Those who are hardware tinkers and hackers know how easy it is to accumulate hardware thingies: single-board computers, microcontrollers, sensors and so on. One of those are Raspberry Pi’s of different version that lay around accomulating dust. It was time to give some usage to those idle computing resources in the form of a cluster for doing some experiments with networking, distributed computing, automation, etc.
There are places over Portugal where fibre connections are still a mirage, and all we’ve got are DSL connections, more specifically Asymmetric DSL (ADSL). The ISP modem + router combo has been updated through the years, and some old ones have been left behind. One of those was a D-Link DVA-G3170i from 2011, which seemed a good practice target for some hardware reversing.
“Based in Porto, the ØxOPOSɆC group was started by g33ks who are passionate about security. The meetup primary mission is to discuss and tackle upsurging security issues by leveraging the expertise and know-how of members of the group.” This year edition of the Summer Challenge consisted of 13 challenges belonging to 4 different categories, namely: Misc (3), Crypto (3), Web (3) and Trivia (4).
This year the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the RCTS – The Science, Technology and Society Network – also known as NREN (National Research and Education Network), part of the FCCN (Foundation for National Scientific Computing) of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), organized for the first time a Capture The Flag competition targetting students from Portugal at different scholar degrees. The competition consisted of 21 challenges belonging to 7 different categories, namely: Reverse (5), Steganography (3), Web (3), Crypto (3), Forensics (4), Misc (2) and Wifi (1).
My long-term laptop, which accompanied me for some years, died some time ago while proceeding a BIOS update. Why update the BIOS since it’s a process well-known for bricking computers? Well, because of Intel and their wonderful speculative execution vulnerabilities. So, after the update, the PC did not turn on again (with only the fans and the keyboard backlight turning on). As you can imagine doing the typical BIOS reset procedures did not work. So here’s the story of bringing it back from the dead.
Some 4-5 years ago an acquaintance of mine gave me one desktop computer tower asking if “it could be used to do normal computer stuff, like watching YouTube and such?”. After booting the machine (without even looking for any hardware details), I see myself facing a mere memory, a Windows NT 4.0 Server Edition booting sequence and login screen. I quickly answer that this machine is a piece worthy of a museum and he quickly said: “so it is trash, do whatever you want with it”. I tossed the machine away in my basement until today.
UBERHid is a USB MitM Wifi keylogger with keyboard and mouse injection capabilities desinged and implemented by @kripthor. The project is still in early phases of development however it already allows on to perform keylogging and inject keyboard/mouse payloads. I had the opportunity to meet @kripthor during the BSides Lisbon 2019 and to get one UBERHid DIY kit.
BSides Lisbon is the biggest security dedicated event in Portugal, with two days of talks, workshops, a CTF competition, and lots more. During BSides, some sidequests ranging from raffles to challenges appear that can give you prizes! This is a write-up of one of those challenges by Cisco/Talos.