Well I've made my Plan B...

https://github.com/linker3000/Z80-Board/blob/master/README.m...

Wordstar and Supercalc (and Zork I, II and III) installed and working fine, so I'm good!

I love this!

I also love the idea of digital prepping (? Not sure if there's a real term for it). Even just jokingly preparing to have a set of tech work after some kind of apocalypse. UPS/solar driven home LAN with a server running copies of wiki, stack overflow, various other resources. Maybe a bunch of music/movies/games. Whatever would assist us if we lost the internet and power grids.

I don't actually think that's likely to happen, but I absolutely do enjoy some mild prepping just for fun and because the effort is so low I might as well be prepared (we have a bugout bag, extensive first aid kit, all the basic tools and survival gear, etc).

It's also just handy to have this stuff around and "own" it rather than always depend on others to be there for us.

I've often wondered about obtaining my own copy of wikipedia (and other knowledge) to put on a portable device. It would be very useful when I jump in my time machine to travel back in time. I'm going to need to know how to build things so that I can become the "winner" of history. Of course, as history would show us if we learned, when you upset the apple cart, the establishment usually eliminates the threat. So, that's the last piece I haven't worked out yet. Oh, and the time traveling bit.

Not terribly terrified. At best it seem to be a Medium IL to SYSTEM. In other words a slightly better UAC bypass than most, but I don't think you can use it to escape from a browser sandbox for example.

People always seem to overlook this distinction... escalating admin privileges is typically one of the easier things for a hacker to do. Getting in is the harder part (ie, remote/browser exploits, etc).

(Hey dmix; hangs soon?)

I'm not really sure if that is true. Adobe exploits are pretty cheap and unless your target is in software you can usually get a click on a link one way or another.

Really, to me, the hard part is getting in without needing to have the user consciously do anything since then you're in and nobody could even have noticed you doing something.

> Really, to me, the hard part is getting in without needing to have the user consciously do anything

That's why I said remote/browser, everything else is noisy and therefore the 'easy' route. Usually this is sufficient for low tech nation states because they attack organizations not individuals, so all you need is a weak human link where noisey isn't a big deal. Then moving horizontally across the organization.

But more importantly OS are terribly insecure and privesc bugs are a dime a dozen. You don't need zero days to achieve that the vast majority of the time.

Yeah, sorry, a no-click / remote exploit is hard. I agree with you there.

But a browser exploit isn't. They're a dime a dozen. Also, I'm surprised that email is still a primary vector that's used to get people to click on links with their work computer. It seems like such a monitored method compared to, say, a LinkedIn contact.

Have they changed their policy on UAC not being considered security barrier on administrator accounts since W10? Windows was screwed for a long time[1], in practice not much better than running in SYSTEM all the time like in Windows 95 days.

[1] http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090611/uac-in-windows-7-s...

I'm not sure even sure they will ever change it. It was designed for Vista using a security model that now corresponds to the "always ask" setting, and hastily changed to propose the two other settings for Windows 7 because users were thinking it asked too often. But the other settings do not even correspond to a sound security model, so there are hundreds or maybe thousands of bypass in Windows if using those, which include the setting by default. That's why MS simply declared that it is not a security boundary, because they had no sound model to make it work against. It's a "best effort" casual mitigation.

Several of these are patched every month. It’s a non-event for the most part. If somebody was targeting you personally, it isn’t going to be a local privilege escalation bug that closes the gap for them.

From what I gather this is privilege escalation for a attacker that already has arbitrary code execution. It is serious but not "shut everything down immediately" serious. Malware or malicious apps you already have could be made more dangerous.

It looks like a local privilege escalation per the comments elsewhere in the post. That's bad, but a low-ish risk to casual use of a personal device unless it's combined with some other way to get your system to execute an attacker's binary.

Just enough to switch to Mac or Linux. :-)

7

Not at all since you aren't using Windows of course?

As a hacker I can assure you that I can just easily annoy you with UAC pop-ups until you click "Ok". So it doesn't really add much and you don't need SYSTEM to do great harm, anyways.

