Know your community — Ionut Popescu
Originally published on January 16, 2017
Ionut Popescu, a Senior Penetration Tester for SecureWorks Romania. Speaker at DefCon and DefCamp, writer of NetRipper and ShellcodeCompiler.
How many years have you been active in the cyber security field? What got you into it in the first place?
“My motivations for getting into this field were never (and will never be) fame or money, it’s the challenge and learning.
I got my first computer when I was 16. I used it to play games until I found a small Romanian security forum. I saw that there was a lot of challenging stuff you could do and I became interested in the security field.
I started learning Visual Basic 6 / HTML / CSS / JS / PHP / MySQL and practiced my web application vulnerability research skills. After some time I became interested in more complicated stuff such as C/C++ and ASM. It was a step by step learning where the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”
Since you started, you have found vulnerabilities (vBulletin for example), wrote exploitations tools like NetRipper and ShellcodeCompiler.
Why have you decided to specialize in offensive security?
“Since I was young, I have always found the offensive part of security more attractive. Offensive security is the fun part of security. From my point of view, it is more complicated, more fun and more challenging than defensive security.
Let’s take the vBulletin example. I managed a vBulletin installation and I wanted to make sure the forum was secure. I always updated with the latest vBulletin patches, our server was up to date and it even had a few hardening configurations — this is defensive security.
But when I decided to take a look on my own at vBulletin, I found an SQL Injection. Guess what made me happier — installing patches and keeping a system up to date or the discovery of an SQL Injection.”
Where did you learn to be an offensive security researcher?
“I started to learn from security forums. I still remember hacky0u forums. Now I get most of my technical stuff from Twitter. My tweets are actually a “to read” list. I like to see that a lot of technical people share their knowledge. I read anything that’s new from blogs, whitepapers and security conferences.”
I saw that you are one of the Admins in the Romanian security forums called RST Forums. What is the goal of this forum?
“The goal of the forum is to help young and newbie Romanians learn security. I have friends that visited the forums for game cheats or programming help and eventually they got into the security field and now they are working as penetration testers for large companies.
The forum helped a lot of us in our careers, and that’s why it is still open. I hope many other young Romanians will use it as a way to start their careers in the field of information security.”
How big is the security community in Romania?
“The security community in Romania is medium-sized. There are really good security guys in Romania, but many of them don’t have the necessary time to share their knowledge.
There are security researchers from Romania that spoke at well-known security conferences, wrote tools and whitepapers, but not as much as I would like to. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter from where the researcher is — we live in the international world, especially the security researchers community.”
Why did you develop NetRipper and ShellcodeCompiler?
“A long time ago I discovered that by using API hooking (intercepting Windows function calls) you can do a lot of stuff. While working on an internal penetration test on a limited system, I had the idea that I could capture the traffic made by administration tools in order to pivot to other systems. The idea was not new, but the available tools did not offer what I wanted — a post-exploitation tool to help penetration testers on their engagements. So, I started working on NetRipper, which was released at Defcon 23.
Recently, being interested in low-level stuff such as ASM and Windows Internals, I wanted to write my own shellcodes. I did it easily on Linux, but it was a little bit more complicated on Windows. I noticed that you will repeat a lot of the content from one shellcode to another, so I decided to automate this. This idea was also not new. I saw a basic shellcode compiler, but its users had to write ASM code. I wanted a fast and easy way to write one. This is how Shellcode Compiler was born.”
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