A Look Back At 2014 – Tools & News Highlights

So it’s back to normal programming today, here’s a look back at 2014 (ups and down) and interesting happenings over the past 12 months – including tools and news stories.

2014 News Stories

So Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general was a pretty hot topic in 2014, and the year started out with Yahoo! spreading malware via adverts on their portal.

Later in the year in May, some smart pirates infested the hottest new game Watchdogs with Bitcoin mining malware and made themselves a fortune. There was also an academic paper about hiding a Bitcoin Mining Botnet in the Cloud using free tier accounts – pretty interesting stuff.

There was of course some massive drama too with some large scale vulnerabilities that got everyone in a panic like the SSL bug Heartbleed, the OTHER SSL bug POODLE and the BASH Shellshock.

It turns out nothing really major happened due to either of them, as far as we know anyway..

There were some large scale hacks/compromises in 2014 though such as Target, eBay, Spotify, Code Spaces, the massive celeb leak/fappening, JPMorgan, ICANN and the mother of all hacks in 2014 and possible ever – Sony Pictures who got totally owned.

There was loads of vulns found in Microsoft software (Schannel was pretty important), as usual – so we won’t bother listing all of those out. Some other fairly inconsequential stuff like bugs in WordPress and a pretty nifty (really ancient) bug in FTP.

2014 Best Hacking Tools

There’s been some pretty neat stuff released this year, with highlights being:

• Capstone – Multi-platform, Multi-architecture Disassembly Framework
• Azazel – Userland Anti-debugging & Anti-detection Rootkit
• wig – WebApp Information Gatherer – Identify CMS
• ODA – Online Web Based Disassembler
• EyeWitness – A Rapid Web Application Triage Tool
• Sysdig – Linux System Troubleshooting Tool
• dirs3arch – HTTP File & Directory Brute Forcing Tool
• XSSYA – Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Scanner Tool

You may have overlooked some of these, so do check them out if you did!

Bonus – Top 10 Most Viewed Posts From 2014

1. PACK – Password Analysis & Cracking Kit
2. ICANN Hacked Including Root DNS Systems
3. Massive Celeb Leak Brings iCloud Security Into Question
4. Blackhash – Audit Passwords Without Hashes
5. masscan – The Fastest TCP Port Scanner
6. Password Manager Security – LastPass, RoboForm Etc Are Not That Safe
7. 14-Year Olds Hack ATM With Default Password
8. ODAT (Oracle Database Attacking Tool) – Test Oracle Database Security
9. ParanoiDF – PDF Analysis & Password Cracking Tool
10. The 25 Worst Passwords Of 2013 – “password” Is Not #1

Enjoy 2015!