Network Computing Editor Wins RSA Hacking Contest

richkarpi writes "Network Computing's security editor won the recent RSA Interactive Testing Challenge. He has up a blow-by-blow description of the events at their site: 'The most important factor in the contest besides basic web exploitation skills (cross site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cross site request forgeries (CSRF), etc.) was speed ... I squeaked out a win in the tie-breaking challenge the first day with only a few seconds to spare as my opponent was right behind in the hunt to combine three injectable fields into one long javascript function.'"

Meh

A real hacker would've cracked open the server the day before and gotten the answers before entering the competition.

Re:Meh

A real hacker wouldn't have participated, but let's not get into a "definition of hacker" debate..

You're right because real hackers are banned from the internet. You're not a real hacker til you get charged as one.

1m a 1337 h4x0r!!!!!1

I know this to be true because my friend in junior high said I am. Also I have this CD with Linux on it which when I put it in the CDROM drive and start one of the school's Dells it tells me how to reset the admin password and then I have r007!!!!!1 OMG p0n13zzzz!!!!111

Re:1m a 1337 h4x0r!!!!!1

If only you could rate posts +1 1337z0rz..

Re:Meh

Actually, last year HD Moore did exactly that -- cracked the vmware image using the metasploit framework and won that way. According to the conference organizers anyway.

Besides, I never claimed that I was a "real hacker". :-)

(yes, that's me. Holy crap, I've been slashdotted!)

Re:Meh

Well, HD Moore didn't win for doing that. While he did use the Framework to break into the machine in a way we didn't expect, he wasn't available to participate in the finals so he was disqualified.

He did ask permission to use the Framework before doing so, which he "happened" to have on a USB stick. The point of the exercise was application testing, not rooting the Windows 2000 server that we forgot to install a firewall on. Whoops, our bad!

Having never seen him before, we didn't know he really was HD Moore until we used images.google.com to find out. :-)

Congrats again Jordan, hope to see you next year since you won a free pass!

Re:Meh

A real hacker would've cracked open the server the day before and gotten the answers before entering the competition.

So James T Kirk is the ultimate hacker? He not only cracked the server, he modified the challenge so he would win!

Knock on door from Homeland Security in 3..2..1

Elite Hackorz just keep quiet about these kind of things!

Wonder what the expense report looks like

After all, this is job related, but I bet the expense report is probably funny

Re:Wonder what the expense report looks like

You forgot the most important line item of all: mountain dew!

And yes, I was drinking dew for the finals:

http://www.rsaconference.com/2007/US/press/photos/ feb8/images/2007-02-08_12-41-10.jpg [rsaconference.com] (hiding behind the monitor)

Time victory = valid?

Because typing speed is everything when you and your buddies are hacking the Gibson via a payphone.

Re:Time victory = valid?

Fool! Real hackers sing baud straight into the mouth piece, bypassing the keyboard entirely.

That's Nothing

The most important factor in the contest besides basic web exploitation skills (cross site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cross site request forgeries (CSRF), etc.) was speed ... I squeaked out a win in the tie-breaking challenge the first day with only a few seconds to spare as my opponent was right behind in the hunt to combine three injectable fields into one long javascript function.

That's nothing.

This one time, I was hacking this really locked-up-the-wazoo Gibson. I'd set up a couple of IDS/IPS evasion bots, perimeter scanning came up clean. Small SQL injection issue merged with XSS showed that the backend database may have been either 768-bit encrypted or a simple 3DES matter, but I was running low on time and didn't get to check. Once the tables were writable to sa, I was able to jump in and jump out with no problem. One of their systems caught an early sniff, but was shut down with a smurf. Everything was PERFECT until their night noc ran a reverse udp traceroute back to one of the hosts I had set up after that, straight DOWNHILL. I got called twice by my isp asking about unusual activity, some other shit about access attempts to a federally monitored system, and they had everything in logs including the Schneier-level, rot-26 I thought would hide me. Fortunately I managed to find a reverse-folding routepath on their IIS Apache and I got out just in time while erasing the incriminating forum posts.

Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.

web security != security

It's good to see he won the contest on that one facet of security, web security.

More interesting

if he'd actually told us a little more detail. As it stands this is a "What I Did On My Summer Holidays" and it gets a D- for information.

Yeah, sure....

"He has up a blow-by-blow description of the events at their site..."

Ha Ha...I'm not falling for that one. One minute your innocently reading a post on Slashdot about some 1337 web hacker asking you to check out his website, the next minute he's robbing your grandma's bank account...

Mitnick warned me about hacker tricks like that... I for one am not going to RTFA!

The CSRF and XSS FAQ

The XSS FAQ [cgisecurity.com]
The Cross-site Request Forgery FAQ [cgisecurity.com]

Why I disable Javascript by default...

This all is precisely why I have the NoScript extension installed in Firefox, and javascript is only turned on if the site requires it; the regular sites I use that DO require it, are whitelisted. I also have firefox set to dump all cookies on quitting; only sites that NEED to set permanent cookies are allowed to do so via the exception list.

Contest Requirements?

Hacking Contest Eh? 14 year old Finnish kids armed with Generalized Quadratic Sieves need not apply?

Yeah, but how would he do against Chloe Sullivan?

This is half in jest, half wondering if any "pros" (ie NSA types) were in the competition? They definitely weren't listed in the TFA and I wonder if they'd be allowed to compete.

Of course, their cover could be working for the Mormons...

myke

Re:Ugh

Relax. You need to work on your reading comprehension.

He wasn't insulting the intelligence of Mormons. He was just remarking on how odd it is that an employee of a *church* was so talented. And it is odd. You would expect that someone so skilled would be more likely to be working for a "tech" company.

Re:Ugh

I would have written the exact same sentence if my opponent was in a similar position at a Catholic, Baptist, Buddhist, etc, organization, or was technical staff for Seven-eleven, Sears, or pretty much any non-security company.

Read it again and you'll notice I also included myself in the category of "people you wouldn't expect in the finals of a web hacking competition". So unless you think I was also calling myself stupid, I wasn't belittling anyone. Merely pointing out that neither of us were the first folks you'd expect to see in the semi-finals.