Don't Get Caught Off Guard
Turn here for the research, cutting-edge attack techniques, and adversarial knowledge that we’re using to enact offensive security strategies. We combine research and expertise to make your organization stronger, more secure, and more resilient.
What DirectDefense Apex Labs is Known For
Application & Network Security
We help protect your applications and network from intrusions, breaches, and other serious threats. By implementing the right rules and configurations for application and network use and accessibility, we provide you with the best overall threat protection.
Research & Consulting
Everything we do is rooted in research – we are constantly learning and developing our knowledge of cutting-edge attack techniques, and sharing our experiences and expertise in specialized hacking through consultations and expert service.
Network Penetration
We use intentional, offensive tactics and techniques to infiltrate your network and identify security vulnerabilities within your applications and systems. We thoroughly evaluate your network and security alerts/responses – or lack thereof.
Red Teams
DirectDefense Apex Labs personnel are authorized to emulate the attack and exploitation capabilities of malicious actors against your organization’s security posture. We aim to improve your security by showing what’s at risk in a real attack.
Attack Simulations & Adversarial Emulations
We conduct simulations and emulations to demonstrate the impact of a successful attack on your overall security posture, as well as show what works for the Blue Teams (the security defenders) in a fully operational environment.
Sophisticated Cyber Intrusions
Our team plays the role of a malicious third party gaining unauthorized access to your organization’s confidential information, core code, and application infrastructures. We will leverage application weaknesses or more sophisticated techniques such as malware, artificial intelligence, or machine learning to identify gaps in your security posture.
Real World Risk Evaluation
Applying our expertise in the real and serious threats facing organizations today and tomorrow, we perform a thorough risk evaluation to identify, assess, and implement key security controls within your network and applications.
Recent Blog Posts
Is Your Organization’s Physical Security Top-Notch? Having high-level security measures at any organization is a must, especially for large corporations that deal with specific clientele and hold confidential and sensitive information. We know attackers find ways to gain access to corporate networks remotely, but physical access poses even more risk, as attackers can potentially get… Read more »
How Secure Are Your Organization’s Premises? When it comes to entry points into an organization, network security gaps and vulnerabilities aren’t the only concern. Bad actors can choose a more traditional way in – physically walking through the doors. You may have locks, ID badges, cameras, and employee protocols, but the best way to know… Read more »
Has your corporation been keeping up-to-date on the latest security practices? An important one to bring into your security repertoire is an enterprise risk assessment. It’s crucial to regularly conduct enterprise assessments to ensure the effectiveness of your corporation’s security measures. An enterprise risk assessment helps your organization continuously update and measure all security protocols,… Read more »
How DirectDefense Compromised a Banking Institution’s Help Desk and Member Services Using a Phone Social Engineering Attack + 5 Common Vishing Pitfalls to Avoid Cyber criminals will stop at nothing to steal personal and confidential information from their target. In recent years, many high-profile attacks have leveraged targeted phone social engineering attacks, known as vishing.… Read more »
How DirectDefense uncovered weaknesses in a municipality’s SCADA systems and a need for SCADA network segmentation A large municipality enlisted the services of DirectDefense to perform a Critical Infrastructure Assessment of the SCADA network controlling their water and electric services. During the SCADA assessments, our team identified several weaknesses that demonstrated the need for SCADA… Read more »
How to Prevent Credential Stuffing with IPv6 Protocol Security Third-party software security risks are created when third-party vendor products lack security, giving attackers wide open access to your organization’s networks and databases. When a vendor has access to your network, including customer and corporate information, your own company’s security doesn’t cover all the gaps, so… Read more »
Smartphone Snooping Without Microphone Access Can your smartphone sensors still enable apps to eavesdrop on your conversations even after the app has been denied microphone access? It does seem possible. We dug into this question based on two research papers, “AccEar: Accelerometer Acoustic Eavesdropping with Unconstrained Vocabulary”, and “Side Eye: Characterizing the Limits of POV… Read more »
