Hi..
About 2 years ago, we demo'd Setiri, a win32 trojan that tunneled data off networks through the use of Invisible Internet Explorer instances. This allowed us to avoid sticky issues like authentication / etc and worked nicely against personal firewalls configured to allow out IE traffic.
Despite the noise it generated back then, very little has been done to combat the problem. So we threw together a few lines of C# and tacked on a gratuitous .pdf (for good measure) for an angle we believe can go a long way towards mitigating the threat..
In short : an invisible browser is not the same as a visible one, and personal firewalls (that do outbound application control) should not treat them the same. Application-level access control systems should be able to detect whether an application is running visible or not.
The short paper : http://www.sensepost.com/garage_portal.html / http://www.sensepost.com/restricted/casper.pdf
The badly written C# : http://www.sensepost.com/garage_portal.html / http://www.sensepost.com/restricted/casper.zip
As usual, please mail questions/comments/flames to research@xxxxxxxxxxxxx / haroon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
/MH
====================================================================== Haroon Meer MH SensePost Information Security +27 83786 6637 PGP : http://www.sensepost.com/pgp/haroon.txt haroon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ======================================================================
