10 Hacker Summer Camp Standouts at Black Hat and DEF CON

Another year, another epic Hacker Summer Camp session. There were stickers galore. There was LineCon. Cliff Stoll took over a threat hunting panel. People decried John Hammond's absence. All in all, a solid week.

Behind it all, Huntress researchers were everywhere, and not just at our Black Hat booth: giving DEF CON talks, lending support to all the villages (Malware, Blue Team, Red Team, and more), and participating in the HacktheBox SOC Showdown. 

Here are 10 highlights from Hacker Summer Camp this year that we loved. 

At DEF CON, Principal Security Researchers Jenko Hwong and Chris Ryan detailed their research into CloudShell, a browser-based terminal that major cloud providers offer so users can manage their cloud resources without installing anything locally.

The research involved reverse-engineering the private REST and websocket protocols behind AWS, Azure, and GCP CloudShell terminals, along with analyzing browser authentication flows connecting cookies to OAuth tokens. The investigation unearthed significant Identity and Access Management (IAM) design weaknesses, including websocket sessions that outlive API token revocation and default CloudShell access tied to consumer email accounts. 

This all culminated in CloudBasher, a newly released toolkit that automates environment discovery, enumeration, and deployment of distributed workloads with persistent storage and private networking. Jenko and Chris demonstrated CloudBash live during the session across a resilient, large-scale agent network

Jenko Hwong and Chris Ryan crack open CloudShell  

DEF CON has almost 40 villages. These community initiatives are focused on tradecraft, offensive security, adversary simulation, emulation, and more across a number of different spaces–whether that's bug bounty, cryptocurrency, lockpicking, IoT, physical security, scambait, car hacking or biohacking.