Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

The Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) purchases bugs from security researchers and sells them back to the companies (Microsoft and so on). They give a year in review that has some interesting statistics about vulnerability hunting and exploitation. This will be a list things that I found interesting from the article.

Most of the Microsoft bugs being purchased in the past have been Browser related. This year, however, there was a large increase in bugs in the Windows OS itself.

Most common vulnerabilities:

1. Out of Bounds Read (205)
2. Use After Free (160)
3. All others (158)
4. Out of Bounds of Writes (95)
5. Stack Based Buffer Overflows (73)
6. Expression Language Injection
7. Untrusted Pointer Dereference (61)
8. Heap Based Buffer Overflows (36)

There are also a few other notable problems that are still prevalent but becoming less problematic:

• Integer Overflow or Underflow (17)
• Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information (18)
• Double Free (7)

To me, it is really odd that that stack overflows are more common than heap overflows. Considering there are many more security mechanisms in place for the stack was reason this surprised me.

Additionally, UAF's are all the rage! It is crazy how dangerous these can be! In the same class as UAF's, double frees are not as common as I expected.

Finally, Expression Language Injection was extremely common (at #6). This is something that we should be looking for much more often in 2020!

Overall, it is awesome to see into the mind of the worlds best bug hunters to see how they are exploiting the worlds most popular software. Thanks for doing this ZDI!