The focus of ERNW Research is performing Research projects in all areas of IT security - publicly funded projects in cooperation with universities, customer projects, as well as internal research projects.
Our goal is to perform cutting edge research to preserve excellence, and apply our knowledge and research results in highly technical projects for our customers.
Particular fields of attention are the areas of Incident Response, Forensic Computing, Malware Analysis, and Medical Device Security, as well as advanced security assessments.
Following our knowledge-driven company culture, we offer research services to work on both scientific and pragmatic problems in the IT security space. Past funded research activities focused on Security Awareness, Digital Forensics, Reverse Engineering & Vulnerability Analysis, and telecommunications security. Future activities are coordinated by ERNW Research.
We support our customers in implementing incident response processes/preparation as well as in analyzing occurred or suspected incidents. Following common incident response process models, we offer the development of incident preparation plans, immediate and on-site incident response and malware analysis, as well as the compilation of technical forensic reports.
We support our customers implementing incident response processes to be prepared and able to handle incidents as they occur. ERNW delivers services in every step of those models to ensure a fast recovery from the incident. With the help of the so-called common model we focus on the management of incidents and the integration of the incident handling with the processes of an organization. Exact proceeding in evidence collection and incident analysis is another important part of the process. (The incident response process is structured into several phases, which cover a wide range of services. They include the definition of an incident policy, the implementation of pro-active measures, the detection of incidents, the formulation of a response strategy, the report and documentation of an incident and implementing controls to prevent other incidents.)
To collect evidence in a forensically sound manner to be usable in legal proceedings, we document each performed step in detail – especially how evidence has been acquired and preserved. For this we prepare a detailed, comprehensive and credible report. It includes a multi-staged description with on the one hand high-level summaries for legal staff, as well as in-depth technical documentation that allows other experts to monitor every step and to repeat all analysis to reproduce and prove our results independently.
If in the analysis phase of an incident some executable file has been identified, whose functionality is unclear, this might for example be a piece of malware or some custom program implemented by a suspect. IP Addresses or passwords are examples for information that might be of interest. To figure out the functionality of the file, we apply multiple analysis steps and techniques, such as Static Analysis, Automated and Manual Dynamic Analysis and Reverse Engineering.
The environment of a healthcare provider is highly specialized. Various audiences with individual backgrounds, expectations and needs use and rely on a variety of medical devices. A defective or manipulated medical device may be massive threat to a patient’s life and may lead to serious harm. This is why ERNW offers medical device security. We customize methodologies to cover more medicine-exclusive topics such as the interoperability of the devices concerning medical communication standards such as HL7.
We provide assessment services such as penetration testing, audits, red teaming, and (closed-source) product evaluations. While we have developed many defined testing methodologies for different technologies, we mainly focus on highly technical and individual assessments. Examples for specialized assessment expertise comprise IoT/embedded/industrial/medical devices, cloud/virtualization/hosting platforms, Microsoft & Active Directory environments, or network/security appliances.
Penetration tests is an important tool to simulate a targeted attack scenario to evaluate the effectiveness of already implemented security measures and procedures and to demonstrate the potential of such attacks.
Red Teaming is an important tool to simulate a targeted attack and APT scenario to evaluate the effectiveness of already implemented security measures and procedures, as well as monitoring and incident detection capabilities and to demonstrate the potential of targeted attacks and to raise awareness for remaining risks. Red Teaming starts with the threat modelling phase, where different attack strategies are prepared and evaluated in the context of the customer. Following the actual Red Teaming will be performed after a model, that reflects how real-world targeted attacks are conducted. In the end we provide a comprehensive written report including a detailed management summary, and verbal debriefing with the customer. In addition, we offer optional follow-up modules like the creation of a personalized social engineering policy and security awareness training.
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In a recent customer project, we discovered vulnerabilities in Microsoft Bookings, an online appointment scheduling tool integrated into Microsoft 365, allowing companies to have customers book meetings in available times themselves. The findings originate from insufficient input validation on the public meeting scheduling endpoint. Although Microsoft has largely mitigated this vulnerability, our analysis provides important […]
During a red-teaming-style customer project, we managed to get access to an Rundeck API token. Rundeck is a job scheduler and runbook automation platform designed to automate routine IT tasks across multiple systems. At first, we were excited about this API token because if we could create new Rundeck jobs, we could execute arbitrary code […]
We discovered a private key for accessing an IBM Hardware Management Console (HMC) during a recent red team engagement. The IBM Hardware Management Console (HMC) is a dedicated management system used to control and manage IBM servers, especially those running on Power Systems (like IBM Power9/Power10) and mainframes (z Systems). After brief research, we identified […]
When you’re analyzing web applications as a pentester or reading pentest reports about web applications, you will often see findings regarding cookies missing certain security flags. The Set-Cookie HTTP header and the JavaScript document.cookie API allow to use, for example, the flags Secure, Path, and Domain. Common audit and pentest tools will tell you when your web application does […]
We recently conducted a security assessment of VMware Carbon Black Cloud, a unified SaaS solution that integrates endpoint detection and response (EDR), anti-virus, and vulnerability management capabilities. As part of our evaluation, we tested the solution’s ability to detect and prevent malicious activity on Windows and Linux systems. Our analysis focused on the Carbon Black […]