The red padlock (at a cafe)

The captive portal of a cafe simply rendered a red padlock on with a line through it. Essentially, it was apparently telling me I am being denied access arbitrarily without using any words. There was no other screen before that. Immediately after wifi handshaking Android’s built-in captive portal detection app just went straight to a padlock. I have never been in that cafe in my life and never use my device maliciously.

Showed the screen to the staff who said “works for me on my phone”, who then noticed the airplane on my status bar and said “oh, you got the little airplane, that’s the problem”. Shit; so then I had to explain that wi-fi works in airplane mode. It was just a distraction for them. I couldn’t really convince them that the problem isn’t anything I’m doing wrong. There is no tech support for this situation -- like pretty much all captive portal scenarios. Being the customer of the customer is a very weak position to be in when the direct customer doesn’t really give a shit if it works or not.

So, has anyone seen this kind of behavior? I run into shitty broken captive portals often enough that I guess I really need to get a better understanding of them, and ways to bypass them.

TLS-encumbered captive portal (transit service)

A transit service offered wi-fi but the network forcibly redirected me to a captive portal that triggers this error:

net::ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

I tried a couple browsers and tried rewriting the https:// scheme as http:// but SSL redirect was forced consistently. The error apparently implies my phone’s browser can’t do TLS 1.3.

It seems like a shitty move for a transit service to require passengers to use TLS 1.3 just to tick a fucking box that says “I agree” (to the terms no one reads anyway). Couple questions:

• I’m generally in the /protect everything by default/ school of thought. But I cannot get my head around why a captive portal where people just tap “I agree” would warrant disclosure protection that could hinder availability. In reality, I don’t really know what the captive portal at hand requests.. maybe it demands people’s phone# or email, in which case it might make sense (though I would object to them collecting that info in a GDPR region in the 1st place).

• Is there a good reason for a captive portal to require TLS 1.3? It seems either the network provider does not trust their own network, or they’re simply incompetent (assumes everyone runs the latest phones). But if I’m missing something I would like to understand it.

I still have to investigate what limitation my browser has and whether I can update this whilst being trapped on an unrooted Android 5.

Bypass methods

I guess I need to study:

• ICMP tunnel (slow, but IIUC it’s the least commonly blocked)
• SSH tunnel
• others?

Are there any decent FOSS tools that implement the client side of tunnels without needing root? I have openvpn but have not tested to see if that can circumvent captive portals. I’ve only found:

• MultiVNC - VNC over SSH
• AVNC - VNC over SSH
• ConnectBot - Can all traffic be routed over this SSH tunnel, or just a shell session?
• VX ConnectBot - same as connectBot but expanded

I’m curious if the VNC clients would work but at the same time I’m not keen to bring in the complexity of then having to find a VNC server. Running my own server at home is not an option.

My to-do list of things to tinker with so far:

• Captive Portal Controller
• ~~CaptivePortalLogin~~ (AOS 6+, and no Izzy archives on this)
• Hotspot Login

Legal options

If a supplier advertises Wi-Fi but then they render it dysfunctional by imposing arbitrary tech requirements after consumers have already bought the product/service it was included with (coffee, train/bus/plane fare, etc), then they neglect to support it, doesn’t that constitute false advertising? Guess this is out of scope for the community but I might be ½ tempted to file false advertising claims with consumer protection agencies in some cases.

And when a captive portal demands email or phone number, it would seem to be a GDPR violation. Some public libraries make wi-fi access conditional on sharing a mobile phone number which then entails an SMS verification loop.

update (phones bought last year already obsolete)

TLS 1.3 was not introduced until Android OS 10 (sept.2019). That was the release date of AOS 10. Older devices like AOS 9 would still be sold at that time and continuing at least into 2023. Shops do not pull their stock from the shelves when the end of support arrives. This means people buying new COTS Android devices just last year or even this year are already too out of date for the TLS 1.3 captive portal to function.

It’s seriously disgusting how many people expect consumers to upgrade this chronically fast.

What sources of technical controls does your organization use?

Do you base device/operating system configurations on:

• CIS workbench?
• NIST/STIG?
• Microsoft best practice?
• Google searches and 'that looks good'?

How closely rigorously does your organization enforce change management for policies or settings?

• Can you change GPOs/Linux/Network device settings as needed?
• During maintenance window?
• After a group meeting with code/change review and some sort of approval authority?

Does anyone fully implement workstation and server logon restrictions, and priviledged access workstations (PAW) as prescribed by NIST/STIG/CIS?

The URL is Microsoft's long description of the same concepts.

Specifically from the above, there's a few things like:

• Establishing asset/systems tiers (domain controllers or entire org compromise tier 0, moving towards less consequence in the event of system compromise)
• Accounts with the Active Directory Domain Admins or equivalent are supposed to be blocked from logging into lower tier assets
• Workstations that have access to log into these super sensitive assets like Domain controllers for management are considered PAWs, and are blocked from internet access, highly locked down, might have extra hoops or management plane assets are air gapped?

