ColaSec

Columbia's Information Security Group

A free and informal gathering of information security professionals and enthusiasts in Columbia, South Carolina at the Richland County Public Library on the 3rd Tuesday of every month at 6:00 PM (click on the YouTube bubble).

Founded 2014 (COVID can’t stop us)

Image credit: Zach Pippin
zachpippin.com

September 15, 2015, meetup wrap-up - frameworks for securing things

We had an excellent meeting this month. About 14 people showed up and participated. We had a lot to talk about with BSides Augusta happening Saturday, the CTF planning for next month, and the usual infosec news. After that, Ralph Collum gave us an excellent talk on security frameworks and how to choose the best one. We finished with some videos from J4vv4d.

Next months meetup will be slightly different. We're planning to do two days. We'll meet our usual Tuesday, October 13, 2015, but we're also going to meet the following Saturday, October 17, 2015, for some capture the flag (CTF) fun. Details to come soon.

August 18, 2015, meetup agenda - Blue Team Starter Kit

Next week, I will be presenting my Blue Team Starter Kit talk, in preparation for my presentation of the talk at BSides Augusta, September 12, 2015, and DerbyCon, September 25-27.

The talk is focused on low cost tools for Blue Teams. The tools I plan to cover in the talk include:

  • Google/Twitter
  • OWASP Zed Attack Proxy
  • Mandiant Redline
  • Microsoft EMET
  • Admin Arsenal PDQ Deploy

These are tools I've found to be effective and accomplishing specific challenges given to me by management. And the best thing is that all of them are easy to use and free (PDQ Deploy enterprise is $500).

Also, we will discuss IT-ology Trends 2015 event at the meetup.


June 16, 2015, meetup wrapup - demo gods pwn presenter

Well it happened again.

The demo gods gave our demo presenter a case of the, "you're not presenting tonight" and thus we were left scrambling for a presentation again. It was still a good night though as we slogged our way through setting up Kali Linux and Metasplotable. Sandra also brought us some cool toys to play with and was kind enough to take notes and a recording of the meeting.

We started with introductions and the agenda for tonight. Then I shared some pictures of CircleCityCon. Adam then stepped up to the play and tried to give a demo until he realized he had downloaded the 32-bit version of VirtualBox and was trying to load 64-bit ISOs. Chris stepped in to assist in walking everyone through how to setup Kali Linux.

We were then distracted when Sandra pulled out some Google cardboard and sent us on trips to space museums, Paris, and other places. We then got back to business and discussed some VM nuances, movie reboots, and Edwin showed of the pfSense console. Back at the Kali Linux install we discovered that you shouldn't try to run a VM from an SD card. Metasploitable is up an running. I managed to pop a padlock in less than five seconds! After a few more errors and troubleshooting both Kali and Metasploitable are up and running. Success!

Robert wrapped up the meeting talking about OSSEC, which he will be presenting on at our next meeting.

Quotes of the night

"That's the problem with doing a presentation with a bunch of nerds; they'll tell what to do and what you're doing wrong." -Robert

"Peter Jackson will get bored and reboot the LORT movies" -Adam

(in the distance) "Ooooooo! Anyone want a cupcake!?" -Tim

Random other things

  • Teracopy is awesome
  • Don't download anything from Sourceforge
  • Hack news: LastPass and baseball hacks
  • Poly password hasher

Again, a big thanks to Sandra for the meeting notes. Our next meetup will be July 21, 2015.

May 19, 2015, meetup wrapup - pwned by the demo-gods

Last Tuesday was our May meetup for 2015. We had planned to dive into the game PwnAdventure3, unfortunately, it was meant to be as we had hardware issues with the server that was supposed to be running the game. Of course, it worked perfectly the week prior. I even completed the first task! We still plan to do PwnAdeventure3 at a future meetup.

The meeting didn't go too waste, however, we discussed several things:

Skycure - https://maps.skycure.com/?loc=29201

Someone who attended HackMiami sent me this link. Based on "Crowd Wisdom," the map shows wifi networks that might have threats on them. We've got two in the Columbia, SC, area.

Cover VT - https://red.cirt.vt.edu/

We had a couple guys from Virgina Tech show us this nifty little link, that has their snort data mapped to Google Map API.

MT6D Visual Data Display - http://paisley.cirt.vt.edu/

This is a link that's meant to demonstrate one way of mitigating a DDoS attack. Essentially as I understood it, the IP address of a device or application keeps randomly switching, which in essence makes it harder for someone to DDoS an individual target.

