Good morning, my fellow Hackers and Hackresses

Good morning! Quiet Friday...

Oh dear, I can change that

I just had a call with a customer, who was really uncertain what the next pentest is going to involve. The test will start next week

I honestly wish customers would be more prepared for upcoming pentests...

You get to be both a security dude and a security teacher

It doesn't actually surprise me. I'm guessing that behind the scenes (on their end) someone was like:

More like absolute infighting between teams and applications "Our application must be given priority!", "No! We are more important!", "We should test those apps too!", "No, they're just internal and we know they're insecure", etc....

I think I'll end up on a pentest myself next week, although an incredibly simple one. I wasn't hired to do any pentesting but our primary pentest person is out for 6 weeks on PTO, so I volunteered.

Oh? Do you have any pentest experience? Or is this you getting experience?

I have some experience with bug bounty programs. Nothing crazy, but I'm not completely new to it. In this case though all the customer is requesting is automated scanning, even without validation, so it's more like "running a tool" than "running a pentest"

Alright, then!

If a customer would request that from me, I'd say alright, but I would lowkey think it's a waste of money

I don't want to transition into full time "red team" work but was hoping I might be able to join a pentest occasionally. I learned a lot of new things when I started playing around with bug bounty programs, and a little bit of variety keeps me entertained

Yeah absolutely. Just recently I had to do some off-the-wire reverse engineering

From what little I know so far they are brand new to the security side of things and just trying to get a general understanding of where they stand on the app

^- This question came as a result

@ConorMancone Sounds like a good opportunity to sell some coder training

No answer? So sad

Well, the answer "Because there is no TLS handshake. It's GSS-API" is good enough

But as for the training situation, at least it's a good thing. I love giving out some training for coders

lol, that's what I get for skimming. The answer was so short it seemed unlikely it was a helpful one

I learned about metadata endpoints from reading bug bounty vulnerability disclosures. They never made sense to me until I started this job and we use them extensively

Sure, my methods seem unorthodox, but I assure you, they work

@ConorMancone Ohh, what are metadata endpoints?

lol!

In all the major cloud providers there are HTTP endpoints available to the machines that will spit back your access credentials. These make SSRF very dangerous, because it means that an SSRF vulnerability will allow an attacker to literally gain the access credentials on the machine, and therefore whatever access those credentials have.

In many cases people don't know about these, and so there have been many cases where those access credentials are effectively root users in the cloud provider

so all of a sudden SSRF leads to complete takeover of the hosting account - which is obviously very bad

Here is a relevant example

blog.appsecco.com/…

Thanks, I'll read through it!

Also, song of the day out of the blue:

sup

Sup?

Sup - verb (used without object), supped, sup·ping. - to eat the evening meal; have supper.

The austrian equivalent would be "seas"

I know, but "sup" is generally a question, isn't it? So "Sup?" is a perfect thing to ask

I realize that now that I have written "seas", hundreds of angry austrians will yell at me for not using the spelling they prefer, such as "seawas", "zeas", etc...

Do all of those spellings make the same sound?

I'm disappointed. Google Translate doesn't have Austrian. It also doesn't even attempt to translate "wassup", even though it recognizes it.

They're all different spellings of "servus", which is latin as far as I know, meaning "I'm at your service", but used commonly to mean both "hello" and "goodbye"

Is Latin slang common in Austria?

Good question. I suppose quite a lot of words in the german language as a whole are derived from latin

That makes American slang seem so lame

I thought Germany mostly had their own language because the Romans couldn't conquer everything?

I'd say the most closely related abbreviation is pronounced like "seawus", in which the hard "r" from "servus" is softened to an "a" sound and the more f-like "v" sound was replaced with a softer "w"

@FireQuacker I'm not a linguist, but as far as I know, latin still had a very important influence on what we now know as the germanic language. Also keep in mind that while they may have problems conquering it militarily, roman culture was still very important

And given that for a thousand years everyone and their mother spoke latin, it's no surprize that the germanic language back then started to become "latinized", just like how english now influences so many other languages

Anyways. From "seawas", we reach "seewas", in which the "ea" is turned into a long "ee" sound. You can still hear a hint of an "a" right before the "-was", but not nearly enough to really write it

And from that, we reach "seas", in which the "a" and the "w" completely disappear. You'd have to know what the word is supposed to be to have any idea it means that.

@MechMK1 I think the "w" sound was how "v" was pronounced in Latin already

@FireQuacker That could be the case, but I don't actually speak any latin. In german, "w" is generally pronounced roundly as in "wool", "warm" or "woman". Whereas "v" has a bit of an "f"-sound to it. It's the reason many schoolchildren write "vogel" as "fogel"

Since it's pronounced like that.

> An ellipsis from the commoners’ greeting once said to feudal lords, "servus humillimus (Domine spectabilis)", in Latin meaning "(I am a) most humble servant, (O) noble lord".

> No subservience is implied in modern use, and the origin of the term is not commonly known. Educated usage may be sincere, jocular or ironic.

Knowing austrian culture, most likely ironic

That's from Wiktionary: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/servus#Etymology_2

Yes, I almost thought so

I was more expecting that "servus" would have come from the Latin "salve" (sal-way, not salve like the medical stuff)

@FireQuacker I was aware of the connection to "serve" and "servant"

Though as the article mentioned, no implication of subservience is given. "Servus" however, is only used in informal contexts. For example, when I go to a nearby "Bosnerstandl" (hotdog stand), I greet the people there with "Seawus, griaß di"

theregister.com/2020/06/04/…

Original article: fyr.io/2020/05/30/…

Damn...

Also "Helldesk" in the tile

The Register tends to be very much in the humor/sarcasm business.

Austrian newspaper is terrible

Okay, not all of it. Der Standard and Salzburger Nachrichten are good

But the vast majority is shit

I actually don't read newspapers much

I'm what's killing the industry

@FireQuacker lul @ that register story

@FireQuacker The industry is shit and deserves to die

95% of newspapers out there are glorified advertisements and PR platforms for large companies

And "newspaper" that releases articles like "10 reasons you should be excited for <companyname>'s new product" deserves to die

@MechMK1 Completely agree on that

Sadly, newspapers that aren't just propaganda machines for companies of <arbitrary political ideology> are few and far between