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InfoSec, DevSec, Penetration Testing, etc.
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Security circleci.com

Time to rotate any secrets you have stored in CircleCI

The headline is the nut of this story, but here’s CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber with the announcement:

We wanted to make you aware that we are currently investigating a security incident, and that our investigation is ongoing. We will provide you updates about this incident, and our response, as they become available. At this point, we are confident that there are no unauthorized actors active in our systems; however, out of an abundance of caution, we want to ensure that all customers take certain preventative measures to protect your data as well.

iOS rambo.codes

iOS bug "SiriSpy" allowed apps to eavesdrop on your conversations with Siri

This tldr from Guilherme Rambo is enough, but read the full post for all the details.

TL;DR: Any app with access to Bluetooth could record your conversations with Siri and audio from the iOS keyboard dictation feature when using AirPods or Beats headsets. This would happen without the app requesting microphone access permission and without the app leaving any trace that it was listening to the microphone.

This bug has since been handled by Apple. Also, after reaching back out to Apple (on Oct 25), Guilherme was told he’d be receiving a $7,000 (USD) bug bounty payment for reporting the issue.

Julie Qiu go.dev

Vulnerability management for Go

Julie Qiu, announcing Go’s new support for vulnerability management:

Go provides tooling to analyze your codebase and surface known vulnerabilities. This tooling is backed by the Go vulnerability database, which is curated by the Go security team. Go’s tooling reduces noise in your results by only surfacing vulnerabilities in functions that your code is actually calling.

There’s a new govulncheck command you can/should install and run against your project. It surfaces only the vulnerabilities that actually affect you, which is awesome.

Govulncheck is a standalone tool to allow frequent updates and rapid iteration while we gather feedback from users. In the long term, we plan to integrate the govulncheck tool into the main Go distribution.

iOS krausefx.com

See what JS commands get injected through an in-app browser on iOS

Felix Krause built an iOS browser app that lists the JavaScript commands executed by the iOS app rendering the page. Use it like this:

  1. Open an app you want to analyze
  2. Share the URL somewhere inside the app (e.g. send a DM to a friend, or post to your feed)
  3. Tap on the link inside the app to open it
  4. Read the report on the screen

His findings after using this for a bit are… concerning. Especially TikTok.

Awesome Lists github.com

A powerful open source toolkit for hackers & security automation

Scanners Box also known as scanbox, is a powerful hacker toolkit, which has collected more than 10 categories of open source scanners from Github, including subdomain, database, middleware and other modular design scanner etc. But for other Well-known scanning tools, such as nmap, w3af, brakeman, arachni, nikto, metasploit, aircrack-ng will not be included in the scope of collection.

Toolkit might be a bit misleading. I was imagning some kind of Docker container or Linux distro with all the tools baked in. This is more of a collection of tools (which is why we applied the Awesome topic to it) that you can pick and choose from. Nice collection, though!

Apple apple.com

Apple adds a Lockdown Mode for "extreme protection"

Lockdown Mode is the first major capability of its kind designed to offer an extreme, optional protection for the very small number of users who face grave, targeted threats to their digital security.

It blocks non-image attachment types in Messages, disables JIT compilation in Safari, blocks incoming FaceTime calls from unknown senders, won’t let the phone connect to a computer via a wired connection, and disables the ability to install new configuration profiles.

Security github.com

Chain-bench – a tool for auditing your software supply chain

Chain-bench is an open source tool for auditing your software supply chain stack for security compliance based on a new CIS Software Supply Chain benchmark.

You can run the tool from a CLI, assuming your code is hosted on GitHub (more SCM hosts coming soon):

chain-bench scan --repository-url <REPOSITORY_URL> --access-token <TOKEN> -o <OUTPUT_PATH>

I couldn’t find a comprehensive list of what checks are in the benchmark, but it appears they are referring to this guide. You can see what an example run’s results like like in the README.

Security github.com

The Deepfake Offensive Toolkit

dot (aka Deepfake Offensive Toolkit) makes real-time, controllable deepfakes ready for virtual cameras injection. dot is created for performing penetration testing against e.g. identity verification and video conferencing systems, for the use by security analysts, Red Team members, and biometrics researchers.

What’s crazy is dot deepfakes don’t require any additional training. 🤯

The Deepfake Offensive Toolkit

Startups kenkantzer.com

Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits

Ken Kantzer was part of ~20 code audits of companies that had just raised their A or B rounds of funding:

It was fascinating work – we dove deep on a great cross-section of stacks and architectures, across a wide variety of domains. We found all sorts of security issues, ranging from catastrophic to just plain interesting. And we also had a chance to chat with senior engineering leadership and CTOs more generally about the engineering and product challenges they were facing as they were just starting to scale.

In this post he shares some of the more surprising things he’s learned from the experience. There’s a lot to digest in this post, but I’ll highlight my favorite to whet your whistle:

Simple Outperformed Smart. As a self-admitted elitist, it pains me to say this, but it’s true: the startups we audited that are now doing the best usually had an almost brazenly ‘Keep It Simple’ approach to engineering. Cleverness for cleverness sake was abhorred. On the flip side, the companies where we were like ”woah, these folks are smart as hell” for the most part kind of faded.

The GitHub Blog Icon The GitHub Blog

GitHub will require 2FA by the end of 2023

Mike Hanley on GitHub’s blog:

The software supply chain starts with the developer. Developer accounts are frequent targets for social engineering and account takeover, and protecting developers from these types of attacks is the first and most critical step toward securing the supply chain…

Today, as part of a platform-wide effort to secure the software ecosystem through improving account security, we’re announcing that GitHub will require all users who contribute code on GitHub.com to enable one or more forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) by the end of 2023.

This is a big step in the right direction and their new(ish) 2FA for GitHub Mobile feature helps make the burden not as cumbersome as it might be otherwise.

Security trickster.dev

Decrypting your own HTTPS traffic with Wireshark

Wireshark is a seriously cool piece of software for packet sniffing and analysis. Why might you want to use it on yourself?

This opens up possibilities to not only reverse engineer web app private APIs in a deeper way, but also to do the same kind of research against desktop apps for purposes such as data scraping, automation, vulnerability research and privacy analysis.

Ars Technica Icon Ars Technica

A bug lurking for 12 years gives attackers root on every major Linux distro

Linux users on Tuesday got a major dose of bad news—a 12-year-old vulnerability in a system tool called Polkit gives attackers unfettered root privileges on machines running any major distribution of the open source operating system.

Previously called PolicyKit, Polkit manages system-wide privileges in Unix-like OSes. It provides a mechanism for nonprivileged processes to safely interact with privileged processes. It also allows users to execute commands with high privileges by using a component called pkexec, followed by the command.

Oh my. It requires local access first, which is the only good news here.

Oliver Brotchie csstracking.dev

CSS fingerprinting

Oliver Brotchie developed this CSS fingerprinting technique that requires no Javascript or Cookies to function and avoids anti-tracking methods such as NoScript, VPNs or browser extensions.

CSS Fingerprinting is a technique of tracking and gathering information on site visitors. This method exploits the nature of CSS to track various characteristics about the visitor’s browser and device, which can later be used to either identify or track said visitor.

Right now, at current spec, this method doesn’t scale, but with the next upcoming draft of the CSS specification, CSS Values 4, it will become far more scalable and precise.

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