BruCON 0x10

Join us to explore the power of shared insight in the battle against today's sophisticated threats, as seen through the eyes of a reverse engineer’s journey. Collective defense can be much more than just sharing signatures—to me it's about guiding diverse talents to forge a strong front against evil. From analyzing APT1 malware, teaching workshops at Brucon, to testifying before US Congress on AI's impact on homeland security, this talk reveals how mentoring and teaching can help others walk a similar path, amplifying our collective impact to secure the future together.

The evolution of China-nexus based backdoors the last decade has rapidly produced several families that have been documented in great detail. One of the latest additions to this order are SideWalk / ScrambleCross which employ challenging techniques and are difficult to detect without prior knowledge about their functionality. In the fall of 2023, the mnemonic Incident Response Team (mIRT) was engaged to uncover an attack as part of an esponiage campaign, and discovered a previously undocumented backdoor in the evolutional trail. Keeping track of the development of these malware families is essential for defenders. This talk shares the highlights from our analysis of the malware and reflections on how to detect it.

It's a struggle keeping track of everything happening day after day, right? Don't blink or you'll miss new vulnerabilities, new techniques and leaks, …

The presenter, Dieter Van Den Bosch, suggested in the feedback form of BruCON back in 2011, that someone should do a presentation on the security highlights of the past year.

We’re 13 years later… and for the second year in a row, Dieter will give that talk himself!

He will take you through a journey of the most active threat actors, some surprising facts that even experts have missed and some of the weirdest things of the past year!

In this talk we'll explore the opportunities that protocol & standards transformations provide for attackers in environments with an API microservice architecture.

Transformation of user input happens automatically when protocols & standards support certain encodings.

When API backends are constructing their own API calls to 2nd order API's using user input, "chained transformations" happen. This allows an attacker to construct payloads that only manifest in harmful form after a certain number of transformations. The payloads are often too obfuscated to be recognized by the perimeter Web Application Firewall.

This type of vulnerability is present even in hardened targets. Pentesters and bugbounty hunters can maximize the attack surface and increase impact using this bug.

For over two years, US and “Five Eye” entities have focused significant attention on the threat posed by an activity cluster initially identified by Microsoft as “Volt Typhoon.” Linked to People’s Republic of China (PRC) cyber operations, Volt Typhoon is notable for effective, persistent use of living off the land behaviors via proxied command and control (C2) infrastructure to target civilian and dual-use critical infrastructure entities. The entity has been described as the most concerning threat to US infrastructure and interests by multiple commercial and government entities – yet for all this attention specifics on the group and their operations remain maddeningly scarce in public, available reporting.

In this discussion, we will examine the nature of high-profile, yet vaguely described, threats such as Volt Typhoon, and what lessons we can learn from such activities. Particularly, we will look at natural tensions in information disclosure that may uniquely align with insights into the Volt Typhoon threat, where counter-cyber operations may play as large a role (and potentially greater) in tracking this adversary as traditional intrusion analysis. Through this discussion we will look into how information sensitivity for cyber threat intelligence reporting may clash directly with the actionability of such information, and how this both plays into direct defense and more broadly in public messaging around concerning (but objectively vague) threats.

To conclude, we will explore the natural tension between disclosure and action for intelligence operations, and the potential harm that may result when secretive items are broadcast widely in public discourse. Using Volt Typhoon as a high-profile and relevant example, attendees will learn to better advocate for and hold reporting entities to account for threat reporting, while also highlighting the need to execute care and discretion in public messaging on the part of commercial and government authorities.

While there's often a strong focus on securing Windows environments against malicious activities, due to their widespread use, it's crucial not to underestimate the potential for Linux based systems to be exploited in a similar fashion.

Wrangling those EDR tools on Linux is downright essential, given its varied attack vectors and plenty of trickster trails to navigate. Linux setups are pretty common in server, cloud and IoT environments, each bringing their own flavor of security showdowns.

With Linux's robust privilege management, you need to set up your EDR solutions in a way that they can effectively oversee and respond to unusual activities. By engaging in active EDR testing on Linux, a comprehensive approach to security is ensured, covering a wide range of threats and system complexities. It's like having your digital glam squad handle all the security drama, so you can focus on the fabulousness!