Article Writing: August 2020

Sunday 30 August 2020

How To Start | How To Become An Ethical Hacker

Are you tired of reading endless news stories about ethical hacking and not really knowing what that means? Let's change that!

This Post is for the people that:

Have No Experience With Cybersecurity (Ethical Hacking)
Have Limited Experience.
Those That Just Can't Get A Break

OK, let's dive into the post and suggest some ways that you can get ahead in Cybersecurity.

I receive many messages on how to become a hacker. "I'm a beginner in hacking, how should I start?" or "I want to be able to hack my friend's Facebook account" are some of the more frequent queries. Hacking is a skill. And you must remember that if you want to learn hacking solely for the fun of hacking into your friend's Facebook account or email, things will not work out for you. You should decide to learn hacking because of your fascination for technology and your desire to be an expert in computer systems. Its time to change the color of your hat 😀

I've had my good share of Hats. Black, white or sometimes a blackish shade of grey. The darker it gets, the more fun you have.

If you have no experience don't worry. We ALL had to start somewhere, and we ALL needed help to get where we are today. No one is an island and no one is born with all the necessary skills. Period.OK, so you have zero experience and limited skills…my advice in this instance is that you teach yourself some absolute fundamentals.

Let's get this party started.

What is hacking?

Hacking is identifying weakness and vulnerabilities of some system and gaining access with it.

Hacker gets unauthorized access by targeting system while ethical hacker have an official permission in a lawful and legitimate manner to assess the security posture of a target system(s)

There's some types of hackers, a bit of "terminology".
White hat — ethical hacker.
Black hat — classical hacker, get unauthorized access.
Grey hat — person who gets unauthorized access but reveals the weaknesses to the company.
Script kiddie — person with no technical skills just used pre-made tools.
Hacktivist — person who hacks for some idea and leaves some messages. For example strike against copyright.

Skills required to become ethical hacker.

Curosity anf exploration
Operating System
Fundamentals of Networking

*Note this sites

Continue reading

BurpSuite Introduction & Installation

What is BurpSuite?
Burp Suite is a Java based Web Penetration Testing framework. It has become an industry standard suite of tools used by information security professionals. Burp Suite helps you identify vulnerabilities and verify attack vectors that are affecting web applications. Because of its popularity and breadth as well as depth of features, we have created this useful page as a collection of Burp Suite knowledge and information.

In its simplest form, Burp Suite can be classified as an Interception Proxy. While browsing their target application, a penetration tester can configure their internet browser to route traffic through the Burp Suite proxy server. Burp Suite then acts as a (sort of) Man In The Middle by capturing and analyzing each request to and from the target web application so that they can be analyzed.

Everyone has their favorite security tools, but when it comes to mobile and web applications I've always found myself looking BurpSuite . It always seems to have everything I need and for folks just getting started with web application testing it can be a challenge putting all of the pieces together. I'm just going to go through the installation to paint a good picture of how to get it up quickly.

BurpSuite is freely available with everything you need to get started and when you're ready to cut the leash, the professional version has some handy tools that can make the whole process a little bit easier. I'll also go through how to install FoxyProxy which makes it much easier to change your proxy setup, but we'll get into that a little later.

Requirements and assumptions:

Mozilla Firefox 3.1 or Later Knowledge of Firefox Add-ons and installation The Java Runtime Environment installed

Download BurpSuite from http://portswigger.net/burp/download.htmland make a note of where you save it.

on for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxyproxy-standard/

If this is your first time running the JAR file, it may take a minute or two to load, so be patient and wait.

Video for setup and installation.

You need to install compatible version of java , So that you can run BurpSuite.

More info

How Do I Get Started With Bug Bounty ?

How do I get started with bug bounty hunting? How do I improve my skills?

These are some simple steps that every bug bounty hunter can use to get started and improve their skills:

Learn to make it; then break it!
A major chunk of the hacker's mindset consists of wanting to learn more. In order to really exploit issues and discover further potential vulnerabilities, hackers are encouraged to learn to build what they are targeting. By doing this, there is a greater likelihood that hacker will understand the component being targeted and where most issues appear. For example, when people ask me how to take over a sub-domain, I make sure they understand the Domain Name System (DNS) first and let them set up their own website to play around attempting to "claim" that domain.

