Category Archives: Personal

The art of cutting corners

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I love ROI-driven solutions and this post is about one of them. My personal cybersecurity consulting practice exposed me to many different types of ‘IT security’ jobs over last 13 years and today I will describe one of them…

Nearly a decade ago one of my clients contacted me saying that they got a USB key that belonged to their client, and their client was interested in regaining the access to the device’s content after they forgot the password.

Hmm interesting…

This was not your random USB key, but a removable device that was specifically designed to encrypt its data by default. As an input, I got a forensic ‘image’ of the USB key, plus some basic info about its vendor, and that was it – so I quickly googled around, and immediately realized the company that produced it was out business for a while…

Before I could even begin I was shot down.

To access the content of the device one needed to run their software (that was luckily present on the key in an unencrypted form), provide the password, and then the actual content of the key would be decrypted and mounted as a separate Windows device. I may not be remembering everything as it was, but the bottom line was that I got an image of an encrypted USB key and had to find a way to crack its password.

The software handling the decryption process was a mess. It was on the complexity level of today’s Rust, Go, Nim binaries – written in a language that was not very commonly used, very high-level, lots of dependencies and hard to analyze statically – definitely no dedicated tools to support analysis (I know I am vague, but it was long time ago – it could have been Visual FoxPro or something like this, I really don’t remember!).

After a few hours of static analysis in IDA I threw a towel and decided to take a different approach. I was hoping that a person that was using the encrypted key was using some simple password that is easy to remember.

So, I build a dictionary of popular English words, then ran that weird decryption software, and finally wrote a very rudimentary AutoIt script that would fetch a word from a dictionary text file (dictionary) one by one, save it to a log file in each iteration, then push it to the UI control of that software that was handling the password input, then send a key that would simulate someone pressing an ENTER key…

Luckily, the software didn’t have any anti-brute-force mechanisms built-in so I just let it ran over night. To my surprise, next morning I discovered the password was cracked!

It was a simple 5- or 6- character long English word, if I remember correctly and once I found out I was immediately ecstatic! I quickly relayed the message to my client, they did so to theirs, and we all ended up being happier and richer that day…

Is there a lesson there for us?

YES!

Sometimes stupid solutions work. You don’t need to understand everything. It’s good to be driven by ROI principles. The art of ‘hacking’ is elusive.

Using OSINT skills for your own protection…

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This is probably the most unusual blog post I have ever written here… Oh, well…

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TL;DR; My wife and I recently stayed at a pretty expensive hotel. I won’t name and shame, but it’s fair to say they didn’t do the job very well. And after a bit of back and forth with the property management, and some escalations with their senior management, we have eventually negotiated a deal with them – we got a partial refund for our, let’s say… not the best experience at their facilities!

You may think it was easy, but it was not. It was definitely very interesting, humbling even and at the same time, kinda eye-opening experience…

Lesson #1 is this:

Do not book your hotels, apartments etc via 3rd party f.ex. sites that start with “B’ or ‘E’ in their names.

Why?

Because when things go bad, hotel and apartment management will not be able to talk to you about your booking, since it is being ‘managed’ via that third party. And that third party, believe me or not, is NOT (at least in my experience) interested in you, your problems, let alone any conflict resolution. They simply ignore you. That’s their ‘management’ style.

Lesson #2 is this:

Find the place you like on any of these booking/hotel sites, but don’t book it there, and instead – find that favorite place’s actual web site, their phone number, and then book directly with the hotel/hostel/apartment/airbnb owner. Once you do it, you will become a direct client of that entity/facility/property. And that gives you at least some rights.

Back to the original story…. Let me say first that the organization that I discovered to be behind this particular hotel chain was… quite complicated… to say the least. The more I was researching them, the more I was finding. Many layers of ownership, many layers of power, the kind of money in motion that most of us can’t even comprehend… many companies in place, all over the world, and many countries involved. Yes, seriously, billions of dollars in motion.

I literally stood no chance.

But, I was quite pissed off.

And I didn’t even care about money that much, but I kinda hoped to prove to myself that recognizing the problem early, carefully collecting forensic evidence to document issues was very important, and with all that evidence in place I still had some small chance to win _something_ as a customer… Plus, the actual, very basic knowledge of the law that protects me as a customer in UK helped too (more about it later). So, utilizing all these bits and pieces of random knowledge, plus ensuring the process of delivering my escalation was done in a polite, but persistent way was a KEY to achieving that final, positive outcome…

You may ask yourself… How did we even get there?

For our recent holiday we had booked a room at the hotel in a premium location. When we arrived, we got assigned to a room that was… peculiar, to say the least. The room was located inside a very old building, and as such, it certainly had that ‘historical old building’ vibe to it f.ex. the ceilings were at least 4m high, the room decor was very old-school, etc. plus there was also a kitchenette, fridge, and some other basics provided… and with all that ‘old’ vibe around it, It was almost perfect….

