Just a reminder, CapSec DC is at Stetson’s on U Street this evening.
Hope to see you there!
Just a reminder, CapSec DC is at Stetson’s on U Street this evening.
Hope to see you there!
So, here’s an interesting tidbit for all you aspiring Twitter hackers . . .
As some of you may know, the OWASP DC Chapter just announced that the US AppSec for 2009 will be hosted in Washington DC this coming November.
In preparation for this, I had registered a twitter account, @AppSecDC the day before on the 21st.
All seemed well, but as I was waiting to make the announcement, and wanted the account to remain “invisible” from the twitter stream, I didn’t make any tweets on it. I did however enter the account information into several different twitter clients on several machines without issue.
After the OWASP meeting this evening, I went to send out the inaugural tweet from the new appsec account — only to be told by Tweetie (a Twitter client app for the uninitiated) that it couldn’t authenticate the account. When I tried through the web, I got a message that the account was locked out. I decided this was curious, but not initially suspicious, as if I had typed it into my Twitter client wrong and it had been sitting there all meeting long trying to update, it might not be surprising if it had gotten locked out. I made the call that I would investigate when I got home.
Upon getting home, I was fairly surprised to see that I still couldn’t log in. At this point, I started getting a tad suspicious. Could Mikeyy or his ilk have figured out a clever way to hack my account . . . before it had ever done anything? Being in AppSec unfortunately can make everything you do a target to some folks. Looking up the account, I was surprised to see that the handle displayed was now different! I know that you can change the handle on an account, but the change seemed . . . well . . . very unhackerly. Who was going to hack our account and change the “real name” to “Nancy?”
However, it did appear that for whatever reason, @AppSecDC was now coming up as @iwantsamoa. Trying a password reset didn’t work, implying that the email address in the user profile had been modified as well.
Just a reminder about some upcoming events:
This Wednesday, Jon Rose will be presenting his Deblaze tool, and I will be talking about some of the recent activity in OWASP, including (hopefully) the official announcement of AppSec US 2009 being hosted in November in Washington DC.
OWASP DC
Thursday April 22nd 6:30 PM
Duques Hall Rm 650D
George Washington University
2201 G St. NW
Washington DC 20037
Please note that this is NOT the same room as last time. It’s nearby, and hopefully we’ll have signs up to show you the way.
Next week, CapSec DC will have its April incarnation at Stetson’s. Hopefully this time we will outnumber marauding birthday parties. Though it was nice to have free balloons.
If you’ve been sleeping through the past weekend, you probably haven’t heard about “Mikeyy” and the Cross-Site Scripting worms which have been plaguing Twitter.
Saving ranting and rhetoric for a separate post, an ethical reaction to this is to attempt to educate people as to how they can protect themselves from things like this in the future.
Since I am often extolling the virtues of NoScript, and routinely suggest it as a counter measure, I figured this would be a good time to write up a tutorial on the subject (and I’ve gotten several requests for it as well).
NoScript is an add-on for the Firefox web browser, which in addition to a few others, can provide users with one of the safest (and most configurable) ways to browse the internet and determine what content is allowed to execute in your browser (and what is not). It is not a cure-all, and does not protect you from all types of web attacks by any means, but it does protect against a lot of common “drive-by” attacks that take internet users unawares, and, if properly configured, would have protected Twitter users from the Mikeyy worms.