Pwnie Award Nominees 2009

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pSsLnNJIa4]

The Pwnie Awards are an annual event at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. They award the Golden Pwnie in a variety of categories: mass 0wnage, most innovative research, most overhyped bug, most epic FAIL, and our favorite: Best Song. Embedded above is [Paco Hope]’s 50 Ways to Inject Your SQL. While a strong entry, it doesn’t touch last year’s winner Kaspersky & Me: “Packin’ The K!”.

Gentle Safe Cracker

Safe_Cracker2 (Custom)

[Carlito] found a safe in his garage with mystery contents. It shows signs of attempted entry and makes interesting noises when shaken. What is the best solution to find out what is inside? Hack it open? Smash it? Blow it up? No, the best solution is to build a robot to try brute force cracking. The robot, housed in an old power supply case, is little more than a servo and a servo controller, communicating with his PC via USB. It seems like a good idea though. Unfortunately, he found it to be seriously lacking in torque, so he’s waiting now to upgrade. The contents of the safe are still a mystery.

[thanks ubernoober1477]

Build A Wireless Keylogger

wireless_keylogger_schematics (Custom)

Hardware Keylogger solutions has released the plans and files for their wireless logger. It has a range of about 50 yard between the transmitting dongle and the receiver. It is based around an Atmel AT91SAM7S64 and the PCB is pretty tiny. In case you hadn’t noticed yet, they sell them as well. The cool thing about this is that key data is transmitted in real time, allowing you to see it as it happens instead of having to go retreive the log physically like you used to.

Binary Reversing Comic

b300

Last month, in preparation for Defcon 17, the qualifiers were held for capture the flag, one of Defcon’s most well known events. One participant, [mongii], did a writeup on how to solve problem B300. The challenge was to find the decryption key used by a program that had several twists that hindered debugging. After grappling with self-modifying code and junk instructions, the team was finally able to find the answer. This win helped Sapheads place in the top 10.  Over at xchng.info, they are collecting solutions to the other problems. Sadly, they’re not all in comic form.

Hacking An IButton

breadboard1

Maxim’s iButtons, which are small ICs in button-sized disks, are starting to show up in more and more places. They have a range of uses, from temperature loggers to identification, and all use the 1-wire protocol to communicate. Over a furrtek, they hacked an iButton used for buying things from vending machines and created an infinite money cheat. They built a small rig based on the ATmega8 to read and write data to the chip. The data was encrypted, so it wasn’t feasible to put an arbitrary amount on the card. Instead, they used a similar technique to the Boston subway hack and restored a previous state to the iButton after something was bought. They also created a hand-held device to backup and restore the contents of a button for portable hacking.

[Thanks furrtek]

Crack WEP Using BackTrack

wepcrack04

Lifehacker wrote a guide for cracking a WiFi network’s WEP password using BackTrack. BackTrack is a Linux live CD used for security testing and comes with the tools needed to break WEP. Not just any wireless card will work for this; you need one that supports packet injection. The crack works by collecting legitimate packets then replaying them several times in order to generate data. They point out that this method can be hit-or-miss, especially if there are few other users on the network, as the crack requires authenticated packets. We covered cracking WEP before, but using BackTrack should smooth out compatibility issues.

Wireshark 1.2.0 Available

wireshark

Everyone’s favorite packet sniffer has a new stable release. Wireshark 1.2.0 has a slew of new features. They’ve included a 64-bit Windows installer and improved their OSX support. A number of new protocols are recognized and filter selection autocompletes. One of the more interesting additions is the combined GeoIP and OpenStreetMap lookups. We’re excited about this new release as Wireshark has proven an indispensable tool in the past for figure out exactly what was going on on our network.

[via Lifehacker]