The Schellman Blog

When making a business acquisition, the potential of a security risk derailing a deal during an acquisition is quite low. Of course, when firms look to expand the number and types of services they deliver, the first consideration doesn’t usually regard security—instead, you must decide whether to build it or whether to buy it.

Some might say a good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

One of the latest intriguing developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is ChatGPT—a natural language chatbot that answers questions submitted by a human user. It’s taken off in such a way that many are using ChatGPT to assist in streamlining their writing needs, but how helpful is the bot, really?

In the legendary Lord of the Rings series, leaders from different societies create a fellowship of nine different people tasked with saving Middle-Earth. The idea wasn’t originally to send nine, and there were obvious reservations about trusting some of the Fellowship with such a serious mission. (Looking at you, Pippin.)

Throughout history, warfare has evolved. The Romans did it one way, the Vikings did it another—Sun Tzu, Richard the Lionheart, and the Allied forces all had different tactics that forced opponents to adjust their defenses and strategies.

So you’ve committed to an audit. Your customers were asking, or maybe a new regulation came into effect that your organization is now subject to—whatever the reason was, you’ve got to get audited because your audit team is confirmed.

When it comes to cybersecurity certifications, you have a lot of options, though the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) stands out among them—it’s one of the most popular and recognized certifications in our industry, so much so that many companies require it as a prerequisite in their job postings or for promotion.

Once again, we need to talk about Burp. At Schellman, we’ve talked about this tool before—on our penetration testing team, we use it a lot and it serves us well, including in our work with mobile applications. But that doesn’t mean there still aren’t situations where extra effort is required in order to get the job done. Our fellow pen testers all know that things evolve so quickly in our field that sometimes we must improvise a new technique to properly solve to the problems we run into. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but one such issue that we are seeing crop up more and more during mobile penetration tests has to do with intercepting traffic from an application. Each time we watch some of that traffic escape our data flow, we’ve found each instance difficult and puzzling, because it’s not a static problem—when it comes to intercepting traffic from mobile applications, the issues can range from common to complex. One of those trickier ones to troubleshoot as a tester is when you can see most of the general web traffic from the mobile device being tested as it goes to Burp, but you also see that none, or very little, of the traffic from the actual mobile app under test follows. When that happens, you probably also note that there are no TLS errors for the domain in scope in the Event log from the Burp dashboard, and that, at the same time, the app seems to be working well, performing requests and receiving data as expected—there’s no other problem, it’s just that some of that traffic has decided to shoot off to the Great Unknown rather than where you know it should be. Does that sound familiar? If you’ve been frustrated by this same problem before, welcome to the club. This article will seek to understand why this even occurs in the first place before laying out a potential solution we worked up to curb any traffic trying to escape your proxy. Read on, and next time said traffic tries to get away from you, you’ll be ready.