Read books. Lots of books.
One way to get better is by reading fellow hunters' and hackers' write-ups. Follow /r/netsec and Twitter for fantastic write-ups ranging from a variety of security-related topics that will not only motivate you but help you improve. For a list of good books to read, please refer to "What books should I read?".

Join discussions and ask questions.
As you may be aware, the information security community is full of interesting discussions ranging from breaches to surveillance, and further. The bug bounty community consists of hunters, security analysts, and platform staff helping one and another get better at what they do. There are two very popular bug bounty forums: Bug Bounty Forum and Bug Bounty World.

Participate in open source projects; learn to code.
Go to https://github.com/explore or https://gitlab.com/explore/projects and pick a project to contribute to. By doing so you will improve your general coding and communication skills. On top of that, read https://learnpythonthehardway.org/ and https://linuxjourney.com/.

Help others. If you can teach it, you have mastered it.
Once you discover something new and believe others would benefit from learning about your discovery, publish a write-up about it. Not only will you help others, you will learn to really master the topic because you can actually explain it properly.

Smile when you get feedback and use it to your advantage.
The bug bounty community is full of people wanting to help others so do not be surprised if someone gives you some constructive feedback about your work. Learn from your mistakes and in doing so use it to your advantage. I have a little physical notebook where I keep track of the little things that I learnt during the day and the feedback that people gave me.

Learn to approach a target.
The first step when approaching a target is always going to be reconnaissance — preliminary gathering of information about the target. If the target is a web application, start by browsing around like a normal user and get to know the website's purpose. Then you can start enumerating endpoints such as sub-domains, ports and web paths.

A woodsman was once asked, "What would you do if you had just five minutes to chop down a tree?" He answered, "I would spend the first two and a half minutes sharpening my axe."
As you progress, you will start to notice patterns and find yourself refining your hunting methodology. You will probably also start automating a lot of the repetitive tasks.

More info

Saturday 29 August 2020

OWASP May Connector 2019

OWASP
Connector

May 2019

Communications | Projects | Events | Community | Membership

COMMUNICATIONS

Letter from the Vice Chairman:

Dear OWASP Community,

Since last month the foundation has been busy working towards enabling our project leaders and community members to utilize funds to work on nurturing and developing projects. So far there has been huge uptake on this initiative. It's great to see so many people passionate about collaborating at project summits.

Our Global AppSec Tel-Aviv is nearly upon us, for members, there is an extra incentive for attending this conference, in the form of a significant discount. This and the sandy beaches and beautiful scenery, not to mention the great speakers and trainers we have lined up, is a great reason to attend. If you have not done so we would encourage you to attend this great conference - https://telaviv.appsecglobal.org.

One of the key things I've noticed in my Board of Director tenure is the passion our community emits, sometimes this passion aids in growing the foundation, but sometimes it also forces us to take a step back and look at how we do things within the foundation. With Mike, our ED and staff we have seen a lot of good change from an operations perspective, with more in the pipeline. Mike's appointment has allowed the Board of Directors to take a step back from operations and enable us to work on more strategic goals. To this end at a recent Board meeting we discussed each Board member taking up one of the following strategic goals, as set out at the start of the year:

1.Marketing the OWASP brand
2.Membership benefits
3.Developer outreach

Improve benefits
Decrease the possibility of OWASP losing relevance
Reaching out to management and Risk levels
Increase involvement in new tech/ ways of doing things – dev ops

4.Project focus

Get Universities involved
Practicum sponsored ideas
Internships

5.Improve finances
6.Improve OWAP/ Board of Directors Perception
7.Process improvement
8. Get consistent ED
9.Community empowerment

I would encourage the community to come forward if you have any ideas on the above and are happy to work with one of the 7 Board of Directors and community members on one of these initiatives.

Thanks and best wishes,
Owen Pendlebury
Vice Chair

OWASP FOUNDATION UPDATE FROM INTERIM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR:

OWASP Foundation welcomes aboard Emily Berman as Events Director. Emily was most recently with the Scrum Alliance where she planned high-profile functions for upwards of 2,000 guests. Emily brings a fresh approach to events planning and her 12 years of experience planning and organizing large-scale events worldwide well in advance will greatly benefit our Global AppSecs.

Did you Register yet?

Global AppSec DC September 9-13, 2019
submit to the Call for Papers and Call for Training
Check out Sponsorship Opportunities while they are still available.

