The DMZ

5:26 AM

I have a webapp that generates PDF files from several user-supplied fields and can use CSRF to change those fields. Is there a way I can try to put malware (e.g. rev shell) in the output PDF by controlling the fields?

Conor Mancone

9:21 AM

@JohnZhau I don't know enough about PDFs, but I'm dubious about a reverse shell. Many PDF readers can run JavaScript thought, but theoretically you will be sandboxed. Presuming you're looking for something for a bug bounty submissions, I might try looking into running cryptomining in a PDF via injected JavaScript, if that's possible

I was just reading about this for the first time and thought it was hilarious, so I might as well share:

Emu War

The Emu War, also known as the Great Emu War, was a nuisance wildlife management military operation undertaken in Australia over the later part of 1932 to address public concern over the number of emus said to be running amok in the Campion district of Western Australia. The unsuccessful attempts to curb the population of emus, a large flightless bird indigenous to Australia, employed soldiers armed with Lewis guns—leading the media to adopt the name "Emu War" when referring to the incident. While a number of the birds were killed, the emu population persisted and continued to cause crop destruction...

MechMK1

Just referred to shitposting in the DMZ as "consulting with other security experts"

Conor Mancone

@MechMK1 Sounds accurate to me :)

MechMK1

@forest What do you mean the CEO? My feedback goes to the Burger King himself.

I still can't get over that one Saber/Burger King fanfiction

twitter.com/saber_says/status/968981205646544896

But why like Saber when you can like Jeanne? She's like Saber, but better in every way

I still can't get over how weird Fate is

nobody

1:16 PM

24

A: How can the U.S. government ensure that the black budget is spent appropriately?

Such a budget will, inevitably, fall under an executive department, headed by either a Cabinet Secretary, or the President himself. The budget for that department is scrutinised by Congressional Committees. Both the relevant Cabinet Secretary, and the senior members of the relevant Congressional...

Is everyone in the congress a trained accountant?

And what's the point of oversight, if everything has to be kept secret?

Basically the oversight is:
Committee: "Where is the money going?"
"Here, here and here, but it's all classified so you can't do anything about it"

ThoriumBR

1:37 PM

here, "government black budget" isn't even in the books...

it's more like this: you do some service to the government and charge $100k, but someone comes and asks you to charge $150k, wire that extra $50k to someone else, or your services won't be needed anymore, forever...

and that "someone else" sometimes isn't even aware of anything, because his documents were misused to open an account somewhere that does not care much about your ID at all

funny story: a woman was fired from his work, and went to work somewhere else... the new job asked her to open an account at a specific bank (it's a nuisance but common occurrence here) so she would be paid. when she got to the bank she was informed that she already had an account there. she would be paid around $1k/month on her job and the account already had around $150k.

she said she wasn't aware of that, asked the account to be locked, and went to the cops. they found out her former boss was the secretary of a senator, and she was using her account to receive those kickbacks...

nobody

@ThoriumBR In my country, you use dead people's information to avoid exactly this

ThoriumBR

here there's a national registry for dead people, and the banks are required to update their databases weekly if I am not mistaken

I know that insurance companies refresh their databases weekly, because some miscreants usually pay insurance for dead people and file for damages later

nobody

How do you get people to register the deaths?

ThoriumBR

1:53 PM

to release the body for burying, the hospital needs a death certificate, and to emit the certificate the government must be notified

the other way to bury someone is homicide, but that does not count...

nobody

Well, we can work around all of that. Plus a lot of people don't die in hospitals.

ThoriumBR

when people don't die in a hospital, the police must be notified and they will notify the government

because no death certificate, no burial...

unless, of course, homicide...

djsmiley2kStaysInside

2:41 PM

urgh why does my brain turn off at 3pm

reed

4:58 PM

why do I always feel like writing my own password manager?

I took a look at the source code of "pass", which is a bash script that uses common linux tools like gpg. I was curious how it managed to edit passwords without writing them on disk, and it turns out it does write them on disk, in a temporary file which can be edited with vi, but then uses shred to delete it

my idea would be to write something like "pass", but much much simpler (and customized for my needs), where everything is kept in bash variables and never written on disk. Then the only problem left would be swapping I guess, which I wanted to disable anyway, but I could add a "swapoff" command at the beginning of the script anyway

djsmiley2kStaysInside

7:30 PM

> my idea would be to write something like "pass", but much much simpler (and customized for my needs), where everything is kept in bash variables and never written on disk.

never, is hard

sure, you could use a ram disk

but if stuff gets swapped out, it's on disk

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