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My experience with the OSCP certification

Daniel Tomescu16 Comments

Offensive Security review - Try harder!

Hi there,

Probably you’re here because you’re interested in obtaining the OSCP certification. Smart decision, good for you! Or maybe you are interested in obtaining a certification in info-sec, but you are still looking for the right one? Even if you are just looking for a way to boost your technical skills, you may be interested in becoming an Offensive Security Certified Professional.

I recently went through the course (Penetration testing with Kali Linux) and certification exam, so here is some of my experience and a few thoughts, you might find them useful.

Requirements

There is no secret that in order to obtain this certification, you need to dedicate a great amount of time and ambition and I completely agree with this.

Also, rumour has it that you already need to have Godlike skills in everything there is to know, or else you won’t understand the materials. I can honestly say that the rumours aren’t true. A strong background in info-sec is preferred, however the course materials are very well explained, there are plenty resources for learning your way through this course, all you need is the determination to try harder and read more, until you fill all knowledge gaps that might appear.

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Defcamp 2015

Mihai Gabriel TanaseLeave a comment

Defcamp 2015At the end of November, between 19 and 20, we will be present at Defcamp 2015 Information Security conference. Adrian Furtuna, Technical Manager at KPMG Romania and Ionut Ambrosie, Security Consultant at KPMG Romania will deliver a hands-on workshop on web security.

 

At DefCamp 2015 you will learn how easy your online data can be stolen, how your privacy is violated and what are the techniques used to break critical systems security

Defcamp history

The Internet is perhaps the greatest invention of the twentieth century and made possible, since 2000, the rise in popularity for smart devices such as smartphones and social networks like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Besides all the benefits it brings, such as instant communication, faster access to services and access to information, privacy and data security are two issues that should concern more and more users.

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OWASP Bucharest EEE

Ionut Popescu1 Comment

OWASP Bucharest EEEOWASP Bucharest is happy to announce the next local event, part of OWASP EEE (Eastern European Event), a one day Security and Hacking Conference. It will take place on 9th of October, 2015 – Bucharest, Romania. The OWASP Bucharest Event’s objective is to raise awareness about application security, to make web applications safe and to educate users, developers, governments, and business leaders on how to protect vulnerable information and avoid dangerous hacks that can have a high cost to fix.

  • The conference is free however, you need to register.
  • The workshop has an entrance fee and limited seats.
  • The event will be in English, with cutting-edge topics presented by renowned security professionals: Bogdan Matache, Daniel Tomescu, Alexander Antukh, Teodor Cimpoesu, Cosmin Anghel, Razvan Deaconescu, Adrian Ifrim, Adrian Furtuna and Ionut Ambrosie.

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NetRipper – Smart traffic sniffing for penetration testers

Mihai Gabriel Tanase5 Comments

Ionut

Ionut Popescu, Senior Security Consultant @ KPMG Romania has been accepted as speaker at the prestigious DEFCON conference. He will present one of his projects: NetRipper tool, developed especially to be used in penetration testing projects.

The conference will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, between 6-9 August 2015.

NetRipper – Short description

The post-exploitation activities in a penetration test can be challenging if the tester has low-privileges on a fully patched, well configured Windows machine. This work presents a technique for helping the tester to find useful information by sniffing network traffic of the applications on the compromised machine, despite his low-privileged rights. Furthermore, the encrypted traffic is also captured before being sent to the encryption layer, thus all traffic (clear-text and encrypted) can be sniffed. The implementation of this technique is the tool called NetRipper which uses API hooking to do the actions mentioned above and which has been especially designed to be used in penetration tests, but the concept can also be used to monitor network traffic of employees or to analyze a malicious application.

https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-23/dc-23-speakers.html#Popescu

And we will be waiting to share  his experience at the conference in the next article.

Hacknet 2015

Ionuț AmbrosieLeave a comment

Map-God1KPMG Europe’s internal information security conference – Hacknet, was held in Berlin and lasted two days, the 29th and the 30th of April.

This year, it was Ionut, Daniel and me who had the privilege of representing KPMG Romania.

Our team arrived in Berlin on the 28th. After taking our luggage to the hotel, we went for dinner, followed by a short walk in the city.

First Day

The conference kicked off early on the 29th and the program for the day consisted of three presentations and the CTF competition.

First presentation was on Relaying Contactless EMV, by a colleague from KPMG NL. After an introduction to smart-cards and EMV, the speaker described the concept of Relay Attacks on Contactless Transactions. Afterwords, he showed a video illustrating his Android implementation of the attack, the novelty of his approach being the small time overhead incurred by the relay. Measurements showed that the duration of a relayed transaction was very close to the duration of a native transaction (sometimes, due to optimizations, even faster). Continue reading →