**Update June 5th, 2021** There have been some questions about Defcon in person attendance and masks, especially as Las Vegas will have officially reopened completely. Dark tangent made it clear in a post on the Defcon Forums, “If a law forces us to allow people to not wear masks we would cancel the event” , if you want to read the entire conversation check it out here. https://forum.defcon.org/node/237012/page2#post237285
Dark Tangent, the founder and organizer of Defcon, just posted in the Defcon forums that the conference going to go hybrid this year. Here is a link to his post: https://forum.defcon.org/node/236655. DT admittedly says things are still fluid but they wanted to put out the information to help people make the decision if they are going to go virtually or in person. Now that the Goons are going to be yelling "space it out" instead of "squeeze it in" It's going to feel like Defcon in a parallel universe.
There will also be some unprecedented changes this year that I wanted to outline below. Again things might change but these where the highlights from DT's post. I will add the preregistration link on this post when they release it later this month.
Defcon will be held both online and in person.
To attend in person you are required to wear a mask and be vaccinated.
Defcon will have socially distance seating and tables, and the convention properties will have increased air circulation and filtering.
For the first time Defcon will have online pre-registration for the in-person conference. The registration platform has not been selected, but they are encouraging in person attendees to preregister by insuring they will get a physical conference badge. DT mentions that they need hard numbers of attendees to help them with planning the event.
They are going to order extra badges for those who show up with cash on-site, but if they guess wrong on quantity you may getting a paper badge, and if they are at capacity you could be turned away.
Defcon will be throwing only the Black and White ball, entertainment. and pool parties this year. They will not be planning or organizing smaller parties.
Defcon has asked everyone, villages included, to pre-record all talks. Should they have to go full virtual, they won’t have a last-minute disaster of trying to capture the talks. This way DEF CON can release talks on Twitch like last year.
Should you be in-person and want to give your talk live they can do that, or do Q&A, or remote Q&A. Pre-recording gives Defcon options and allows everyone to see the talks. Yes, DCTV will be happening so you can also watch in your hotel room.
DT also listed some of the assumptions they have been working with while trying to organize Defcon this year.
Almost no international attendees will attend in-person. The quarantine times and lower vaccination rates mean it is not very realistic, so we hope they will join us on-line instead.
That everyone in our demographic who is capable and wants a vaccination will have gotten one by the end of June.
Our in-person attendance will be ¼ to ½ normal, and people will be changing their minds on whether or not to attend right up to the last minute – and that includes people organizing contests, events, and villages.
Not all Goons will be there in-person, and many will help out by Gooning virtually.
While there will be fewer attendees there will also be fewer villages, contests, and events. It should all balance out so attendees don’t fee like there are a million things to do but not enough people to do them with.
There will be hybrid events, where you can participate in-person as well as virtually, but doing this for every event is unfortunately too demanding for many contest and village organizers.
I am pretty excited that Defcon will have hybrid model this year. Defcon for me over the last almost 20 years of attendance is something I look forward to every year. Like most people your last day after the con - when your hung over, hot, and reek of cigarette smoke - you have those brief thoughts that “maybe I’ll take next year off”. That only lasts a short time before your booking your hotel for next year.
Welcome back Defcon!
Use Cases:
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have leveraged VDI Horizon infrastructure to accommodate their remote workers. Today remote users connect to VDI Horizon infrastructure over many different means home ISP connections, company-issued cellular devices/hotspots on multiple carriers, as well as personal devices. We have identified an issue with cellular devices traversing the ATT Wireless network connecting to VDI Horizon infrastructure.
The Architecture:
I wanted to simplify the VDI Horizons infrastructure discussion to just the pieces that are crucial to the issue. The relevant parts that come into play for user access to the Horizons environment is the VMWare Horizon client, hardware load balancers, and the UAG or User Access Gateway servers.
The Protocols:
VDI Horizons traffic is split between primary and secondary protocols. The primary protocol used for authentication is over HTTPS or port 443. Within the ATT wireless network, this traffic is sourced from the primary enterprise PAT address. After the VMware Horizon client has authenticated and established secure communication to one of the UAG appliances, one or more secondary connections are made from the Horizon client. These secondary connections can include:
• Blast Extreme display protocol (TCP 443 and UDP 8443). Note that UDP is optional with Blast.
• PCoIP display protocol (TCP 4172 and UDP 4172).
The secondary Horizon protocols must be routed to the same UAG appliance and from the same client IP address that the primary Horizon protocol was authenticated from. The UAG authorizes the secondary protocols based on the authenticated user session. The UAG will only forward traffic into the corporate data center on behalf of an authenticated user.
