An Update and Some Tips and Tricks I Picked Up

Intro

Quick note before I start this, but I am writing this at 12:36 am my time so please excuse any spelling mistakes etc you may find :)

Some Lessons

Its been a long time since I've last done a post on this blog and I think enough has changed in my life that I aught to discuss some of the things that have occured. For those of you not already aware, since I last updated by blog I finished my studies as a Junior Security Consultant at NCC Group and have now graduated to a full time security consultant. As a result of this I've been busy bouncing back and forth between various jobs for several of NCC Group's clients, an experience that has proven to be both interesting and unexpected in a number of different ways.

In particular, one of the things that suprised me the most was how different everyone's experience is when it comes to performing professional pentration tests. Whilst my internship at MWR Infosecurity exposed me to this somewhat, its become much more apparent over the last few months that there are a wide range of skillsets within the infosec industry and that it really is quite impossible to master every single one of them, or even truely gain indepth knowledge of a few of them, without actual experience working with those products. There is simply too much to learn within a single field of security. As thus I've found that many people tend to choose one main area of study that they want to truely master and then another 2 or 3 additional areas that they try to remain knowledgeable about. This is just my experience though an in no way should act as a delimter to stop someone from trying to learn as many feilds as they feel comfortable taking on.

Another thing that I've come to realise more about is the role of certifications these days. Many people I've met have repeatly noted that they are not comfortable with the idea of certifications within the security community, and having done some jobs for NCC Group, I can honestly say that I understand why this is the case. Whilst I have done several security certifications such as OSCP and OSCE in the past, and they have no doubt help build the basics in my mind, until you are actually put on the job and have to learn things by yourself. Several concepts, tips, and tricks I've only learnt through actually getting hands on with training labs and real world client engagements where one has to come up with solutions to various problems on the fly. While most of you who probably read this blog already know this is the case, you'd be suprise to know that some of the people I've worked with still don't realise the crucial need to self learn or ask for help in these situations. If you don't know how to Google your problem, your going to have a bad time and your just wasting your time, your clients time, and the companies time.

Finally, I  found it really odd how many pentesters I've met from various companies whilst working who don't know how to program. Understandably, some pentesters may feel that they don't need to learn programming as most of their job consists of running tools that others have programmed and then interpreting the output to report to the client. Unfortunetly, without a proper understanding of programming, one will not understand the true underlying nature of a lot of security issues that he/she reports, which will hamper one's ability to explain the true impact of a bug on the client's systems.

Future Plans - Defcon, Exploit Development Stuff, Misfortune Cookie, etc

With all this aside, I wanted to say that this year I will be planning to attend Defcon 24 this year and will be self funding a trip down to Las Vegas to come see all you guys in the USA :) If your in the area or planning to attend, feel free to give me a shout; it would be great to meet up with all of you!

Some of you guys have also been asking why I haven't been updating the blog with any stuff reguarding exploit development. The thing is that while I am still working on exploit development from time to time (its not so easy doing it inbetween jobs), a lot of it is still either a work in progress, or covered by company NDA agreements, so I can't really discuss a lot of it. That being said, if you are interested in some of the work that I have done recently, feel free to take a look at https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/uk/whitepapers/2015/10/porting-the-misfortune-cookie-exploit-whitepaperpdf/ for one of my whitepapers I did on porting the Misfortune Cookie exploit to support more target routers. Unfortunetly due to the company's policy on exploits, I am prohibited from releasing any of these exploits publicly or too many screenshots on the whole process, however the whitepaper tries to provide an overview of the process and the problems that I encountered as best as I could.

I've actually had a lot of thoughts about how I plan to continue to develop my skills in the future. One of my concerns is the combination of pentesting and exploit development burning me out in the long haul, however at the same time I realise theres a certain point where this thought is just dragging me down and preventing me from doing anything useful. To that extent I am planning to try go through The C Programming Language 2nd Edition by Brian W. Kernighan and the late Dennis M.Ritche to recover C programming basics and ensure that I don't have any gaps in my knowledge as I feel there are some areas that might need reinforcing. I'm hoping to then go through The Shellcoder's Handbook Second Edition as I really need to go through some of the basics in that book such as heap overflows, fuzzing and format string bugs.

Conclusion

With all that being said, I'm very happy to be working with NCC Group at the moment and I hope to try and update this blog some more in the foreseeable future if it is at all possible, however the main thing I wanted to get across here is that because of NDA's and work life, I may end up posting less on this blog than normal. Hopefully though, I will be publishing some whitepapers and technical articles though NCC Group and I'll likely be notifying you guys of any updates on that side of things through my blog or Twitter.

Until the next update, keep learning guys :)

- Grant