To answer the downvotes:

You can install Chrome extensions without the user noticing (built this in the past) which gives you access to basically everything without even resorting to DLL injections (I don't share this because it's dangerous and can't be fixed by the Chromium team). Reminder: It's possible to hijack 2FA and online banking with this method. I've read the source code of Zeus and SpyEye, I can do the same thing a) without AV detection and b) without DLL injections (which are very easy to spot).

If you know the Win32 APIs, it's extremely easy to build malicious software that doesn't need escalated privileges.

edit: I'm pretty sure I can implement it on Mac and Linux, too. I don't like the sentiment that those systems are more secure, it's just the difference in usage.

edit2: I can recommend Sandboxie. Please use it to get a little bit more security.

I'm genuinely curious how you'd go about doing what you describe.

I'm vaguely aware that Chrome has a mechanism to silent-install extensions, IIRC when they're placed in the filesystem in a certain way, specified in the registry, or configured via GP. I don't remember which, but I think they install silently. Failing all that, you can probably just extract the extension into the Chrome profile folder and on next restart it'll pick it up.

You saying it "gives you access to basically everything" makes me think you're doing one of the techniques above, which does bypass the permissions dialogs.

And sure, "Access all data on all websites you visit" would grant you the ability to see everything in every webpage and do what you're describing.

I honestly wouldn't mind knowing which Win32 APIs you're referring to. Perhaps you could drop a couple of them, so I get a ballpark idea of which direction you're going in with that.

Finally, the reason I'm writing this comment, really, is that I'm _most_ curious how you'd implement "it" on macOS and Linux too. I 100% agree that both are just as vulnerable as Windows in their own ways but have less market share. I would be extremely interested to hear some of the ways you'd particularly go about attacking Linux, which I use everyday.

SandboxIE doesn't run on macOS or Linux.

> Failing all that, you can probably just extract the extension into the Chrome profile folder and on next restart it'll pick it up.

No, this would be a security hazard. All the mentioned ways require admin privileges or even group policy privileges. I'm doing it without any permissions.

Chrome hardened the process to protect their users. They're doing the best they can, but the Win-APIs are too powerful and there is no sandbox (like those for Mac) in place. Officially, all ways (registry keys, files, ...) require admin privileges for a very good reason.

See http://www.chromium.org/administrators/pre-installed-extensi... for an overview of the official methods.

> SandboxIE doesn't run on macOS or Linux.

Mac has its own sandbox and Linux offers SELinux and I was talking about a security vulnerability I have written for Windows specifically, that's why I gave the tip for Sandboxie.

> Perhaps you could drop a couple of them, so I get a ballpark idea of which direction you're going in with that.

> I would be extremely interested to hear some of the ways you'd particularly go about attacking Linux, which I use everyday.

Sorry, I can't talk about this specific attack in detail because this vulnerability can't be fixed. It's conceptually fairly simple and <400 LoC and I'm sure you can find it on your own if you're determined.

For Linux and security: If you're not constantly monitoring your running processes and bash scripts, privilege escalation and others can be easily pulled off (e.g. simply aliasing sudo). As an example, it's extremely simple to extract all stored passwords from Chrome and others [1]. That's the reason I prefer to use separate password managers (most of them protect their address space), although you can easily hack them as well. That's the reason I prefer encrypted virtual drives - it's unconventional and most tools don't cover it so the hacker has to search for them manually. Security is mainly making it more difficult to find the stuff, it's nearly impossible to hide it completely (otherwise the user wouldn't be able to access it, too).

It's a big field, so I don't really know what what you're interested in. You can find exploits on https://www.exploit-db.com and look for things that are interesting for you. For most of the pwnage, you don't need any exploits (except the chain of remote exploits to get in). As soon as you're in, you can do anything without any problems - getting root user, keylogging [2] (very easy for X11), injecting shared libraries (especially easy on Linux with LD_LIBRARY_PATH) and other stuff.

I would recommend sandboxing tools, network- and host-based IDS/IPS, a good firewall which also analyzes behavior patterns and a healthy amount of paranoia. Many AV systems are mainly security risks themselves and add a false sense of security, it's extremely easy to bypass them and their sandbox-analyzers.

