Summary When email users of several email services send mail using mechanisms other than that service’s web interface (i.e.: their phone or laptop’s email program), services commonly include the user’s IP address in message headers. This information disclosure lets recipients of these messages perform some privacy-invasive actions, such as: Approximate geographical location of the sender Correlation of separate email addresses, but sent by the the same sender Broadband and / or cellphone provider Users looking to send email in a manner that keeps this information private from message recipients should use either the web interface or an alternative mail provider.

A while back, we talked about a common challenge in the security industry – searching for some known bad content (i.e.: “Invoke-WebRequest”) in content that you know has been encoded in base64. In a really cool bout of co-discovery, others simultaneously wrote similar implementations. Since then, this approach is now in the process of being integrated into YARA. Very cool times! Another situation you might have run across is malware authors “encrypting” their content with a static XOR key – a process I like to call “encraption”.

If you’re looking to get one of the Star Trek TOS patches (Science, Engineering, or Command) embroidered on something, they often charge a lot of money to convert the logo to the format that embroidery machines understand. Here are version I created in the Brother PES format, as well as in the native format I created it in (EmbroideryWare STICH). Command - [Brother PES] [EmbroideryWare STICH] Science - [Brother PES] [EmbroideryWare STICH] Engineering - [Brother PES] [EmbroideryWare STICH]

If you’re looking to get the Dragon Ball Z logo embroidered on something, they often charge a lot of money to convert the logo to the format that embroidery machines understand. Here’s a version I created in the Brother PES format, as well as in the native format I created it in (EmbroideryWare STICH). [Brother PES] [EmbroideryWare STICH]

If you’re looking to get the PowerShell logo embroidered on something, they often charge a lot of money to convert the logo to the format that embroidery machines understand. Here’s a version I created in the Brother PES format, as well as in the native format I created it in (EmbroideryWare STICH). [Brother PES] [EmbroideryWare STICH]

Background In the web application world – especially single-page applications – smooth and fluid interaction is key. For many years, these applications have been doing a pretty good job of getting this fluid interaction though AJAX techniques and browser support for XMLHttpRequest. One issue, however, is that XMLHttpRequest requires that all of your communication go through an text-based HTTP protocol. Another issue is that XMLHttpRequest doesn’t let a server initiate communication back to connected clients.

In 2003, Crosby and Wallach wrote an excellent paper demonstrating a new form of Denial of Service vulnerability against applications by abusing algorithmic complexity in the data structures that they depend on. For example, some data structures operate quite efficiently when given everyday input, but the performance degrades precipitously in certain edge cases. If an application provides user-controlled data to one of these data structures, attackers can intentionally provide this worst case form of input to generate a Denial of Service attack against the application.

After posting Extracting Activity History from PowerShell Process Dumps, I got an interesting follow up question: “Is it possible to extract the content of scripts (from disk) that were executed, even if those files were not captured?” The answer is “Yes”, but it’s also complicated. And to make it even more complicated, we’re going to go down a path showing how to do some of this detective work from scratch. This is going to require a lot of WinDbg automation, so for a first step, install the WinDbg module.

Imagine that you’re investigating the compromise of a system. The system doesn’t have PowerShell Logging enabled, but you did capture a process dump while activity was happening. This memory dump is forensic gold, and the managed code debugging extension for WinDbg (“SOS” – Son of Strike) gives you all the tools you need to mine it. After using File | Open Crash Dump, this is what you see: From there, load the SOS extension, fix symbols, and reload:

After it’s done indexing your data, Scour is blazingly fast at local content searches – far faster than Select-String, grep, or anything else that rips through files when you search. It accomplishes this through the power of the popular Lucene search engine. Similar to the way that publishers have made searching physical books fast, Lucene must first create an index of your content before you can search it. So while Scour was incredibly fast at searching content, the indexing process took much longer than I wanted it to.