SensePost: Automation - Deus ex Machina or Rube Goldberg Machine?

Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2005 [Audio] Presentations from the security conference

How far can automation be taken? How much intelligence can be embodied in code? How generic can automated IT security assessment tools really be? This presentation will attempt to show which areas of attacks lend themselves to automation and which aspects should best be left for manual human inspection and analyses. SensePost will provide the audience a glimpse of BiDiBLAH - an attempt to automate a focussed yet comprehensive assessment. The tool provides automation for: * Finding networks and targets * Fingerprinting targets * Discovering known vulnerabilities on the targets * Exploiting the vulnerabilities found * Reporting Roelof Temmingh is the Technical Director of SensePost where his primary function is that of external penetration specialist. Roelof is internationally recognized for his skills in the assessment of web servers. He has written various pieces of PERL code as proof of concept for known vulnerabilities, and coded the world-first anti-IDS web proxy "Pudding". He has spoken at many International Conferences and in the past year alone has been a keynote speaker at SummerCon (Holland) and a speaker at The Black Hat Briefings. Roelof drinks tea and smokes Camels. Haroon Meer is currently SensePost's Director of Development (and coffee drinking). He specializes in the research and development of new tools and techniques for network penetration and has released several tools, utilities and white-papers to the security community. He has been a guest speaker at many Security forums including the Black Hat Briefings. Haroon doesnt drink tea or smoke camels. Charl van der Walt is a founder member of SensePost. He studied Computer Science at UNISA, Mathematics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and has a Diploma in Information Security from the Rand Afrikaans University. He is an accredited BS7799 Lead Auditor with the British Institute of Standards in London. Charl has a number of years experience in Information Security and has been involved in a number of prestigious security projects in Africa, Asia and Europe. He is a regular speaker at seminars and conferences nationwide and is regularly published on internationally recognized forums like SecurityFocus. Charl has a dog called Fish.