Question:

Does anyone actually do any of this at their organization?

If so, to what degree?

People hated red forest because it was a whole other set of infrastructure to baby sit.

People hate air gapped systems because no remote access or work from home.

The above doesn't work well with cloud, and as a result Microsoft (just as an example) pushed for the new hybrid PIM models replacing their old red forest concept.

I'm just curious.

Weekly thread to discuss whatever you’re working on, big or small, at work or in your free time.

Weekly thread for any and all career, learning and general guidance questions. Thinking of taking a training or going for a cert? Wondering how to level up your career? Wondering what NOT to do? Got other questions? This is the time and place to ask!

This is not an ad.

Does anyone have experience with Tenable products?

I'm interested in real world experience regarding:

• cost
• effectiveness
• ease of use

I'm playing with Tenable Security Center and Nessus Scanner. I'm early in the deployment, just looking for pointers and whether anyone has used it?

What alternatives is your org using if not?

Can you compare?

Edit, if anyone is interested, I can post results and opinions here also.

Weekly thread to discuss whatever you’re working on, big or small, at work or in your free time.

Weekly thread for any and all career, learning and general guidance questions. Thinking of taking a training or going for a cert? Wondering how to level up your career? Wondering what NOT to do? Got other questions? This is the time and place to ask!

The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.

Another installment of #infosec / #cybersecurity #followfriday! Some awesome accounts below👇

- @4Dgifts
- @hatless1der
- @eatscrayon
- @lcheylus
- @badhorse
- @blastoise
- @hookgab
- @misczak
- @thomrstrom
- @dkohlbre

If you're interested in following along in what is happening in the /c/cybersecurity community on infosec.pub (#Lemmy) than you can follow @cybersecurity!

Weekly thread to discuss whatever you’re working on, big or small, at work or in your free time.

Question for people willing to visit Cloudflare sites:

How do you determine whether to trust a login page on a CF site? A sloppy or naïve admin would simply take the basic steps to putting their site on Cloudflare, in which case the authentication traffic traverses CF. Diligent admins setup a separate non-CF host for authentication.

Doing a view-source on the login page and inspecting the code seems like a lot of effort. The source for the lemmy.world login page is not humanly readable. It looks as if they obfuscated the URLs to make them less readable. Is there a reasonably convenient way to check where the creds go? Do you supply bogus login info and then check the httpput headers?

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10292094

Source: www.infosecurity-magazine.com – Author: 1 A new phishing kit dubbed Tycoon 2FA has raised significant concerns in the cybersecurity community.  Discovered by the Sekoia Threat Detection & Research (TDR) team in October 2023 and discussed in an advisory published today, the kit is associated with the Adversary-in-The-Middle (AiTM) technique and allegedly utilized by multiple threat […]

Weekly thread for any and all career, learning and general guidance questions. Thinking of taking a training or going for a cert? Wondering how to level up your career? Wondering what NOT to do? Got other questions? This is the time and place to ask!

Part 1: https://venturebeat.com/security/security-expert-chris-krebs-on-tiktok-ai-and-the-key-to-survival/ Part 2: https://venturebeat.com/security/security-expert-chris-krebs-on-tiktok-ai-and-the-key-to-survival-part-2/

An HTML-only email from a gov agency has a logo referencing an URL that looks like this:

https://1wy1y.mjt.lu/tplimg/1wy1y/f/l9hl7/g3q3v.png

It’s not exactly that (apart from the domain) but of course it’s rather unique looking. They send email routinely. The initial emails had an obviously non-suspicious basic logo, like “(their office domain)/files/logo.png”. But then later they switched and every message from them is the URL in the mjt.lu domain. It’s not unique per message but it could be unique to the user, perhaps to keep tabs on when each person reads their messages.

The output of torsocks curl -LI looks like this:

HTTP/2 200
date: (exactly now)
content-type: image/png
accept-ranges: bytes

That’s it. It’s the shortest HTTP header I’ve seen. There’s no content-length. I find that suspicious because if this is a service that facilitates tracker pixels, then they would want to withhold the length in order to dodge detection. Although from its usage in my case it wouldn’t just be a pixel -- it’s a logo.

The date is also suspect. Shouldn’t the date be the date of the object, not the current time this second?

Are there any other checks to investigate this?

Weekly thread to discuss whatever you’re working on, big or small, at work or in your free time.

A thread compiling all Verge articles about AI influence on the upcoming election.

Has its own RSS feed: https://www.theverge.com/rss/stream/23862839

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10043498

In this interview, Pedro Cameirão discusses emerging cybersecurity trends for 2024 and advises enterprises on preparation strategies.