User Friendly vs Secure

By Martijn Korse / 24th November 2017

Security is sometimes compared to healthy food. Quite a nice analogy: we all know we should eat healthy but we don’t always do it. The same is true for security: even though we know security measures are important, we sometimes favour a situation that is less secure. For various reasons.

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Reproducible Builds

Reproducible Builds

By Martijn Korse / 12th October 2017

Last September a lot of users got infected with malware when they downloaded the CCleaner update. Hackers had been able to hide the Floxif Trojan inside the installer of the update. CCleaner is a utility program used to clean potentially unwanted files and invalid Windows Registry entries from a computer. This is a chart from…

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Personal Data in URLs

By Martijn Korse / 23rd August 2017

Parameters in the url (GET parameters) are used to pass information to the destination on the target server. Quite often I see cases where these GET parameters are used to transmit personal data. For example, a company sends out a newsletter to their clients with a link to their website where they want to personalize…

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Shodan Postman Collection

Shodan Postman Collection

The Christmas holidays are coming and to those of you who feel like doing something adventurous: there is now a new way to visit the dark caverns of the internet. We created an exciting combination of two existing services that make this trip possible: A Postman collection of all the currently available Shodan API calls….

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jquery prototype pollution

Mitigating CVE-2019-11358 in old versions of jQuery

A few months ago, a new vulnerability was found in jQuery, affecting all existing versions of jQuery. It was fixed only in the new version 3.4.0.The SNYK website has a lot of detailed information about this ‘Prototype Pollution’ vulnerability, so I won’t go into that here. For those interested, follow this link : https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-JQUERY-174006 What…

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dns caa record

Implementing a CAA Record

It has been a while since tools like Qualys’ SSLLabs and testssl.sh are reporting on the usage of CAA records. So anyone caring about the quality and security of their SSL connection will probably have noticed its existence by now. But what is it for and how do you configure it? In short: using a…

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Two Factor Authentication Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability (CVE-2018-20231)

At BitnessWise we recently did a review of a few Two Factor Authentication (2FA) plugins for WordPress. First we selected some candidates based on usability and free-version features and after that performed a technical review of the plugin. This revealed a vulnerability we’d like to discuss in this post for future reference and to better…

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We prevented a sign-in attempt

Last weekend, almost exactly between April Fools’ Day and Halloween, Google played a prank and scared us! If you have used Gmail on different devices, you probably know the kind of message you get when you log in from a different device. Additionally, you might be presented with a security question if Google doesn’t trust…

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Don’t trust Google Links

Phishing campaigns are lucrative and probably will continue to be so for a while longer: they are cheap to launch and it only takes a few recipients that click on your malicious link to be successful. But awareness about the dangers of clicking on links is slowly rising. So if you’re a bad guy, how…

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