Turns out there are some changes going on this year for Defcon badge hackers. Joe Grand, designer of the badge for the last 3 years has announced plans to pre-release some of the specs of this years design before the conference. (traditionally the badge details have been a big secret and eagerly anticipated until opening day)
Although I am not part of the “Black Hat Bloggers Network” (I wasn’t even aware that there was one) I noticed this post over at www.stillsecureafteralltheseyears.com (which also wins the award for longest security related domain name) titled - Why go to Blackhat?
I’ve learned recently that good security testing is all too often a shadow of a larger skillset - good debugging knowledge. Because of this I’ve been following many more of the blogs of individuals on the Windows debugging and advanced troubleshooting teams and learning more about the tools they use to peer deeply into applications and systems.
Two of the programs which come up often in their troubleshooting are WinDBG and Process Explorer. Having used each extensively over the last few months I noticed a cool new (to me at least) feature in Process Explorer tonight and thought I would share it - this is the DEP and ASLR status tags.
To enable the identification tabs right-click on the column headings in the main window. This brings up a menu which allows you to select the appropriate tags…
Now you can quickly identify running programs having these features enabled. This is very similar to the information from David Maynor’s LookingGlass utility. (whose link seems to come and go in my bookmarks)
I prefer to have less applications that are more universally powerful than having to download a hundred different software utilities, each with specialized tasks, but YMMV.
One of my good friends and a fellow security researcher here in Chicago, Nate McFeters just scored his own guest spot on the homepage of ZDNet discussing methods of “Defeating the Same Origin Policy” of modern web browsers. (congrats again Nate!) I’m helping to pimp out his coverage by linking here. Go give his article a read and learn something new and cool about our good friend, the web browser.
I don’t really like re-posting links to other blog entries, but I thought this was worthy of promotion. Hacknmod.com has a link to the BlackHat archive of video presentations from 2007 and another for SchmooCon. If you can’t make the conference, this is almost like being there… well, not even close really, but at least you can dream…
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