Author: Baab

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December Meeting update…

Things are rolling right along for December’s meeting. I hope to see a bunch of you on the 16th.

  • I’ve got a healthy smattering of Kali and ParrotOS workstations on the long table ready for anyone who wants to do actual pentesting against the CTF server. (These were the HP All-In-Ones I picked up at the auction.)
  • The CDC book will be one door prize/raffle for one lucky winner, and I will also have a few decks of “Backdoors and Breaches,” a tabletop card-based game for simulating incident response using a D20 for other winners.
  • As I mentioned before, the LED Marquee parts kits are all here ($15 a set), and I built and tested one. It’s been up and running in my family room for a couple of weeks now. If you want to assemble one at the meeting, it’s super-easy, and if you want it programmed as well, I’ll leave the choice up to you whether you want me to push the programming from my Arduino IDE on my laptop, or if you’d rather go through the process of setting up Arduino yourself, for the learning experiences. There are a number of dependencies and modifications that need to be made, more than I’ve had to do in any other Arduino project. Most of them are well-documented, and some are just common-sense fixes, I trust all of you are capable of figuring it out. It’s just a matter of do you want to go home with a working device or a challenge. 🙂

I mentioned this on Twitter, but not all of you follow Twitter — I picked up the “Crash Course Electronics & PCB Design” course on Udemy over Black Friday weekend for just $10. I can’t say enough good things about it. I have a reasonable enough basic understanding of electronics to get by on mimicry and duplication with minor troubleshooting, but I’ve always wanted a deeper understanding and more foundational knowledge. This 100-hour course, taught patiently by Andre Lamothe, is really hitting the mark.

I guess the best way to characterize it is, come for the PCB design, stay for the best approach to electronics foundational knowledge I’ve seen yet. I was going to skip ahead to the PCB design part, but I’m learning and enjoying the electronics portion so much that I haven’t been able to pull myself away. Already I’ve added a few more things to my wishlist (a signal generator, a set of thru-hole diodes, etc.) and acquired a renewed sense of vigor and enthusiasm for my portable payphone project, which fell by the wayside in the old house when I ran into issues trying to power it properly. Exciting times indeed. It’s one thing being able to troubleshoot a circuit by trial and error. It’s another thing to understand the math and theory behind it and be able to make it right — or even make it better.

Be sure to register for the meeting so that I can be sure to have enough beer chairs for everyone.

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Fascinating — The Drone Databook, by Dan Gettinger

From the Preface:

Once a novelty, drones have become standard military equipment, spawning a global network of units, bases, and test sites. Battlefields in Ukraine, Syria, and Yemen, as well as zones of geopolitical conflict such as the Persian Gulf and the East China Sea, are increasingly crowded with drones of varying size and sophistication. Whether they are used for intelligence gathering, aerial strikes, artillery spotting, or electronic warfare, drones are a leading contributor to the changing character of modern war.

The Drone Databook is a study of military drone capabilities. It is comprised of profiles of 101 countries in seven regions – Asia and Oceania, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, North America, and Sub-Saharan Africa – as well as two appendixes that address military drone infrastructure around the globe and the technical specifications of more than 170 drones currently in use by these countries. The Databook evaluates the military drone capabilities of each country in terms of six categories: inventory and active acquisition programs, personnel and training programs, infrastructure, operational experience, aircraft research and development programs, and exports.

CSD-Drone-Databook-Web

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You’re Not Clever: Password Patterns Exposed

Maybe you were reluctant to get on the password manager bandwagon. Passwords are inherently dangerous. Storing them in the cloud, you worry about breaches, you worry about losing access, etc. So you devised a clever pattern you thought would help you weather the storm until we finally get rid of passwords forever.

Maybe your password is a common word, then the first few letters of the site name. Long enough to avoid being guessed via brute force, and complex enough as well.

And that’s worked well for you for the past few years. You’re sitting pretty and haven’t been breached in a widespread attack.

YET.

Here’s the thing — when you use a pattern approach, every breach puts you more at risk, exposing your pattern. So far the bad actors have only been brute forcing using the breach lists (that we know of). It’s only a matter of time, if they haven’t started already, that they start cross referencing your user accounts from the various breach lists to get a per-user password list. Once that happens, inspecting those subsets for patterns will be trivial, and they will own ALL of your accounts.

Get out now, while you can. MFA where possible, long phrases if MFA is not available, 16-character complexity when long phrases don’t work.

If you don’t trust cloud password managers, use something like Keepass, but keep multiple backups in a safe place in case of corruption.

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The LAB comes alive!