Except…

It was also very dirty, wear and tear did show a lot, you could see scuff marks, find actual spiderwebs and dust bunnies, silicon sealing in a bathroom was full of mould, and the bathroom floor tiles’ grout was washed out too (posing a real risk of hurting our feet cuz the edges of exposed tiles were actually quite sharp), then there was an integrated fridge that had a door that could not be closed properly and was actually leaking, and we also found some trash left by previous guests, and on top of that – the carpet was probably either 50 years old or the last time it was cleaned was that ’50 years ago’, then the room’s furniture was barely holding it together, curtains were heavy, but also had a ‘been not washed in last 2 decades’ feel… and I even spotted and recorded some insects happily parading inside the bath tub… Finally, it was a room that was facing an alley that seemed to be quite popular with many late drunkards.. — it was noisy throughout the night!

It felt very bait-and-switch.

Basically, what they advertised on the booking web site vs. what they delivered was substantially different.

Luckily, in the UK, there is a Consumer Rights Act that, at least in theory, helps to address situations like this. I used it as a base for my complain. As such, while still inside the property, I collected a lot of photos and videos, and after I came back home, I have sent these to the Property Managers…

They replied quite quickly, and in a professional manner – they stated that everything I have highlighted in my email is being taken care of, with and immediate effect, and they thanked me for reporting the issues, plus, obviously, were also very sorry.

Interestingly, they also used the chance to tell me that this hotel is not really a hotel, but a minimalistically managed hotelish-like longer-stay more-apartment-than-a-hotel facility. As such, they were not committed to provide housekeeping services frequently, they did not replenish anything in the room unless you asked for it, and.. while staying there you are basically simply left to your own devices…

Huh… Seriously….?

That was very interesting for us to hear. When we booked the place we had all the expectations of it being a proper hotel room!!! Why? Because we booked it thinking that we are booking an actual Hotel Room – the booking website literally referred to it as such! Ironically, and notably… even today… a few months later… all advertisements for this place that are all over the booking websites still advertise this property as a proper hotel!!!

But let’s get back to our comms. That Hotel Management’s reply was obviously not very satisfying: call me petty, but I did want to get at least some refund!

After checking their web site, googling around, and trying to find out who the real ‘owners’ of the hospitality function at this hotel chain are, I eventually found this hotel chain’s Country Manager for UK, and their email address.

My rationale to contact this person directly via email was that:

  • a) I wanted to bypass all the possible controls in place f.ex. chatbots, support phone and emails, all lines of support really, and evade all the controls put in place that make the complain-to-a-human-person almost impossible (common practice today)
  • b) I wanted to bypass the direct Hotel Management as well, and talk to their bosses directly – I not only wanted to speak to a reason, but I also wanted to show them how BAD the property they advertise and manage is! (naive me)
  • c) I wanted to leverage my corporate experience that gives me an advantage in knowing how escalating things via appropriate corporate channels works (not humble to say, but if you work in a corporate environment for a while, you eventually learn how to press some buttons).

So, my email to the Country Manager was pretty brutal aka very factual. I also made sure that, same as I did with the Hotel Managers, I provided that person with links to an archive saved on my website that included all the photos and videos I took at the property….

The Country Manager reacted in a ‘corporate-nothing-happened’ way at first. BUT, also, honestly stated that they have not seen my videos, photos due to their company’s strict IT security policy that made it impossible for them to download the media archive from some random web site I placed the media files on…

Huh… Okay… Fair enough.

So, I had converted all the iphone HEIC photos I took at the hotel into smaller JPEGs, and have attached them all to my reply email. I also placed larger video files (without any additional compression/archiving) directly on my web site, so they didn’t need to be unpacked aka they could be viewed online, directly, after one clicks the media links I placed inside my reply email.

You can see clearly that I was really trying to connect with them 😉

I did all that and sent my response.

There was no answer.

OK…ay….

So, I decided to escalate it further…

At that stage I have already discovered who the CEO of the company is, and her email address as well, so I forwarded the whole email chain to her, including attachments. Surprise, surprise. She was actually OOO 🙁 But… The automated reply indicated who her temporary replacement is… I forwarded the email chain to that ‘temporary replacement person’ immediately. I must make a note here that both the CEO and her replacement were based in a different country and timezone.

Next morning, 9:00am, I got a quick reply email from the aforementioned UK Country Manager – apparently, the person was unable to answer my earlier emails due to her busy traveling schedule, but given the circumstances (my escalation) she has committed to reply to me later on that very afternoon…

And that promised reply has arrived, in the afternoon, indeed!

By 4pm I got a lengthy response, where that Country Manager addressed all the issues I mentioned, apologized a lot, and then offered to give me a refund of 30% of the total price for our stay…

I was pretty happy to accept the offer and the case got closed.

What this example teaches us?

We, infosec professionals, are in a unique position to help our problems by utilizing OSINT techniques to bypass many of modern ‘customer-blocking controls’. We don’t need to talk to ‘bots’, click through gazillion of pointless links, and/or fill-in web forms that are never handled/actioned. We can, and should, still, find a way to communicate with real people and ensure our business is taken care of by them. And we can communicate these issues better than many other people, because we have a pretty developed understanding of corporate processes, including collection and presentation of forensic evidence, and basic security and privacy frameworks and laws…

I sometimes ask myself: did I just pull an infosec ‘Karen’?

I don’t think so. I fought for my rights and these rights have been eventually recognized. I didn’t try to pay less that I was supposed to — I just wanted to pay a fair price for a poor quality room offered in the greatest possible city location. And I eventually did.

In 2023, our enemies are not just Threat Actors…