DEF CON 24 - Bertin Bervis Bonilla, James Jara  - Exploiting seismological networks Rem
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 2016-11-13

In this presentation we are going to explain and demonstrate step by step in a real attack scenario how a remote attacker could elevate privileges in order to take control remotely in a production seismological network located at 183mts under the sea. We found several seismographs in production connected to the public internet providing graphs and data to anyone who connects to the embed web server running at port 80. The seismographs provide real time data based in the perturbations from earth and surroundings, we consider this as a critical infrastructure and is clear the lack of protection and implementation by the technicians in charge. 

We are going to present 3 ways to exploit the seismograph which is segmented in 3 parts: Modem (GSM, Wi-Fi, Satellite, GPS,Com serial) {web server running at port 80 , ssh daemon} Sensor (Device collecting the data from ground or ocean bottom) Battery (1 year lifetime) Apollo server (MAIN acquisition core server) These vulnerabilities affect the Modem which is directly connected to the sensor , a remote connection to the modem it’s all that you need to compromise the whole seismograph network. After got the root shell our goal is execute a post exploitation attack , This specific attack corrupts/modifies the whole seismological research data of a country/ area in real time. We are going to propose recommendations and best practices based on how to deploy a seismological network in order to avoid this nasty attacks.

Bio:
Bertin Jervis Bonilla is a security researcher focused in offensive security, reverse engineering and network attacks and defense, Bertin has been speaker in several security conferences in his country and latin america such OWASP Latin Tour , DragonJAR conference and EKOPARTY, He is the founder of NetDB - The Network Database project , a computer fingerprint/certificate driven search engine. Formerly is a network engineer working for a five letters us networking company in San Jose Costa Rica.

James Jara is the founder and CTO of NETDB.IO , a search engine of internet of things focused in info-security research. He likes Bitcoin Industry, Open Source and framework development and gave various presentations on security conferences like EkoParty. Interested machine learning for mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and industrial systems used in critical infrastructure networks. Sport-coder!