The Solfa Cipher (NSEC17 Write-Up)

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The Solfa Cipher Between May 19th and 21st, 2017, I’ve participated in the NSEC 17 Capture-the-Flag (CtF) event held annually in Montreal, QC. As usual, the team and I had a blast spending days and nights solving challenges and drinking free beer. Among the challenges was a two-part cryptographic puzzle printed on the first and last […]

Removing Debugging Information from Visual C++/C# Projects

It’s often surprising how many malware programmers forget to do the simplest things. Mostly because many are so concerned with functionality, stealthiness and other production concerns, that details slip easily of their minds – a clear advantage to forensics. One of these details is the Program DataBase (PDB) information added by Visual Studio, which most malware authors used for Windows development. While it may seem innocuous, this string reveals a lot about the operating system used by the author, its user name and most notably, symbols that can be used by IDA and ease understanding of the disassembly.

Firefox Javascript Vulnerability

Once again, Javascript is the source of a new exploit that has been recently discovered on Firefox1. The vulnerability can be exploited by crafting malicious Javascript code on a Firefox 3.5 browser and leads to the execution of arbitrary code on the user’s machine. This is due to a vulnerability in the JIT engine of […]