In my previous article, I showed you how to deploy your project to Firebase and use it for free. Now, let’s explore additional benefits of Firebase. In the upcoming article, I will show you how to set up a custom domain name for your project and utilize a free SSL certificate from Firebase.
In this note, we discuss the Instant Digital Signature (IDS) mode, which was announced earlier. While the main content of the IDS mode was already disclosed in a previous publication, we believe that additional specifications will improve understanding.
Let's take a deeper look at the Q1 2023 DDoS attacks mitigation statistics and observations from Qrator Labs' perspective.
Now that 2022 has come to an end, we would like to share the DDoS attack mitigation and BGP incident statistics for the fourth quarter of the year, which overall saw unprecedented levels of DDoS attack activity across all business sectors.
In 2022, DDoS attacks increased by 73.09% compared to 2021.
Let's take a closer look at the Q4 2022 data.
Hello everyone! We've already talked in our blog about how the Positive Hack Days 11 forum had a special Payment Village zone, where anyone could look for vulnerabilities in an online bank, ATMs, and POS terminals. Our competition to find vulnerabilities in an online bank is not new, but in recent years it has been somewhat supplanted by ethical hacking activities for other financial systems. In 2022, we decided to correct this injustice and created a new banking platform, making use of all our years of experience. We asked the participants to find typical banking vulnerabilities and report them to us. In the competition, the participants could play for either the "white hats" (participate in the bug bounty program of an online bank) or for the "black hats" (try to steal as much money from the bank as possible).
All the credit is due to the RFC’s authors: A. Azimov (Qrator Labs & Yandex), E. Bogomazov (Qrator Labs), R. Bush (IIJ & Arrcus), K. Patel (Arrcus), K. Sriram.
A BGP route leak is an unintentional propagation of BGP prefixes beyond the intended scope that could result in a redirection of traffic through an unintended path that may enable eavesdropping or traffic analysis, and may or may not result in an overload or complete drop (black hole) of the traffic. Route leaks can be accidental or malicious but most often arise from accidental misconfigurations.
Let’s say you want to send an encrypted message to your friend in order to avoid it being intercepted and read by a third party. You generate a random secret key and encrypt the message with it. Let’s say you use AES. But how do you let your friend know the key to decrypt it?
In this article, we will explore how the Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman algorithm works under the hood. The article includes the implementation of this algorithm from scratch, written in Python.
The following text consists of two logically connected parts. The first part constructively rules out the assumption that untraceability supposes anonymity. The second part enumerates specific practical tasks in the form of various scenarios when digital signatures (DS) do not provide correct solutions to the task. It is demonstrated that a complete solution can be obtained through a special combination of DS and an interactive anonymous identification protocol.
With the end of the 2022' third quarter, we invite you to take a tour into DDoS attacks mitigation and BGP incidents statistics recorded from July to September.
The Positive Hack Days 11 forum, which took place May 18–19, 2022, was truly epic. The bitterly fought ATM hacking contest featured no fewer than 49 participants. How cool is that? The winner of this year's prize fund of 50,000 rubles, with the handle Igor, was the first to hack the virtual machines. And he wasn't even at the event! :)
Besides Igor, eight other participants picked up prizes this year for their VM-hacking skills. They were: drd0c, vient, vrazov, durcm, zxcvcxzas7, asg_krd, hundred303, and drink_more_water_dude. A big thank-you to everyone who took part, and for those who weren't at PHDays, here are the links to the virtual machines.
The National Internet Segment Reliability Research explains how the outage of a single Autonomous System might affect the connectivity of the impacted region with the rest of the world. Generally, the most critical AS in the region is the dominant ISP on the market, but not always.
As the number of alternate routes between ASes increases (the "Internet" stands for "interconnected networks" - and each network is an AS), so does the fault-tolerance and stability of the Internet across the globe. Although some paths are more important than others from the beginning, establishing as many alternate routes as possible is the only viable way to ensure an adequately robust network.
The global connectivity of any given AS, whether an international giant or a regional player, depends on the quantity and quality of its path to Tier-1 ISPs.
Usually, Tier-1 implies an international company offering global IP transit service over connections with other Tier-1 providers. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that such connectivity will always be maintained. For many ISPs at all "tiers", losing connection to even one Tier-1 peer would likely render them unreachable from some parts of the world.
Imagine someone withdrew money from a company's account at night. The next morning panic breaks out, leading to yet more problems. The IT department can reinstall a compromised system from scratch or restore it from backup. Reinstalling from scratch will wipe out all traces left by the attackers, and external investigators will have to search for clues in other systems. Restoring from backup carries the risk of accidentally reinstating a compromised image. In this paper, we will describe common mistakes that experts make when responding to security incidents.
The second quarter of the year has ended and, as usual, we take a look back at the mitigated DDoS attacks activity and BGP incidents that occurred between April and June 2022.
The IDS Bypass contest was held at the Positive Hack Days conference for the third time (for retrospective, here's . This year we created six game hosts, each with a flag. To get the flag, participants had either to exploit a vulnerability on the server or to fulfill another condition, for example, to enumerate lists of domain users.
The tasks and vulnerabilities themselves were quite straightforward. The difficulty laid in bypassing the IDS: the system inspected network traffic from participants using special rules that look for attacks. If such a rule was triggered, the participant's network request was blocked, and the bot sent them the text of the triggered rule in Telegram.
And yes, this year we tried to move away from the usual CTFd and IDS logs towards a more convenient Telegram bot. All that was needed to take part was to message the bot and pick a username. The bot then sent an OVPN file to connect to the game network, after which all interaction (viewing tasks and the game dashboard, delivering flags) took place solely through the bot. This approach paid off 100%!
The first text-based CAPTCHA ( we’ll call it just CAPTCHA for the sake of brevity ) was used in 1997 by AltaVista search engine. It prevented bots from adding Uniform Resource Locator (URLs) to their web search engine.
Back then it was a decent defense measure. However the progress can't be stopped, and this defense was bypassed using OCR available at those times (for example FineReader).
CAPTCHA became more complex, noise was added to it, along with distortions, so the popular OCRs couldn’t recognize this text. And then OCRs custom made for this task appeared. It costed extra money and knowledge for the attacking side. The CAPTCHA developers were required to understand the challenges the attackers met, what distortions to add, in order to make the automation of the CAPTCHA recognition more complex.
The misunderstanding of the principles the OCRs were based on, some CAPTCHAs were given such distortions, that they were more of a hassle for regular users than for a machine.
OCRs for different types of CAPTCHAs were made using heuristics, and the most complicated part of it was the CAPTCHA segmentation for the stand along symbols, that subsequently could be easily recognized by the CNN (for example LeNet-5), also SVM showed a good result even on the raw pixels.
In this article I’ll try to grasp the whole history of CAPTCHA recognition, from heuristics to the contemporary automated recognition systems. We’ll figure out, if a CAPTCHA is still alive.
I’ll review the yandex.com CAPTCHA. The Russian version of the same CAPTCHA is more complex.
Positive Hack Days 11 will begin in a matter of weeks. This international forum on practical security will be held on May 18–19 in Moscow.
As per tradition, PHDays will have three big tracks dedicated to countering attacks (defensive), protection through attack (offensive), and the impact of cybersecurity on business. It is our pleasure to present the first talks.
The first quarter of the year 2022 has passed; now, it is time to look at the events of Q1 in terms of mitigated DDoS activity and recorded BGP incidents.
