Owning the Users with The Middler

Presented at DEF CON 16 (2008), Aug. 9, 2008, noon (50 minutes)

This talk introduces a new open source, plugin-extensible attack tool for exploiting web applications that use cleartext HTTP, if only to redirect the user to the HTTPS site. We'll demonstrate attacks on online banking as well as Gmail, LinkedIn, LiveJournal and Facebook. We'll also compromise computers and an iPhone by subverting their software installation and update process. We'll inject Javascript into browser sessions and demonstrate CSRF attacks. Our new tool, The Middler, automates these attacks to make exploiting every active user on your computer's network brain-dead easy and scalable. It has an interactive mode, but also has a fire-and-forget mode that can perform these attacks automatically without interaction. Written in Ruby, this tool is easy to both extend and add into other tools.

Presenters:

  • Jay Beale - Senior Security Consultant and Co-Founder, Intelguardians Network Intelligence, Inc.
    Jay Beale is an information security specialist, well known for his work on threat avoidance and mitigation technology. He's written two of the most popular security hardening tools: Bastille UNIX, a system lockdown and audit tool that introduced a vital security-training component, and the Center for Internet Security's Unix Scoring Tool. Both are used worldwide throughout private industry and government. Through Bastille and his work with the Center, Jay has provided leadership in the Linux system hardening space,participating in efforts to set, audit, and implement standards for Linux/Unix security within industry and government. Jay also contributed to the OVAL project and the Honeynet Project. Jay has served as an invited speaker at a variety of conferences worldwide as well as government symposia. He's written for Information Security Magazine, SecurityFocus, and SecurityPortal. Jay has co-authored or edited nine books in the Information Security space. Six of these make up his Open Source Security Series, while two are technical works of fiction in the "Stealing the Network" series. Jay is a security analyst and managing partner at Intelguardians, where he gets to work with brilliant people on topics ranging from Page 4 application penetration to virtual machine escape. Prior to this, Jay served as the Security Team Director for MandrakeSoft, helping set company strategy, design security products, and pushing security into the then third largest retail Linux distribution.

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