…
Introduction I recently attended a new cyber security conference in London called CyberThreat18 hosted by the National Cyber Security Centre and SANS Institute. Over the two-day period, the event included a Capture The Flag (CTF) competition, broken into four sessions, in which teams and individuals raced to crack the challenges and collect the most points. This is a write-up of one of the…
Introduction Every year, the folks at Counter Hack Challenges and SANS run a cyber security challenge for people to enjoy over the festive season, and once again it was great fun and very educational. Head over to the challenge site to set the scene, have a look at the questions, and have a go for yourself before reading my solution below! This year’s challenge came as two components: the first is…
Update 2017-10-10 After gaining some traction online, Twitter user @JaCzekanski pointed out that there is a way to remove the OnePlus Device Manager app via adb, without requiring root (substitute net.oneplus.odm for pkg ) @chrisdcmoore I've read your article about OnePlus Analytics. Actually, you can disable it permanently: pm uninstall -k --user 0 pkg — Jakub Czekański (@JaCzekanski)…
Note: since beginning this research back in February, another security researcher @chmod750 has independently discovered and disclosed much of what I am about to talk about! Introduction I recently acquired a TP-Link TL-SG108E (V1) Easy Smart switch . The Easy Smart range of switches from TP-Link are targeted at the advanced consumer market; they have some enterprise-class managed switching…
Introduction Every year, the folks at Counter Hack Challenges run a cyber security challenge for people to enjoy over the festive season, and this year it’s a corker. Head over to the challenge site to set the scene, have a look at the questions, and have a go for yourself before reading my solution below! Part 1: A Most Curious Business Card First, we examine Santa’s business card to see if it…
Background The security of consumer wireless routers has come a long way over the years. In terms of the technology available, we’ve gone from completely unprotected wireless networks being the norm, seen the rise and fall of the fundamentally broken WEP algorithm, and arrived at the relative security of WPA/WPA2. A wireless network protected by WPA/WPA2 using a pre-shared key (which is what you’d…