Interesting Reading, and Red Team Action

I’ve been busy this week teaching part of the intro series of courses we have at the National Forensics Training Center, but I still wanted to post a quick update.  I figured I’d share a few interesting things I read this week, and talk a bit about some extracurricular activities going on in our lab tommorow.

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been using Instapaper to mark articles and sites to “Read Later”.  The benefit of Instapaper is, with the integration and sync’ing between all the different computers I use and (crucial) my iPod Touch, I actually wind up reading things that I intend to read later, instead of them just getting bookmarked and forgotten.  While I’m on WiFi I can sync them all up to the iPod and read them anywhere, offline, where I don’t have the distractions of grabbing new emails and messages.

Some things I star’d and enjoyed recently:

• Should I Learn Assembly Language – HD Moore tackles the question of whether or not penetration testers have a need to learn assembly language.  Spoiler: The answer is, essentially: you can get away with not knowing it if you just use the shellcode in Metasploit, but it’s a must if use public-sourced exploits or just want to understand how the shellcode works (which you should).
• Network Time Protocol (NTP) Fun – Cool little writeup over at the carnal0wnage blog about a new module in Metasploit that performs some information gathering over NTP.
• Clueless FUD Article… – In which Steve Manzuik points out that there is a lot more information sharing going on behind the scenes in infosec than you might be aware of (or at least more than the author of a specific DarkReading article is aware of)

Tomorrow afternoon, a group of guys (who have historically done well in past CTF events here at the university) and I will be acting as the red team for a cyber-defense exercise being hosted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  They have a nice VMWare setup in Fairbanks that all of the teams will be remoting into, and we’re really looking forward to giving the participating universities a hard time.  If you happen to be one of the readers that local enough to Mississippi State University to drop by for a visit, feel free to come by the forensics lab in Butler Hall tomorrow between 1:30 and 7:30 PM to see how things are going.