CHICAGO (April 8, 2010) - Trustwave, a leading provider of information security and compliance solutions, announces that three of the company's information security experts will deliver briefings at Black Hat Europe in Barcelona, Spain, April 14 and 15, 2010. The presentations will be delivered by members of SpiderLabs, the advanced security team at Trustwave responsible for incident response and forensics, penetration testing, application security and security research.
Steve Ocepek, director of security research, and Wendel G. Henrique, security consultant, will deliver, Oracle, Interrupted: Stealing Sessions and Credentials, which will demonstrate security issues associated with the default, unencrypted nature of database protocols. As database users perform legitimate queries, information is often transmitted in clear text, easily readable by attackers with access to the data. Using common man-in-the-middle attacks, this presentation will demonstrate how an attacker can downgrade the authentication mechanism, obtain leaked operating system (OS) credentials, and hijack sessions to issue their own queries.
Using a new proof-of-concept tool, thicknet, Ocepek and Henrique demonstrate this approach by gaining unauthorized access to Oracle, the most deployed relational database in the world. Using this new man-in-the-middle tool, the team will demonstrate stealing credentials using downgrade techniques, which enables an attacker to specify a weaker encryption algorithm to decrypt credentials offline. The team will also use the tool to take over existing sessions using TCP hijacking, which enables an attacker to participate in a communication stream between a legitimate user and the database. Both methods ultimately allow an attacker to view data and manipulate configuration, as well as perform their own queries in order to obtain information such as credit card data, customer and partner data, proprietary information and more.
"Using man-in-the-middle attacks to obtain credentials and take over sessions poses a huge risk to organizations and their customer's data," says Nicholas J. Percoco, senior vice president and head of SpiderLabs for Trustwave. "It's imperative that organizations are aware of these inherent security risks and protect their organization to ensure information is not maliciously obtained."
Security consultant Christian Papathanasiou will deliver Abusing JBoss, which will unveil a new tool to compromise JBoss servers, most often used to host Java web sites. This server is often viewed as inherently secure due to the difficulty of obtaining off-the-shelf equipment for compromising the server. With JBoss's prevalent use in industries including financial institutions and gaming, attackers stand much to gain by compromising these servers.
Papathanasiou will demonstrate the tool by which thousands of JBoss servers could potentially be compromised in just a few minutes. Afterward, he'll show mitigating actions that can stop the attacks. He will also provide information on how to secure JBoss servers to ensure they're not prone to such attacks.
"It's plausible that hackers have already recreated the tools that we'll unveil at Black Hat Europe," says Robert J. McCullen, chairman and CEO of Trustwave. "Therefore, it's critical for businesses to adhere to security best practices, which minimizes the exposure of risk associated with these vulnerabilities."
About Trustwave
Trustwave is a leading provider of on-demand and subscription-based information security and payment card industry compliance management solutions to businesses and government entities throughout the world. For organizations faced with today's challenging data security and compliance environment, Trustwave provides a unique approach with comprehensive solutions that include its flagship TrustKeeper® compliance management software and other proprietary security solutions including SIEM , WAF , EV SSL certificates and secure digital certificates . Trustwave has helped hundreds of thousands of organizations-ranging from Fortune 500 businesses and large financial institutions to small and medium-sized retailers-manage compliance and secure their network infrastructures, data communications and critical information assets. Trustwave is headquartered in Chicago with offices throughout North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. For more information, visit https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/.