Finally, we discussed a few things people would be interested in discussing for future meetups.

Thanks to everyone that came out. We look forward to seeing everyone next month!

 

May 19, 2015, meetup agenda - PwnAdventure3

The next ColaSec meetup we will be taking a look at the hacking game Pwn Adventure 3, which was featured at Shmoocon and in this article on WIRED. The game is a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, where objectives are completed by hacking the game.

We have setup a server to run the game. Attendees will need to bring a laptop and download the game client from the Pwn Adventure 3 site. After downloading and installing, launch the client to run an update on it.

Some other things attendees might want to install/bring is a decompiler program to view the game files, like .NET Reflector. I've also found a walkthrough that uses utilizes Wireshark, so that might come in handy as well. Speaking of walkthroughs, feel free to do a little research ahead of time. Here are some links to get your started:

Ghost in the Shellcode - Home of the Pwn Adventure. Has walkthroughs on last year's version.

PwnAdventure3 - Main website.

Dead Packet Society - A walkthrough using Wireshark.

PwnAdventure2 walkthroughs:

balidani

Everlasting Wanderer

Lockboxx

List of tools for static code analysis - Wikipedia

This exercise is something I've never done before and I those most of the group hasn't done before, so I'm hoping we can all learn and grow from the game together.

ColaSec meetup January 20, 2015, roundup

Tuesday we had our first ColaSec meeting of the new year at IT-ology. Among the announcements we have POSSCON looking for security professionals to present at the conference who have a background and experience with implementing open source for security related projects. The POSSCON organizers approached us to help them fill the five speaking slots they have available. Each speaking session will be 45 minutes and should cover a topic that includes implementing or developing an open source tool for security. If this of interest to you or if you have questions, contact me at timothy.deblock[at]gmail[dot]com.

I presented on, How to get started and keep up with information security. When I first got interested in security I wasn’t exactly sure where I needed to start. This presentation is meant to share my experiences of going from reading one security related site to reading several, listening to podcast, reading books, going to conferences, and getting involved. If you’re interested in reviewing my presentation the slides are available here.

PRESENTATION: How to get started and keep up with information security by Timothy De Block

After my presentation Jeff gave us a review of ShmooCon which he recently attended in Washington, DC. Aside from scaring the shit out of us in regards to our vulnerable home routers, he also tolds us about the Keynote by Joseph Lorenzo Hall, which covered, “the intersection of technology, law, and policy.” Essentially, keeping the internet the open internet. He also told us about encryption and the police, a talk about analysis of point-of-sale (POS) software, Httpscreenshot, Masscan’s ability to scan the entire internet in 6 minutes (calling BS here), and also timing side channels which dealt with some cryptography voodoo.

After those two presentations we got into a little bit of a discussion on career paths into security and what someone would need to do for that. It was a great meetup with a lot of good back and forth and resource sharing. Our next meetup is scheduled for Tuesday, February 17, 2015. We look forward to seeing you there!


January 20, 2015, meetup agenda

Tuesday January 20, 2015, is our first meetup of the new year.

This Friday Blackhat gets released to theaters and we're looking to have a special ColaSec meetup to go watch the movie. Shmoocon is also this weekend so be on the look out for items to talk about from there next Tuesday.

On the docket is me giving a presentation on how to keep up/get into information security. The title is still very much in the works, but it's a presentation that talks about some of the resources an information security professional can use to keep up with the latest happening in the community. This is my first presentation every and I'm hoping it's not too noobish and gives people some good information they can use. The goal is to be interactive so that those already following the infosec community can participate as well. Really, it's just a way for us to create some discussion and share some great resources to make us all better professionals.

Looking forward to seeing some old faces and some new faces at the next meetup.

New ColaSec meetup day and social engineering

After talking to several current and potential members of this user group, we have decided to shift our meetup day from every third Monday of the month to every Tuesday of the month. Tuesday just seems to fit everyone's schedule better and allows everyone to shake off those Monday blues. We also won't be conflicting with Monday night football during the fall.

With the new date it puts our next ColaSec meetup on Tuesday January 20th, 2015. The Tuesday after Blackhat releases. If anyone is planning on going hit me up on Twitter or by email (timothy.deblock[at]gmail[dot]com).

While on holiday and doing some chores this past week I was listening to episode 120 of the Down the Rabbithole security podcast and they had on Chris Hadnagy who was talking about social engineering. It's a really good episode, with a lot of good information and interesting stories about social engineering, as well as how organizations can better protect themselves against social engineering. If you can find the time I would highly recommend listening to the episode.