Skip to main content

Cyber Cyborgs Among Us

 Not quite human...and not quite machine

I recently had the privilege to interview Len Noe on the Set Solutions podcast. Not only is Len an awesome human being...he's also a little bit more than human being. Sometimes referred to as cyborgs, grinders, transhuman, or biohackers. Len has augmented his own biology with technology in order to begin transforming himself into the ultimate cyber weapon.

He has multiple implants in his hands that can be used to support different types of cyber attacks. He introduced multiple different attack scenarios during his talk at the RSA Conference "Biohacking: The Invisible Threat", and will be covering them again at BlackHat USA later this year!!!


While there still remains a stigma and some controversy around this trend, I would argue that Len is just ahead of his time. With multiple major R&D firms investing in similar capabilities (such as Elon Musk's Neuralink), Len and others like him, are blazing a trail for what lies in the future.

“The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.”  

-- Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology


Check out the full interview on the "Ready, Set, Secure" podcast at the link below, or wherever you download your podcasts.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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