Elusive Thoughts

Introduction Hello everybody, it has been a while since I made a post, but this time is going to be a really long long post (that is why I am going to brake it in many parts). Lately my interest has significantly increased as far as the iOS platform is concerned.  The iOS is becoming more and more popular among the financial business sector companies so it came for me the time to expand my knowledge on IPhone devices. Plus since the complete industrialization of hacking (mostly because of the Chinese government, unit something is doing a good job) nowadays knowledge in iOS platforms is critical (they pay good money for iHacking). This post is going to include only hardening information and explain what the security measures are to block exploits and prevent buffer overflows etc. The second post is going to include network attacks and the third post is going to include attacks in the data of an iDevice. Note: iOS the most advanced OS for mobile devices ever created (ju...

Introduction Nowadays hacking, as already mentioned in my previous articles, has been industrialized, meaning that professional hackers are constantly hired to make money out of practically anything and therefore all Web Application vulnerabilities have to be understood and defeated. This article is going to talk about what Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is, explain how can someone perform a successful CSRF attack and describe how to amplify a CSRF attack (e.g. combine CSRF with other vulnerabilities). CSRF is an attack which forces an end user to execute unwanted actions on a web application in which he/she is currently authenticated (simplistically speaking). With a little help from social engineering (like sending a link via email/chat), an attacker may force the users of a web application to execute actions of the attacker's choosing. A successful CSRF exploit can compromise end user data and operation in case of a normal user. If the targeted end user is the administ...

Introduction This article is going to talk about performing Web Application security code reviews the proper way (also known as my way). The best approach to perform a Web Application security code review would be to have at your disposal the Web Application (uploaded and running in a Web Server) and of course the Web Application code itself, because you would be able to verify your findings in real time (e.g. exploit a Cross Site Scripting issue immediately after you identify the issue in the code). Ideally this happens within a CI/CD pipeline where your SAST tool flags a finding, and you can spin up a local or staging instance to validate whether that finding is actually exploitable — that feedback loop is where the real security value lives. But first lets define what is a security source code review. A security code review is a systematic examination of a Web Application source code that is intended to find and fix security mistakes overlooked in the initial development phas...