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!”.

Sslstrip, Hijacking SSL In Network

Last week at Black Hat DC, [Moxie Marlinspike] presented a novel way to hijack SSL. You can read about it in this Forbes article, but we highly recommend you watch the video. sslstrip can rewrite all https links as http, but it goes far beyond that. Using unicode characters that look similar to / and ? it can construct URLs with a valid certificate and then redirect the user to the original site after stealing their credentials. The attack can be very difficult for even above average users to notice. This attack requires access to the client’s network, but [Moxie] successfully ran it on a Tor exit node.

Black Hat 2008: Dan Kaminsky Releases DNS Information


[Dan Kaminsky]’s much anticipated talk on his DNS findings finally happened at Black Hat 2008 in Las Vegas today. [Dan] has already uploaded the complete slides from his talk as well as posted a short summary to his site. New information in the slides since our previous coverage includes “Forgot My Password” attacks and new attacks on internal network vulnerabilities as a side of effect of DNS cache poisoning. [Dan]’s talk today was over capacity; our shot of the conference room overflow is shown above.