[1]: https://securityxploded.com/googlechromesecrets.php

[2]: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat

> All the mentioned ways require admin privileges or even group policy privileges. I'm doing it without any permissions.

Oh, nice :)

> They're doing the best they can, but the Win-APIs are too powerful and there is no sandbox (like those for Mac) in place.

Hmmmm.

> Mac has its own sandbox and Linux offers SELinux and I was talking about a security vulnerability I have written for Windows specifically, that's why I gave the tip for Sandboxie.

I have to admit I've never really poked SELinux. My understanding of it is that because it was bolted-on, both architecturally and conceptually, that getting the most out of it is a real pain. This has put me off. :/ (heh)

>> I would be extremely interested to hear some of the ways you'd particularly go about attacking Linux, which I use everyday.

> Sorry, I can't talk about this specific attack in detail because this vulnerability can't be fixed. It's conceptually fairly simple and <400 LoC and I'm sure you can find it on your own if you're determined.

Righteo then writes program that generates all possible C programs <400 LoC long

In all seriousness, you definitely have me interested now :) I guess what might be a relevant question is, how universally applicable is it? Would it run on my minimally-configured Slackware box, for example?

And I am _very_ fascinated to hear that this "cannot be fixed". Are you describing a Linux-specific Spectre/Meltdown?

If this is Chrome-specific - or, shall we say, could be deeply contextualized into domains very important to Chrome - well, I'm sure you've seen https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=648971 and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=766253, and particularly the one tag with the numbers in it in the sidebar on the left...

To be honest I'm not really sure what I'm interested in, you could sort of describe where I'm at as somewhat similar to your post 8 months ago about finding your passion. (In my case it's a resource thing.) I've started playing with X11 recently though, to the extent of just learning the wire protocol for fun.

I was actually thinking of making a tiny Xlib-less keylogger the other day, haha. (As in, talking to X via write()/read() directly.) Not quite sure why; perhaps the theoretically-interesting scenario of "not linking to libX11 might be less suspicious?" could be one explanation. I don't seem to need to give myself a rationale to stay motivated on my current track (woohoo), so I'm just tinkering for now.

Uh - getting root on Linux isn't exactly straightforward! Although there was that one time I found a very confused Docker installation (running Ubuntu on CentOS... I'd never used Docker before and could not figure out which way was up ("wat, I have yum AND ap--wait no now apt-get disappeared where did it go"), for about an hour lol) and this system may or may not have left /dev/vda1 in the Docker image... and it may have allowed me to mount it read-write from under the host system, with effective UID 0... ._. (IIRC, I think it was visudo that worked great.)

I wonder if there's a password manager that stores data in the kernel and/or uses the kernel's crypto keyring - and whether such effort would be worth it? (At least this would thwart local attacks, and only remote attacks via the Wi-Fi stack would work. xD)

I've fished forgotten passwords out of Login Data more times than I have fingers, I think. sqlite3 .dump + printf "$(sed 's/../\\x&/g')" FTW.

Linux's non-umbrella model, where there's no cohesive oversight, will be its undoing, I think.

I've wanted to do do packet inspection for a little while now, incidentally, and the introduction of TLS 1.3 has been most annoying. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540111

On the subject of AV my favorite thing is https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary :P (if just for the very non-official "you totally know Google is using this every day.")

One thing I was vaguely considering (last night, actually) was an idea I've had for a while - taking forensic memory-dump analysis tools to the next level and making them work in realtime with QEMU. End result being, you run a tool as root with the PID to a running QEMU instance, it attaches (possibly via process_vm_{read,write}v) and lets you watch VT streams, see keys+passwords being typed in SSH, perhaps take screenshots, see the process tree, etc.

Thanks for the tips!

A friend of mine is running SmashTheStack. He has build an IT sec company in the past (and sold it), maybe you can learn something from the war games. People from Project Zero and very clever people from Stanford are active in the community - those are top-notch hackers.

It's very low-level stuff, but if you like, try to hack those servers. Have fun!

http://smashthestack.org/faq.html

Interesting.

Been meaning to get into this kind of thing for ages.

This website seems a bit quieter than some of the other platforms out there, which I always like. I'll have to give it a poke sometime. Thanks.