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I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

erenyagdiran.github.io

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Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#181

Post by tomrod »

akx wrote: post #62
Swizec wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, according to wikipedia on ";" > Modern style guides recommend no space before them and one space after. And that's really interesting about French. Personally I think a colon surrounded by spaces looks funny, but then again, I've never learned a language where that wasn't the correct way. edit: my French girlfriend says French puts spaces on both sides of all punctuation except commas and periods. Like this ! W…

The spaces-before-questionmarks-and-exclamation-marks is one of the "tells" I use to figure out a writer is French. More often than not it's a dead giveaway...

Sounds like a half-way decent spam detection rule !

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#182

Post by big_youth »

fsniper wrote: post #71

The post started very well but with the first screen shot, my mind started tingling: What the heck a security engineer is doing in a root shell? An unknown binary sent via an email is run in a root shell. There is also no mention of email source tracking. Hey you are a security engineer you know about weakness of smtp right? Even if this is a virtual machine, I would really reconsider employment of him or sit down an…

Most pentesting distros run as root by default, check out Kali Linux which is the industry standard. It makes it a lot easier to run all the strange applications we use. As long as you keep it in a VM you'll be pretty solid.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#183

Post by cmdrfred »

sauere wrote: post #161
B5geek wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nice simple test that I like to give as a first-wave elimination: Have a computer setup and running (all properly configured). Pull the network cable out of the jack a little bit (so it looks like it's plugged in but isn't). Ask the person being interviewed to show me an IP being used by microsoft or google. (so ping/dig/nslookup/etc) Let the person know that (a) the computer is in working condition (i.e. no driver…

> 90% of participants just try to open a web-browser and type in "what is the IP address of google" Oh god.

I don't know why this is downvoted. This is Hacker News, a hacker always uses the least amount of effort (the least number of lines of code for example) to achieve his goal.

  Windows key + R / "cmd" / Return / "nslookup google.com" then when that fails, "ping 8.8.8.8" and when that fails, "Ipconfig /ALL", then ask "Do you use Dhcp or are ip's assigned?" as I reboot the computer and check the physical connections at the same time.
*I stand corrected.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#184

Post by a3_nm »

Swizec wrote: post #20
ar7hur wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I think it's not so simple ";" is surrounded by space left and right ":" has no space on the left in English, but it has one in French

Nope, according to wikipedia on ";" > Modern style guides recommend no space before them and one space after. And that's really interesting about French. Personally I think a colon surrounded by spaces looks funny, but then again, I've never learned a language where that wasn't the correct way. edit: my French girlfriend says French puts spaces on both sides of all punctuation except commas and periods. Like this ! W…

To be precise, the space before punctuation is of course non-breaking, and it is a narrow no-break space (i.e., thinner than a usual space) in careful typography (e.g., LaTeX with "\usepackage[francais]{babel}" does it).

(Another fun pedantic remark: French typography rules require that you apply the rules of a foreign language whenever you quote text in that language, so that the English rules should be respected for English quotations within a French text.)

And I agree with akx -- being French, I've seen my share of French people writing in English with the French rules, and I always thought that it could be used as an indicator by a careful reader.

(As an example, there used to be an ads campaign in the Parisian subway some years ago which advertised "I speak Wall Street English !" or something or the kind. As this was for an English class, I always found it funny that they couldn't get their English typography right.)

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#185

Post by tptacek »

jere wrote: post #49
zellyn wrote: post #2

If this sounds fun, give microcorruption.com a try :-)

Yes microcorruption was a lot of fun and the last part of this post reminds me very much of the last level. The nice thing about microcorruption was how you didn't need much more than familiarity with assembly and C (and language of choice in the end game). This interview challenge on the other hand... I wouldn't even know where to start.

Thanks! It's worth saying here: Hans, Nicholas, Daniel, Andy and I wrote Microcorruption in order to be the basis of job interviews. :)

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#187

Post by lunixbochs »

cmdrfred wrote: post #183
sauere wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 90% of participants just try to open a web-browser and type in "what is the IP address of google" Oh god.

I don't know why this is downvoted. This is Hacker News, a hacker always uses the least amount of effort (the least number of lines of code for example) to achieve his goal. Windows key + R / "cmd" / Return / "nslookup google.com" then when that fails, "ping 8.8.8.8" and when that fails, "Ipconfig /ALL", then ask "Do you use Dhcp or are ip's assigned?" as I reboot the computer and check the physical connections at th…

Least effort?

    win+R, ping -t google.com, return

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#188

Post by dylz »

cmdrfred wrote: post #183
sauere wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 90% of participants just try to open a web-browser and type in "what is the IP address of google" Oh god.

I don't know why this is downvoted. This is Hacker News, a hacker always uses the least amount of effort (the least number of lines of code for example) to achieve his goal. Windows key + R / "cmd" / Return / "nslookup google.com" then when that fails, "ping 8.8.8.8" and when that fails, "Ipconfig /ALL", then ask "Do you use Dhcp or are ip's assigned?" as I reboot the computer and check the physical connections at th…

So let's make it shorter:

"ping goo.gl"

http://74.125.239.9

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#189

Post by groby_b »

cmdrfred wrote: post #180
ryanburk wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say no! google's DNS address is not its IP address :-)

http://8.8.8.8 just times out. Why not point it to http://www.google.com or just serve a little javascript redirect or something? Sloppy work Google.

And a DNS server should have an open port 80 (and so an additional attack vector) because...?

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#190

Post by scintill76 »

general_failure wrote: post #140
scintill76 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the creators themselves are saying they don't consider it secure, I don't think it's "FUD".

Sorry, I didn't imply what Shykes said is FUD. I meant most of the articles out there about docker security have little to no information other than "breakout is possible".

That quote from Shykes could be paraphrased "it's safest to assume breakout by uid0 is possible." I understand the academic/hacker interest in identifying the exact avenues for breakout, and why vague articles are disappointing. My point is, it's important everyone understand it's not to be considered secure, even if we can't/don't name the vulnerabilities off the top of our heads.
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