ITSEC Newsletter 2023-12-21

This report is a little different than our typical content. We were able to analyze data from a perspective we typically don’t get to see… a threat actor’s host! In early November, we came across an open directory that included more than a year of historical threat actor activity. By analyzing tools, logs and artifacts left open to the internet, we were able to profile the threat actor and their victims. After analyzing the artifacts we can conclude with moderate confidence that the majority of the threat actor activity conducted was not financially motivated. They routinely scanned for services and vulnerabilities on government services and defense contractors. However, they also demonstrated limited financially motivated behavior’s such as deploying crypto-miners and targeting finance sites. In this case, we have structured the report around the Diamond Model (Victim, Capability, Adversary, Infrastructure). The threat actor relied solely on open source tools and frameworks. For example, active scanning and reconnaissance was performed using sqlmap and ghauri, and if vulnerable, exploitation was performed. Command and control frameworks such as Metasploit and Sliver were then used for post exploitation activity.

Hi, I'm Aga and I'm the new Editor-in-Chief of Paged Out! :) Joining the project, I knew that it was important to many people, but I was still pleasantly surprised when I read emails or tweets expressing the happiness that after a long hiatus, Paged Out! is coming back. It showed me the power that putting diverse, interesting, complex, or ground-breaking ideas on one page has. It took a while for us to get here, to the point where we can share the Issue with you, but now we're back, and we're here to stay. Issue 3 happened because of all the great authors who took their time to write engaging, interesting, and all-around great one-page articles and submitted them to us. I would also like to thank our reviewers for their hard work and dedication and our DTP team that made this comeback possible, as well as everyone else who helped us along the way. There is still work to be done and changes to be made, but with such a wonderful team and community on our side, the future of Paged Out! looks bright. As we are releasing this Issue into the world, we hope you will enjoy it, share it with others, and allow it to inspire you to write something of your own.

This article describes section layout and its interaction with dynamic loaders and huge pages. Let's begin with a Linux x86-64 example involving global variables exhibiting various properties such as read-only versus writable, zero-initialized versus non-zero, and more.