Re: New presentation is up: 0days: How hacking reallyworks

[Holden Williamson <limeyhaqr () gmail com>]

Dear list,
  I don´t wish to rain too heavily on everyone´s parade, but "real
hacking" has very little to do with 0day and even less to do with
remote exploits at all.
Before dave got quite so hype about selling canvas he used to admit
that 0days, and remote exploits in general (implicitly, at least) were
for the "weekend warriors" - the penetration testing teams and the
scriptkiddies.
Remote exploits are of use to only these two catagories of attackers.
Scriptkiddies because they have no understanding of true attack
paradigms and penetration testers because they can only attack the
scope of the target which they have been assigned.
Any "real hacker" will already have set up "infrastructure" many years
ago and will maintain this. "REAL HACKING" is done by having root on
boxes and doing a lot of harvesting and correlation of password/auth
token data.
For example, if I wanted to own navy.mil I would not attack navy.mil,
I would go via the Astronomy lab at the university of Maryland.
Likewise when I want to own Microsoft I go via the computer science
lab at Cambridge.
The internet is a network of trust. You are only as secure as the
weakest link in your chain of trust. This is an attack paradigm known
to "REAL HACKERS" as Trusted Path Exploitation.
Any penetration test cannot take into account your ISP or any other
boxes logging into (or having access to in any way) your network.

Therefore, if penetration testing without 0days is useless in the face
of 0days then penetration testing with 0days (and therefore any
penetration testing within the current legal bounds) is useless in the
face of Trusted Path Execution, which is how all the "REAL HACKERS" do
everything anyway.

This whole thread is yet another iteration of the trend for people to
turn hacking into some kind of game of academic masturbation.
The sooner people realise that hacking is a psychological and not a
technological game the sooner networks will become secure.
Luckily for people like me this isn't going to happen very soon.

Yours (very drunk) in motherfucking (brazillian) cyberspace - 
Holden Williamson AKA the limey haqr
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