So I happened upon an auction for a collection of HP All-In-One PCs. I’ve always thought they were great general purpose solutions for classroom, lab, specific location browser use. Not what any PC fetishist would want, but fine for group use or general use purposes.

The price was right, so I picked them up, not knowing the complete specs, with only pictures and a “tested and working” claim attached to them.

I fired the first one up during the November meeting the other night. It booted into Windows, with an enterprise login screen for a medical group — brilliant, they sold medical PCs without wiping the hard drives. Mucked around with the BIOS settings so that I could boot Ubuntu to determine the specs of the machine without opening it up, found out it had bitlocker, which didn’t like me mucking with BIOS settings.

Tried to install Kali via Fog, something was busted in my Fog installation, so I just installed Ubuntu from a USB. It turns out they have an i5 4590s quad-core in them, along with 8GB RAM and a 500GD HDD. 4x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports. Gigabit ethernet and Wifi built-in. Not too shabby, glad I picked up this auction.

So the other night, I fixed Fog (firewalld was blocking TFTP), and deployed Kali. Updated and re-captured the image so that the future builds would be more up-to-date, then imaged the second unit this morning. Imaging a new unit just takes two minutes when connected via Gig-E.

Late last night I noticed one showed a CD in the drive. Popped the tray, and what do I find but a CD, labeled by a medical services vendor, with the attached label on it.

The file on the CD was a PDF file. The file name was the patient’s full name in last, first middle format.

It took just a minute or to to create a file with every possible date for the last century, seconds to normalize the password hash so that security tools could use it, and then just seconds to run a brute force tool against the hash using the wordlist I created. Within just a few minutes of discovering the CD, I was able to view a patient’s FULL MEDICAL HISTORY.

Some lessons here:

1) DON’T leave sensitive media in PCs that are going up for auction or to be “destroyed.” Never trust that process to someone else. Remove ALL media — USB, CD, hard drives, etc. Wipe/destroy them separately.

2) DON’T put a label on something telling whoever has possession of it the exact format of a password — it really narrows things down and makes it much easier for us to “guess” it.

3) DON’T make the filename the person’s full name.

4) DON’T use DOB as a password field. It’s absolutely not complex enough. Make it a long password and hand that piece of paper to them separately, or make it available in your highly-secured medical portal.

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Hey look!

The LED Marquee 3d-printed parts are finished! They should be here by the end of the week, and who knows, maybe the Shenzhen parts will be here by then too!

Ready for the group build?

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November Meeting tomorrow evening

Our November meeting is tomorrow evening Monday 11/18. Show up as early as six if you want. We’ll be in the basement again, it’s so much more comfortable than the library. Registration on the dc540.org website, remember, not on Meetup.

I will try to put some lighting in the side and back yards to make the path easier to navigate now that it’s getting darker earlier. I promise you won’t get murdered here, this is a nice neighborhood.

BYOB if you’re picky. There’s still some Durian candy left over.

As expected, the LED marquee group build stuff won’t be here in time for tomorrow’s meeting, but really should be here in time for the December meeting.

If there’s something you want to say, learn, try or do during the meeting, speak up. I’m just a facilitator, not a leader. 🙂

My kink is fringe culture, always has been. What’s yours? Bring something for show and tell.

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WeWork continues fucking up…

LOL, first they annouce the pricing change, NOBODY is accepting that. So they tried to walk it back, saying it was meant to be a “test” for “select groups.”

Riiiiiiiiiiiight….

Now they’re messing with the employees.

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An interesting piece of early Loudoun County telephone history…

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a bit of a phone fetishist. I was about sixteen when I first involved myself with phreaking, switch-hook dialing and fun stuff like that. I worked at an answering service manning a large vintage analog switchboard.

So I greatly enjoyed coming across this article when researching Loudoun County history.

loudounhistory.org-The-Development-of-the-Telephone-in-Loudoun-County

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Off-Grid Cyberdeck…

I’ve been staring at this tab that I’ve left open on my browser for days now. Do I really need another project? I mean you guys don’t know half the projects I’ve got going on already.

I try to push it out of my mind, each time there’s a new amazing project on the table, but my FOMO kicks in, and tells me, “BUT I NEED IT!”

I really don’t.

I didn’t need the VIC-20.

I didn’t need Project GoCube.

I didn’t need the Project MF Blue Box.

I didn’t need the Altairduino or the PiDP8/i.

Nor do I need this. BUT I NEED IT!

https://back7.co/home/raspberry-pi-recovery-kit?fbclid=IwAR2LUJ-xywP6IGLfai3GQk88Qt2MHkmunbk4tQ4ZduYxbJCiI5X36f7gM6M