Save the Date for Global AppSec Amsterdam Sept 23-27, 2019
Sponsorship Opportunities are available

EVENTS

You may also be interested in one of our other affiliated events:

REGIONAL AND LOCAL EVENTS

Event	Date	Location
Latam Tour 2019	Starting April 4, 2019	Latin America
OWASP Portland Training Day	September 25, 2019	Portland, OR
OWASP Italy Day Udine 2019	September 27,2019	Udine, Italy
OWASP Portland Day	October 16,2019	Wroclaw, Poland
LASCON X	October 24-25,2019	Austin, TX
OWASP AppSec Day 2019	Oct 30 - Nov 1, 2019	Melbourne, Australia

PARTNER AND PROMOTIONAL EVENTS

Event	Date	Location
Open Security Summit	June 3-7,2019	Woburn Forest Center Parcs, Bedfordshire
Hack in Paris 2019	June 16-20, 2019	Paris
Cyber Security and Cloud Expo Europe	June 19-20, 2019	Amsterdam
IoT Tech Expo Europe	June 19-20, 2019	Amsterdam
BlackHat USA 2019	August 3-8,2019	Las Vegas, Nevada
DefCon 27	August 8-11,2019	Las Vegas, Nevada
it-sa-IT Security Expo and Congress	October 8-10, 2019	Germany

PROJECTS

We have had the following projects added to the OWASP inventory. Please congratulate these leaders and check out the work they have done:

Project	Type	Leader(s)
Risk Assessment Framework	Documentation	Ade Yoseman Putra, Rejah Rehim
QRLJacker	Tool	Mohammed Baset
Container Security Verification Standard	Documentation	Sven Vetsch
Find Security Bugs	Code	Philippe Arteau
Vulnerable Web Application	Code	Fatih Çelik
D4N155	Tool	Julio Pedro de Lira Neto
Jupiter	Tool	Matt Stanchek
Top 10 Card Game	Documentation	Dennis Johnson
Samurai WTF	Code	Kevin Johnson
DevSecOps Maturity Model	Documentation	Timo Pagel

Also, we will have the following projects presenting at the Project Showcase Global AppSec Tel Aviv:

Final Schedule
Wednesday, May 29th				Thursday, May 30th
Time	Project	Presenter(s)	Confirmed	Time	Project	Presenter(s)	Confirmed
10:45 a.m.	Glue Tool	Omer Levi Hevroni	Yes	10:30 a.m.	API Security	Erez Yalon, Inon Shkedy	Yes
			7

11:55 a.m.	IoT & Embedded AppSec	Aaron Guzman	Yes	11:50 a.m.	Mod Security Core Rule Set	Tin Zaw	Yes
				12:25 p.m.	Automated Threats	Tin Zaw	Yes
12:30 p.m. Lunch Break				12:55 p.m. Lunch Break
2:35 p.m.	SAMM	John DiLeo	Yes
3:10 p.m.	Application Security Curriculum	John DiLeo	Yes	3:10 p.m.	Damned Vulnerable Serveless Application	Tal Melamed	Yes

Finally, if you are able to help participate in the Project Reviews at the Conference, please send me an email at harold.blankenship@owasp.com. We have a large line-up of projects to review this time around:

Project	To Level	Leader(s)
Snakes and Ladders	Flagship	Katy Anton, Colin Watson
Cheat Sheet Series	Flagship	Dominique Righetto, Jim Manico
Mobile Security Testing Guide	Flagship	Jeroen Willemsen, Sven Schleier
Amass	Lab	Jeff Foley
Attack Surface Detector	Lab	Ken Prole
SecureTea	Lab	Ade Yoseman Putra, Bambang Rahmadi K.P, Rejah Rehim.A.A
Serverless Goat	Lab	Ory Segal

Google Summer of Code Update:
We were allocated 13 students this year! The current timeline is as follows:

Google Season of Docs:
We were accepted into the Google Season of Docs. There will be a single technical writer resource. The current timeline is as follows:

COMMUNITY

New OWASP Chapters
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Guayaquil, Equador
Lome, Togo
Natal, Brazil
Nashua, New Hampshire
Gwalior, India
Louisville, Kentucky
Nainital, India
Liverpool, United Kingdom
Syracuse, New York