Plus: 10 Tips to Keep Your Organization Out of the Red A financial institution enlisted our services to perform a Red Team assessment – an effective approach to simulate a real-world threat actor attempting to compromise an organization from the outside in. Using an email phishing campaign combined with a physical breach, DirectDefense consultants uncovered… Read more »
How DirectDefense accessed sensitive financial and personal data through injection vulnerabilities The best defense against injection attacks is to secure legacy applications by leveraging an app security assessment. Got a legacy app? Then listen up: Legacy applications can be particularly susceptible to injection attacks and organizations should take immediate action to remediate this vulnerability before… Read more »
Using Simulated Security Attacks to Test Network and Physical Vulnerabilities DirectDefense was asked by an airline to conduct security testing through simulated security attacks to help identify vulnerabilities that could put the airline’s data and operations at risk. As part of the engagement, DirectDefense: Spoiler Alert: Through effective tactics, like tailgating, we were able to… Read more »
Exploring Fake News Detection as a Service Automated or machine-learning solutions for fake news detection are both necessary and challenging in the fight against misinformation. This post explores the first automatic, content-agnostic approach to fake news detection, FNDaaS, which considers both new and unstudied website features. The Challenges of Fake News Detection Using Current Methods… Read more »
The Pros and Cons of Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Code Development Using an AI coding assistant is rapidly becoming an attractive choice for developers. Instead of analyzing your own problem-solving processes and translating them into code, why not draw on the massive body of developed software that has likely solved your problem a hundred times?… Read more »
How Safe are Electric Vehicle Charging Mobile Applications from Attack? This post provides a review of research on mobile EVCS app security and how vulnerable these apps are from attack. I have detailed my take on the research and findings, as well as what we learn from the research on improving security for mobile electric… Read more »
Can These Languages Eliminate Memory-Handling Vulnerabilities for Programmers? Much has been made recently of the memory safety provided by programming languages like Rust and Go. These languages have been designed to eliminate some of the language weaknesses that make it so easy for C and C++ programmers to write vulnerable software. These memory-safe languages are… Read more »
How Safe are Radar Sensors from Adversarial Attack? This post provides a review of research on radar security and how vulnerable a particular type of radar is to adversarial attack. I have detailed my take on the research and findings, as well as what we learn from the research on improving security within radar-based environments.… Read more »
What We Can Learn From an Examination of the Misapplication of Cryptography In this post, I present my thoughts and learnings from a research paper focused on cryptography use cases demonstrating misapplication. The authors undertook a study building on some previous work by other authors, going further to study the prevalence of false positives in… Read more »
A Deep Dive into ThirdEye and What Researchers Found In this post, I present my thoughts and learnings from a research paper about ThirdEye, an automated Android application testing tool that was created by the paper’s authors. While this tool does not appear to have been released to the public at the time of publication,… Read more »
Apex Labs Dissects a 4-Part Study on Privacy and Security Issues in Electronics Repair Is there data snooping by electronics technicians when we bring our devices in for repair? The researchers in this paper claim to have conducted the first-ever comprehensive study to understand the state of privacy in the electronics repair services industry. While… Read more »
How We Used A Vishing Test to Attack an Internal Corporate Network We are back with the third and final write-up of our social engineering blog series to add to previous posts about an email phishing campaign and target phishing scenarios using social media. This post is all about a vishing call! Vishing or Voice… Read more »
Breaking Down an Email Phishing Campaign Based on Relationships We are back, with a new blog in our social engineering series – all about target phishing. In my previous post, we discussed a phishing campaign engagement where an email is sent to multiple targets, and the attackers wait for replies. Target phishing, however, depends more… Read more »
Learn the Tactics Savvy Attackers Use to Dodge Anti-Spam Protection and Infiltrate Networks Social engineering attacks are commonly used in red teaming simulations and breaches. While many companies are reducing their web and network attack surfaces, most employees – if not every employee – has one or more of the following communication surfaces that are… Read more »
