sean đź”’

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aim had a buffer overflow in it as part of its protocol! wild stuff

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

Chat Wars | David Auerbach

In the summer of 1998 I graduated from college and went to work as a programmer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. I was put on the group that was building MSN Messenger Service, Microsoft’s instant messaging app. The terrible name came from Marketing, which had become something of a joke for always picking the clunkiest and least imaginative product names. Buddy List? C U C Me? MSN Messenger? No, MSN Messenger Service. I’ll call it Messenger for short.

n+1

@molly0xfff “You’d have to be a bozo of a reader not to see that this guy is playing games with people and manipulating them.”

wild that he thinks he isn’t being manipulated!

This is a terrifying and sobering write-up by Retool on so many levels. It's about about a recent spear-phishing via SMS attack on employees, followed by voice phishing attack that deepfaked an employee's voice.

Retool said just one of its employees fell for it, which is of course all it takes. Here's the scary part:

"The voice was familiar with the floor plan of the office, coworkers, and internal processes of the company. Throughout the conversation, the employee grew more and more suspicious, but unfortunately did provide the attacker one additional multi-factor authentication (MFA) code.

The additional OTP token shared over the call was critical, because it allowed the attacker to add their own personal device to the employee’s Okta account, which allowed them to produce their own Okta MFA from that point forward. This enabled them to have an active GSuite session on that device. Google recently released the Google Authenticator synchronization feature that syncs MFA codes to the cloud. As Hacker News noted, this is highly insecure, since if your Google account is compromised, so now are your MFA codes.

Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this “feature”. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isn’t a clear way to “disable syncing to the cloud”, instead there is just a “unlink Google account” option. In our corporate Google account, there is also no way for an administrator to centrally disable Google Authenticator’s sync “feature”. We will get more into this later."

https://retool.com/blog/mfa-isnt-mfa/

When MFA isn't actually MFA

Due to a recent Google change, MFA isn't truly MFA.

Retool Blog
One big thing missing from Microsoft’s blog (that was in the Wiz blog, and is accurate) - the MSA key expired in 2021. They weren’t checking the validity dates, either - customers might want to ask them if they fixed this.
I have started a private LLM Security Slack to discuss all aspects of AI and LLM Security. If you'd like an invite, shoot me a message and I'll invite you!

I missed the 10 year anniversary of my first blog post in March. I'm not sure if it's really held up to the test of time, but it was fun to read.

https://www.seancassidy.me/write-your-own-data-structures.html

sean cassidy : Write your own Data Structures

how much better off would we be, security-wise, if we didn't have awful security solutions like legacy IPSes and VPNs on the internet?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/05/24/volt-typhoon-targets-us-critical-infrastructure-with-living-off-the-land-techniques/

Volt Typhoon targets US critical infrastructure with living-off-the-land techniques | Microsoft Security Blog

Microsoft has uncovered stealthy malicious activity by Volt Typhoon focused on post-compromise credential access & network system discovery.

Microsoft Security Blog
Asana's bug bounty average payout is $1,334.61. So close!
2022: Your weakest link is your users
2023: Your weakest link is your AI assistant who will do whatever anyone asks of it if they ask politely
@riskybusiness ping of doom, 2023 edition