The Symptoms:
On the ATT Wireless network when a user's Horizon client connects to a virtual IP address it is load balanced to a UAG server and the session is authenticated. The IP address of the traffic is sourced and authenticated using the device’s IP address, this is true for all networks. When the Horizon client attempts to connect to the secondary protocol the traffic destined to the secondary protocol port, UDP 8443, or TCP or UDP 4172, is routed through a proxy within the ATT network. When the traffic is routed through the ATT proxy the source IP address of that traffic is different than the original device IP that was used to authenticate the user session and the VMware UAG server rejects the traffic. In some situations, the load-balanced traffic may even be sent to a different UAG server. This seems to be true for all users on the ATT Wireless network.
Moving toward a solution:
The first part of solving the problem is identifying the cause, and we believe that is done. Since the IP address of the primary and secondary protocols are different, the Horizons server rejects the traffic or perhaps never sees the traffic based on load balancing and persistence settings of the load balancer. ATT network engineers have been very helpful with troubleshooting and validating that our assumptions are accurate and are currently looking at solutions to solve the issue.
**Update** the ATT sales people that where interfacing with the ATT technical staff have informed us it is not possible to fix the issue. They are trying to sell us a cellular router that they say can be routed over an APN to solve the issue, instead of letting the technical folks fix the issue for us and potentially everyone else on the ATT wireless network.
What would we like to see:
We would like to see the secondary protocols included in the enterprise PAT and not routed through the proxy. If this was implemented, it could fix VDI Horizons across the entire ATT Wireless environment for everyone.
So SolarStorm the SolarWinds supply chain hack... Yeah.... You might have heard about it?
SolarWinds supply chain was compromised. What that means is a trojanized version of a SolarWinds package was uploaded and distributed to their clients . The infected package contained malware named SUNBURST, and when clients installed the infected package it also installed the malware. The malware creates a backdoor to allow the bad actors to control the server, move laterally, and exfiltrate data. Basically what ever they want....
Updated Solarwinds Attack Lifecycle:
What should you do now:
As information starts to come out and the initial freak out calms down we are learning more about the impact of these exploits, and they are pretty huge. I wanted to gather a collection of information and vendor responses in one place to try to help fellow nerds have a resource of reliable information.
SolarWinds
- Security Advisory https://www.solarwinds.com/securityadvisory
Fireeye Links
- Initial write up about the Sunburst https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2020/12/evasive-attacker-leverages-solarwinds-supply-chain-compromises-with-sunburst-backdoor.html
- Counter Measures https://github.com/fireeye/sunburst_countermeasures
- Emergency Directive https://cyber.dhs.gov/ed/21-01/
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42
- Analysis of Sunburst https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/fireeye-solarstorm-sunburst/
- Information https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/12/16/solarwinds-sunburst-attack-what-do-you-need-to-know/
Cisco Networks
Splunk
- Response and Identification tool https://www.splunk.com/en_us/blog/security/sunburst-backdoor-detections-in-splunk.html
Mcafee
Microsoft
- Pretty tough to get through :( https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/12/15/ensuring-customers-are-protected-from-solorigate/
- **Customer Guidance: https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2020/12/13/customer-guidance-on-recent-nation-state-cyber-attacks/
Infoblox
Elasticsearch (Elastic Security)- Response and Identification tool https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-security-provides-free-and-open-protections-for-sunburst
- **Assessing the SolarWinds hack with their tool: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/tech-center/assess-solarwinds/
During the pandemic, I have been binging more and more Star Wars shows on Disney+. While I have been taking in all that Star Wars it hit me I wasn't sure when these individual shows or movies took place in the canon timeline. Shows like the Mandalorian throw in some deep-cut references that I didn't get until I understood when it took place.
So I wanted to put up a list in chronological order to help myself and hopefully, everyone else enjoy Star Wars a little bit more.
- The Acolyte
- Tales of the Jedi
- Episode I Phantom Menace
- Episode II Attack of the Clones
- Clone Wars (movie)
- Clone Wars (tv show S1-7)
- Episode III Revenge of the Sith
- The Bad Batch
- Tales of the Empire
- Solo: A Star Wars Story
- Obi-Wan Kenobi
- Andor
- Star Wars: Rebels (S1-4)
- Rouge One: A Star Wars Story
- Star Wars: A New Hope
- The Empire Strikes Back
- Return of the Jedi
- The Mandalorian
- The Book of Boba Fett
- Ahsoka
- Star Wars: Resistance S1 (tv show)
- The Force Awakens
- Star Wars: Resistance S2 (tv show)
- The Last Jedi
- Rise of Skywalker
Also if you want more in depth info I found this interactive site that lists a lot more then just TV and movies. https://starwarscanontimeline.com/
Enjoy!