The deplorable four. Testing free antiviruses: Huorong, Preventon, Zoner, and FS Protection

Date: 31/08/2020

Today, I am going to battle-test four antivirus programs: a British one, a Chinese one (featuring an original engine), a Finnish one, and an exciting Czech project at the beta-version stage. All of them are free and offer extra protection features aside from the basic system scan. Let’s pit the new antiviruses against hordes of trojans and worms I prepared for them!

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The weakest link. Phishing emails as a pentesting tool

Date: 04/08/2020

Conventional wisdom holds that the most vulnerable component of any computer system is its user. Humans may be inattentive, unthoughtful, or misinformed and easily become victims of phishing attacks. Accordingly, this weak link must be tested for security as thoroughly as the software and hardware components.

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Diabolically reddish pentest. Building tunneling chains through docker containers on a Hack the Box virtual machine

Date: 04/08/2020

How to seize control over a host located in a different subnetwork? The right answer is: build numerous intricate tunnels. This article addresses tunneling techniques and their application in pentesting using as an example Reddish, a hardcore virtual machine (insane difficulty level: 8 out of 10) available on Hack The Box training grounds.

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Solar stroke. Two severe vulnerabilities in Apache Solr

Date: 04/08/2020

Not long ago, researchers have discovered two severe vulnerabilities in Apache Solr, a popular open-source full-text search platform. The first bug relates to incorrect handling of Velocity templates, while the second one originates from the DataImportHandler module. Their exploitation enables the attacker to execute commands remotely; therefore, both vulnerabilities must be treated as critical.

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