Alexa Hacking at DEF CON 29

This year, I delivered a talk at DEF CON 29 IoT village on the social exploitation of victims proxied through Alexa voice assistant devices.

Check out the Video here!!!

The talk was live-streamed on Twitch on Friday, August 6th at 3:30pm PT on the IoT Village Twitch Channel. If you missed the live talk, check out the video on YouTube here:

What's the talk about???

As voice assistant technologies (such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) become increasingly sophisticated, we are beginning to see adoption of these technologies in the workplace. Whether supporting conference room communications, or even supporting interactions between an organization and its customers — these technologies are becoming increasingly integrated into the ways that we do business. While implementations of these solutions can streamline operations, they are not always without risk. During this talk, the speaker will discuss lessons learned during a recent penetration test of a large-scale “Alexa for Business” implementation in a hospital environment where voice assistants were implemented to assist with patient interactions during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The speaker will provide a live demonstration of how a cyber-criminal could potentially use pre-staged AWS Lambda functions to compromise an “Alexa for Business” device with less than one-minute of physical access. Multiple attack scenarios will be discussed to include making Alexa verbally abuse her users (resulting in possible reputation damage), remote eavesdropping on user interactions, and even active “vishing” (voice phishing) attacks to obtain sensitive information. Finally, the talk will conclude with a discussion of best-practice hardening measures that can be taken to prevent your “Alexa for Business” devices from being transformed into foul-mouthed miscreants with malicious intent.

Comments

Building Bots with Mechanize and Selenium

The Sociosploit team conducts much of its research into the exploitation of social media using custom built bots. On occasion, the team will use public APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), but more often than not, these do not provide the same level of exploitative capabilities that could be achieved through browser automation. So to achieve this end, the Sociosploit team primarily uses a combination of two different Python libraries for building web bots for research. Each of the libraries have their own advantages and disadvantages. These libraries include: Mechanize Pros: Very lightweight, portable, and requires minimal resources Easy to initially configure and install Cuts down on superfluous requests (due to absense of JavaScript) Cons: Does not handle JavaScript or client-side functionality Troubleshooting is done exclusively in text Selenium Pros: Operations are executed in browser, making JavaScript rendering and manipulation easy Visibility of browse

Bootstrap Fail - Persistent XSS via Opportunistic Domain Sniping

This is the story of how a failed Bootstrap implementation on a website allowed me to gain JavaScript code execution into thousands of user browsers. How I Found It? Before I get into the story, I'll quickly explain how I found this vulnerability in the first place. I have started developing a new opportunistic approach for acquiring persistent XSS (Cross Site Scripting) on various web-services across the Internet. This methodology consists of the following steps: Use custom web-crawler to spider web services across the Internet and scrape source code. It iterates through IP addresses and hits the web-root content for every IP address. It then identifies websites that are using externally hosted JavaScript. This is achieved for each server by… Reviewing the HTML source code for <script> tags with a source (src) value containing a full web-address (rather than a local path). An example would be <script type='text/javascript' src='https://domain.name/path/to/ho

Bypassing CAPTCHA with Visually-Impaired Robots

As many of you have probably noticed, we rely heavily on bot automation for a lot of the testing that we do at Sociosploit. And occasionally, we run into sites that leverage CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart") controls to prevent bot automation. Even if you aren't familiar with the name, you've likely encountered these before. While there are some other vendors who develop CAPTCHAs, Google is currently the leader in CAPTCHA technology. They currently support 2 products (reCAPTCHA v2 and v3). As v3 natively only functions as a detective control, I focused my efforts more on identifying ways to possibly bypass reCAPTCHA v2 (which functions more as a preventative control). How reCAPTCHA v2 Works reCAPTCHA v2 starts with a simple checkbox, and evaluates the behavior of the user when clicking it. While I haven't dissected the underlying operations, I assume this part of the test likely makes determination

SocioSploit

Search This Blog