Karl Fosaaen
Karl specializes in network and web application penetration testing. Karl holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and has over eight years of consulting experience in the computer security industry and in that time has worked with a variety of industries; financial services, health care, and retail. Karl holds the Security+, CISSP, and GXPN certifications. In his spare time, Karl has volunteered at some conferences including DEF CON, THOTCON, and AppSec USA. Karl has previously spoken at BsidesMSP, THOTCON, AppSec California, and DerbyCon.
November 20th, 2017
Speaking to a City of Amazon Echoes
Amazon recently introduced messaging and calling between Echo devices. This allows Echo device owners to communicate to each other via text messages, audio recordings, and voice calls. It’s pretty handy for leaving someone a short note, or for a quick call, but as a hacker, I was more curious about the potential security issues associated […]
July 21st, 2016
Attacking Federated Skype for Business with PowerShell
Federated Skype for Business is a handy way to allow businesses to communicate with each other over a common instant messaging platform. From a security standpoint, the open exchange of information between businesses is a little concerning. NetSPI first started running into instances of federated Skype for Business (at that time Lync) about two years […]
May 3rd, 2016
Using PowerShell to Identify Federated Domains
The Economy of Mechanism – Office365 SAML assertions vulnerability popped up on my radar this week and it’s been getting a lot of attention. The short version is that you could abuse the SAML authentication mechanisms for Office365 to access any federated domain. It’s a really serious and interesting issue that you should totally read […]
January 19th, 2016
NetSPI’s Top Password Masks for 2015
Over the course of the last year, we’ve cracked a lot of NTLM domain password hashes. During many of our internal penetration tests, we grab the password hashes for all of the domain users and attempt to crack them. Throughout the year, we keep track of the hashes that we’ve cracked and try to gain […]
July 22nd, 2015
10 Places to Stick Your UNC Path
Recently there was a big fuss over the “Redirect to SMB” blog that was put out by Brian Wallace. Personally, I think that the recent scare over this vulnerability is a little overstated, but it could be a useful way to capture an SMB hash. I was already in the process of putting together this […]
May 5th, 2015
Running LAPS Around Cleartext Passwords
Intro Managing credentials for local administrator accounts is hard to do. From setting strong passwords, to setting unique passwords across multiple machines, we rarely see it done correctly. On the majority of our pen tests we see that most of the domain computers are configured with the same local admin credentials. This can be really […]
April 27th, 2015
GPU Cracking: Rebuilding the Box
A little over two years ago, we built our first GPU cracking box. At the time, there was pretty limited information on what people were doing to build a decent cracking box, especially if you were trying to do so without breaking the bank. As with any piece of technology, things go out of date, […]
March 2nd, 2015
NetSPI’s Top Cracked Passwords for 2014
It’s been a big year for password cracking at NetSPI. We’ve spent a lot of time refining our dictionaries and processes to more efficiently crack passwords. This has been a huge help during our pentests, as the cracked passwords have been the starting point for gaining access to systems and applications. While this blog focuses […]
December 15th, 2014
Cracking Stats for Q3 2014
During many of our penetration tests, we gather domain password hashes (with permission of the client) for offline cracking and analysis. This blog is a quick summary of the hashes that we attempted to crack in the third quarter of 2014 (and so far for this year). The plan is continue doing this again at […]
