Finding a Drupal Vulnerability

Finding a Drupal Vulnerability

So, I found my first official Drupal Vulnerability with Drupal Core. You can read more about it officially on Drupal’s website here –> https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2016-001

For those that don’t know much about Drupal it is a Content Management System similar to WordPress and Joomla.

During my time conducting a security assessment and audit on Drupal, I found an issue. This particular vulnerability was found many months back. I had decided to hold off on publishing anything about it so it would give many Drupal users time to mitigate the issue.

What is the Vulnerability?

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Vulnerable JavaScript Illegally Mining User Machines

Vulnerable JavaScript Illegally Mining User Machines

So a few days ago, I was browsing Cnet.com to view some on-line tools. I noticed an odd alert triggered by my Anti-Virus scanner. My scanner detected it as HKTL_COINMINE with my URL Filtering option enabled on my scanner. I decided to investigate it further to see what this was all about. What I slowly started to uncover was that something was using my machine to mine. This at first didn’t make sense, as no new applications or files were downloaded.

Then, I noticed an increase in CPU, and I have a normal baseline where my CPU levels normally reside at for the most part. After looking into some network connections I realized there was a connection made out to a server in Ukraine. And, that isn’t typical behavior of my network to be connecting to a machine in Ukraine. The realization after some further investigation that it was the CNET JavaScript file that had been compromised externally on another server . And, this led me to my next blog post!

How Do They Exploit JavaScript?

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When Organizations Do Not Use Email Encryption

When Organizations Do Not Use Email Encryption

For this article, I had originally written it a few months ago. However, I didn’t get the chance to post it at that time. And, in a fortunate and positive way it turns out that my post will be some what less relevant than originally intended for the readers. When I initially had started this article, I had noticed an issue which seems to crop up anytime I am working with an organization. Many important organizations still lack basic security tools and options. In the example of this article, it looks into the lack of use of email encryption and secure email systems.

Now before I get into the nitty gritty stuff I want to list out a disclaimer. Everything I conduct, list, and discuss on my blog is and has always been for educational purposes. None of my articles are made or should be used to attack machines out there. All information on my blog is for the better purpose of learning better security methods.

Disclaimer

Now this article is not meant to bash government organizations in any way what so ever. This article is here to teach that any and all types of organizations can easily lack basic security measures. (more…)

SMTP Authentication

Hello everyone.

I am back with some more email security!

Today I’d like to talk about SMTP Authentication.
Some people may never have heard of this concept or may have simply ignored it as it seemingly may not feel that important.

However, in certain situations one may need to make use of SMTP Auth for email.

SMTP Authentication

SMTP Authentication – Outgoing Emails

As shown above in the diagram.

SMTP Auth is fairly simply to use for all incoming or outgoing emails.

Essentially, a machine has to authenticate with the central mail server.

The authentication can be done in various ways.

You can normally query LDAP, Active Directory, or some other identity management system as well as store the credentials on the mail server (not recommended).

How Does It Work?

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Network Security for IP Camera’s

Network Security for IP Camera’s & Video Surveillance Systems

These days many devices have some form of interaction with our networking devices and the internet itself! What people forget is much like our desktops, laptops and mobile devices. All of these other types of devices need to be secured. The average person is going to assume no security is needed and that the product itself is already fairly secure by default. In my personally opinion, I’d say the default security settings are usually not sufficient enough to keep the device and your network safe.

I’ve created a guide below of procedures that can be followed to enhance the security measures for your IP Camera’s and systems.

IP Camera Hardening Guide

I’ve created a hardening guide below that will look at a few key components that administrators will want to make use of in their network.

• Passwords
• LDAP/AD Authentication
• VLAN’s
• 802.1X Authentication
• Disabling Network Ports
• Disabling Unused Services
• MAC Address Filtering
• Physical Access Control

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