Live data from Hacker News

Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

blogs.forbes.com

101–110 of 135 posts

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood this. Wouldn't a competent security professional know of the existence of TrueCrypt, who would then ask a competent psychologist to determine if you were withholding information (I sure as hell wouldn't be able to keep a straight face), who would then ask a competent interrogator to get the real password from you? I don't even think plausible deniability would hold in court -- claiming that a la…

A large part of the design of Truecrypt is that nobody CAN prove there's an alternate partition. Or, you can decrypt your secondary alternate partition under duress to reveal your real hidden one. Maybe put some token warez on it or something. To make sure that you can't distinguish free space from encrypted noise, you have to write random noise everywhere as part of the filesystem creation process. The one thing Tru…

Couldn't they just attempt to fill the "outside" partition up? I mean, let's say you have a 1TB partition with a 100GB hidden volume inside. What happens if somebody tries to write more than 900GB into the outside partition?

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#102
Whoever it is, they are a genius of deception. Check this out: http://pastebin.com/tSiQevxe

Kayla first asks for root password using two passwords that she already has but might not necessarily be the root one. She also already knows that remote root isn't allowed. This way:

1) She'd get the root password e-mailed to her if it wasn't one of those two. "No, it's not those, it's ''."

2) She sets up her point of entry.

Great stuff.

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#103
post #46

Is the phrase "Windows Opcodes" (from the article) a subtle troll on the part of "k" or a journalistic goof? I'm no programmer by any stretch, but that phrase jumped out at me as phony. I know there are system calls for operating systems, and opcodes are processor instructions, so this use of the term raised my b.s. meter a notch.

Hate to break it to you but that actually means something. The technical details are surprisingly on target for being written by a tech journalist. Ex. http://www.metasploit.com/users/opcode/syscalls.html

Why is this upvoted? It's clearly wrong, those are syscalls to the windows kernel.

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#104
post #63
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm big on systems and testing and generally more interested in people than the technical nature of technology. I just wanted to see if it would work. I did this off and on from the time I was 14 to 17 or so. I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest town had about 27 people. It was an interesting way to spend time in high school. To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize d…

Thanks for the explanation. I suspect most people downvoted you because they didn't understand your motivation. I particularly liked your comment about finding formulas for social interactions. Have you tried looking for work at a social startup? From what I have heard of Facebook's culture, you would fit right in.

i didn't downvote, but regardless of the motivation it's still just a little creepy

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the design of Truecrypt is that nobody CAN prove there's an alternate partition. Or, you can decrypt your secondary alternate partition under duress to reveal your real hidden one. Maybe put some token warez on it or something. To make sure that you can't distinguish free space from encrypted noise, you have to write random noise everywhere as part of the filesystem creation process. The one thing Tru…

Couldn't they just attempt to fill the "outside" partition up? I mean, let's say you have a 1TB partition with a 100GB hidden volume inside. What happens if somebody tries to write more than 900GB into the outside partition?

It will overwrite the hidden partition. The 'outside' partition doesn't know about the hidden one. When you are mounting the outside partition you do have an option to protect the hidden one by providing the password for the hidden one, but if you don't, you can end up overwriting it by filling up the outer partition.

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the design of Truecrypt is that nobody CAN prove there's an alternate partition. Or, you can decrypt your secondary alternate partition under duress to reveal your real hidden one. Maybe put some token warez on it or something. To make sure that you can't distinguish free space from encrypted noise, you have to write random noise everywhere as part of the filesystem creation process. The one thing Tru…

Couldn't they just attempt to fill the "outside" partition up? I mean, let's say you have a 1TB partition with a 100GB hidden volume inside. What happens if somebody tries to write more than 900GB into the outside partition?

[deleted]

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the design of Truecrypt is that nobody CAN prove there's an alternate partition. Or, you can decrypt your secondary alternate partition under duress to reveal your real hidden one. Maybe put some token warez on it or something. To make sure that you can't distinguish free space from encrypted noise, you have to write random noise everywhere as part of the filesystem creation process. The one thing Tru…

Couldn't they just attempt to fill the "outside" partition up? I mean, let's say you have a 1TB partition with a 100GB hidden volume inside. What happens if somebody tries to write more than 900GB into the outside partition?

The OS has absolutely no knowledge of the hidden partition - as far as it knows, that area is just empty space on the disk. TrueCrypt runs from a bootloader (which you can have on a separate CD!), prompting you for a password. It uses that password to attempt to decrypt the (encrypted) volume headers - note the rest of the disk is encrypted too. Unless you install TrueCrypt the software application, there is no indication that was the tool you used.

Take a look at http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/ - it is an interesting read.

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#108
post #59
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. What was your motivation?

I'm big on systems and testing and generally more interested in people than the technical nature of technology. I just wanted to see if it would work. I did this off and on from the time I was 14 to 17 or so. I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest town had about 27 people. It was an interesting way to spend time in high school. To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize d…

This sounds like Transactional Analysis, it's an interesting read on Wikipedia

I think the link is just http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/transactional_analysis if that's wrong I apologize, I'm typing this from my phone

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#110
post #96

This is Anonymous we're talking about. Isn't "16 year old girl" a well-known colloquialism on 4chan, normally used to convey the stereotype of a middle-aged, balding geek still living in his parent's basement who likes to use fake online personas? Forbes got trolled in a monumental fashion.

It's a synonym for attention whore.
Post reply on HN