Category: General security

Look too much into the Sun (Tzu) and you will be blinded

You can’t go to a security conference nowadays and not hear at least 700 references to Sun Tzu and his writing, The Art of War. And how important and relevant that book is to the world of Information Security. But let’s not limit our focus to the InfoSec guys. Life coaches (whatever they are) are abusing… Continue reading Look too much into the Sun (Tzu) and you will be blinded

The revised and compressed OWASP Top 3 Web Application Vulnerabilities

I love Top 10s. They’re everywhere and about everything: Top 10 Fascinating Facts About Neanderthals, Top 10 Crazy Bridal Preparation Customs, Top 10 Alleged Battles Between Humans And Aliens, etc. But my question was always: why 10? Why not 11? Or 9. Or whatever else? I guess 10 sounds more important than 11 or 9. It’s the decimal system, 10… Continue reading The revised and compressed OWASP Top 3 Web Application Vulnerabilities

Short URLs are Harmful for Cloud Data Sharing

I was never a big fan of sharing cloud data through a unique link, rather than nominating the specific people that can access the data. To me it feels like security through obscurity. It looks something like this: https://{cloud_storage_provider}/?secret_token={some_unique_token} All the security of this model relies in the randomness and length of the secret token.… Continue reading Short URLs are Harmful for Cloud Data Sharing

Updating Kali Linux from behind a restrictive proxy

I installed Kali Linux from the mini ISO, so I ended up with a fully functioning Linux system but with little to no tools (just nmap and ncat). In order to install the tools that are making Kali what it is, I had to install the metapackages. For me, the easiest option was to install all of… Continue reading Updating Kali Linux from behind a restrictive proxy

http vs https performance

A while ago I had a huge argument with a development team regarding the usage of https. Their major concern was that the impact on performance would be so big that their servers wouldn’t be able to handle the load. Their approach was to use https just for the login sequence and plain text communication… Continue reading http vs https performance