[Dailydave] Latency is a demogorgon

Parity pty.err at gmail.com
Thu Aug 18 00:02:16 EDT 2016


A fun question to ask is, *"why wasn't that Cisco ASA remote patched?"*

Because EQGRP didn't tell Cisco about it, duh.

But, wait, if you're EQ and suddenly a bunch of your vulns are in the wind,
you're bloody well going to rethink the equities there, right? Especially
knowing that an adversary was suddenly in possession of a bunch of your
unpatched vulnerabilities...

Unless, of course, you didn't know.

pty

(Alternative explanations: 1. the vuln just got lost in the bureaucracy; 2.
meh, it's just a persistence bug, and notifying the vendor would be a tell;
3. some bugs get disclosed, some bugs don't, and, say, an inquiring mind
might discern a thing or two about the equities process by reviewing which
ones got patched, and when, and which ones didn't.)


On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 8:01 AM, dave aitel <dave at immunityinc.com> wrote:

>
>
> So every remote access trojan framework has a high level interpreter built
> into it these days. It brings you back to something from that Zero Day
> movie (which we all watched drunk to make it bearable, admit it) where a
> Kaspersky analyst talked about Stuxnet being "Big but amazingly BUG FREE".
> Not having subtle bugs is something you can do much more easily in
> Python/Lua/Ruby/etc than in C/C++. There are other good reasons to have a
> high level language in your RAT system, but that is a major one.
>
> One of the other major reasons is that you can push complex logic to the
> endpoint that only lives there temporally. By complex logic, we mean
> full-on exploits. You can drive CANVAS's entire MSRPC libraries inside
> INNUENDO <https://immunityinc.com/products/innuendo/>, without ever
> touching disk. And we often do (MSRPC is still important in the world even
> though the last good public bug was MS08-026).
>
> And this is a good reason to choose Python instead of Lua in your RAT.
> You're going to want to write your exploits in Python. You're going to want
> to run your exploits on the remote side - because of Latency.
>
> Latency is a funny thing. Inside all networking code is a hellish mishmash
> of timeouts, MTUs, retries, and buffers. That mishmash does
> Murphy-law-level chaotic things in the face of what you might consider very
> reasonable network conditions. Sat hops are one second latency bombs. Add a
> couple of those, and a bit of packet loss, and TCP breaks down in some hard
> to debug ways that will drive your exploits from "Working \o/" to "Not
> worky worky sadface". This is hard to emulate on VMWare or other software
> stacks for some reason.
>
> In any case, there are bad things about putting Python in your RAT, but
> one GOOD thing is that no soon-to-be-fired-for-extreme-idiocy operator
> will ever upload an entire package to some random redirector box on the
> Internet to avoid latency issues.
>
> That said, I still lean towards HUMINT being a source for the EQGRP leak.
> It's kinda a happy battle between colossal stupidity and insane malice at
> this point?
>
> -dave
>
> TL;DR: https://twitter.com/itsDanielSuarez/status/764898078663012356
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dailydave mailing list
> Dailydave at lists.immunityinc.com
> https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/attachments/20160817/7d2f2b2d/attachment.html>


More information about the Dailydave mailing list