Vulnerabilities have been discovered in Ruby applications with the potential to affect vast swathes of the Internet and attract attackers to lucrative targets online. These vulnerabilities take advantage of features and common idioms such as serialization and deserialization of data in the YAML format. Nearly all large, tested and trusted open-source Ruby projects contain some of […]
The security research community is full of grey beards that earned their stripes writing exploits against mail servers, domain controllers, and TCP/IP stacks. These researchers started writing exploits on platforms like Solaris, IRIX, and BSDi before moving on to Windows exploitation. Now they run companies, write policy, rant on twitter, and testify in front of […]
In the final part of our three-part series, we investigate the how the toolkit user gained control of program flow and what their strategy means for the reliability of their exploit. Elderwood and the Department of Labor Hack Writing Exploits with the Elderwood Kit (Part 1) Writing Exploits with the Elderwood Kit (Part 2) Last time, […]
In the second part of our three-part series, we investigate the tools provided by the Elderwood kit for developing exploits from discovered vulnerabilities. Elderwood and the Department of Labor Hack Writing Exploits with the Elderwood Kit (Part 1) Writing Exploits with the Elderwood Kit (Part 2) Several mitigations must be avoided or bypassed in order […]
Recently, the Department of Labor (DoL) and several other websites were compromised to host a new zero-day exploit in Internet Explorer 8 (CVE-2013-1347). Researchers noted similarities between this attack and earlier ones attributed to Elderwood, a distinct set of tools used to develop several past strategic website compromises. We have not, however, identified any evidence […]
