ITACS 5211: Introduction to Ethical Hacking

Wade Mackey

Week 14: Review of all topics

Microsoft Issues Patch for Windows Zero-Day Flaw Under Active Attack

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Microsoft on Dec.11th, its year-end December Patch Tuesday, released security updates to patch a total 39 vulnerabilities its Windows operating systems and applications—10 of which are rated as critical and other important in severity.
One of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month is listed as publicly known at the time of release, and one is a zero-day reported as being actively exploited in the wild by multiple hacking groups.

The flaw affects almost all versions of Windows operating system—Windows 7 through Server 2019. This is the third zero-day vulnerability Microsoft has back-to-back patched in three consecutive months through its regular monthly patch update to address a Win32K elevation of privilege bug.

 

https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/microsoft-patch-updates.html

New Adobe Flash Zero-Day Exploit Found Hidden Inside MS Office Docs

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https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/flash-player-vulnerability.html

Here is a complicated exploit. It starts with phishing and an email attachment. While the vulnerability resides in flash Word is necessary for the exploit and within a word doc you need a payload, in this example it is an image file. Once the document is opened the payload unpacks, uses Flash’s vulnerability and then can:

monitoring user activities (keyboard or moves the mouse)
collecting system information and sending it to a remote command-and-control (C&C) server,
executing shellcode,
loading PE in memory,
downloading files
execute code, and
performing self-destruction.

Adobe has since patch the vulnerability.

Conversation for ISACA Event

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In that event, I had several conversations with different professionals from different company. The most impressive conversation for me is about the differences between IT auditing and cyber security auditing. For IT auditing, IT auditors need to repeat the audit process again and again with different clients to review everything related to technology and business. However, for cyber security auditing, they can meet a lot of different technologies to make sure the controls are available to deal with the risks. It needs them to keep learning the development of the new technologies. No matter which position you do, they are important to every organization.

ISACA Event and Interesting Topic of Conversation

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So as part of our assignment this week, I chatted with a bunch of people at the ISACA event and one of the conversations I had with an ISACA member was what concerns you about cyber security now or in the future?  And the answer I got was about how we might have good encryption standards now but in the future if China or an adversary gets there hands on it, in 5-10 years with Quantum computing they will easily be able to own the data.  This turned in to talking about how we need to adopt Quantum computing sooner than later to prevent this threat in the future.    In fact I ran into this article that talks about this topic.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612509/quantum-computers-encryption-threat/

 

This article basically talks about how complacency is a mistake and how we need to start working on standards and encryption methods that can’t be cracked by quantum computers.  They see the hard part is getting everyone to agree to this standards and the hope is that its going to take a long time for a malicious user to get there hands on quantum computing.

 

On a side note, the event was very nice, and a great experience to network with others in the field.