How We Were Able to Alter API Settings that Control Energy Production During a recent security assessment of an Application Programming Interface (API) that dynamically manages the energy resources for a large energy utility and allows external client devices to communicate with end devices that sit behind the API server, DirectDefense was able to gain… Read more »
Students will learn the fundamentals of DevOps and how DevOps teams can build and deliver secure software. In a time when the drive for technology efficiencies has left security in the dust, organizations focused on developing code are now starting to realize the true importance of what secure DevOps means. DevOps security or DevSecOps is… Read more »
It’s time to rethink your password policy to prevent modern password attacks. If you think your company’s policy of requiring passwords to have a minimum length of eight characters, in addition to other complexity requirements, is sufficient to effectively prevent modern password attacks, think again. Our client, a global corporation with business units in more… Read more »
What PCI Compliance for Cloud Data Looks Like: Challenges and Maintenance Moving to the Cloud is not as simple as “Just put it in the Cloud and we won’t have to do PCI.” The Cloud can reduce PCI Scope but it can also add to the complexity of maintaining PCI compliance. As we will discuss,… Read more »
Mobile devices are often one of the most overlooked assets from a security perspective. Many people are under the false assumption that mobile devices “can’t get viruses”, “aren’t important”, or that they can ignore mobile updates, when in fact, these devices often store more critical data than people realize, yet statistically are barely more secure… Read more »
How DirectDefense leveraged the pandemic to exploit remote access security for a large corporate network through an email phishing campaign While most of the world was busy adapting to the Work from Anywhere #WFA movement that the pandemic suddenly brought on, a certain segment of the population saw a unique opportunity to get into an… Read more »
Part 1: Get Inside the Heads of the DirectDefense Team as We Launched an Attack on a Client’s System to Bypass Passwords and Gain Access to “Protected” Critical Data This post is the first in a 2-part series addressing the need for strong passwords across all industries to adequately protect important company and user data.… Read more »
Part 2: Get Rid of Weak Passwords like Winter2020 and Password1 – Our Attack into One Company’s Database Highlights the Risk of Poor Passwords This post is the second in our 2-part series addressing the need for strong passwords across all industries to adequately protect critical information. In a recent client engagement, we set out… Read more »
DirectDefense performs Red Team engagements for its clients as a standard service. During many physical Red Team engagements, we are met with physical access control systems that use RFID or NFC to provide authorized users access to certain areas of buildings. These systems are often used to control entry into a building, or control access… Read more »
During application testing, most SQL injection attacks are mundane. Often, when there is one SQL injection, there are many–and they are easily exploitable with tools like sqlmap. Occasionally, an application is largely protected against SQL injection, but something interesting happens on a test. A tester manually validates a SQL injection vulnerability based on server responses,… Read more »
Turn Your Software Development Security into a Repeatable Engineering Process Companies have long viewed application security testing as a black art that’s dependent upon a small number of experts wielding arcane tools to find vulnerabilities and develop exploits. However, as the velocity of software development increases, the old way of running security tests becomes less… Read more »
Interested in building your own mobile application testing lab? We’re here to help. A key aspect of testing mobile applications is the ability to observe and modify network traffic. Learn how to use a router with modified firmware to perform HTTP/HTTPS-based traffic interception. 3 Methods for Intercepting Traffic 1. ARP cache poisoning Testers can use… Read more »
PCI Scope reduction is a great way to make PCI compliance simpler and to reduce risk. PCI Scope reduction reduces the attack surface area and the number of systems that must be maintained to the PCI standards…. “Less is more.” This blog post discusses web page redirects, which are an excellent method to get many… Read more »
Tokenization techniques are rapidly evolving to address PCI scope reduction efforts and securing cardholder data from breaches. PCI scope reduction is integral in simplifying PCI compliance and reducing risk overall in the environment. Effectively minimizing attack surface area and limiting the number of systems assessed to PCI standards, scope reduction is crucial. The issue of… Read more »