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Comment by Genbox | Hacker News Reader

I work in the field and I'm not entirely sure about the cardinality of types of attacks. On one hand, there are password spaying, RDP bruteforces, email attachments, social engineering etc. On the other we have BlueKeep, ZeroLogon and the tons of RCE present in VPNs (looking at you PulseSecure), Routers, and Firewalls.

I would say that breaches often are related to RCE that ultimately derives from buffer exploitation. They are notoriously difficult to detect with forensics techniques, so they might not be discovered and tracked.

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You're guessing I think. Phishing of some sort is by far the most reliable and used method. CVEs that get exploited are rarely using memory exploits but they do happen and affect companies and people that refuse to update their stuff to the most part. There is just rarely the need to spend time to develop memory exploits because on every consumer OS there is some sort of memory-safety protection. At least DEP or ASLR unless you get lucky and and the software or shared libs have all that disabled or reliable rop gadgets are found.

I'm not making general claims about the use of memory exploitation - only questioning the statement that they are not widely used.

With more than 500 forensics cases with my name on it, and a substantial amount of them being RCE based, I'd say it is more than just guessing.

There is no need to spend time on developing a exploit when you can find hundreds new ones every month on GitHub. DEP and ASLR are also not used in embedded devices where memory management in the firmware is atrocious.

ASLR and other hardening practices are also not used in old machines on your network everyone forgot about

Well I didn't claim that memory exploits were not used. They're just rarely used when compromising end user workstations these days. 10 years ago you had rampant exploit kits for example none these days. You still see memory exploitation if internet facing stuff or even internal devices for lateral movement.

The comment you were replying to is talking about the majority if compromises. Citing your case stats to argue against that is a bit weird.

Your experience is valid. I'm absolutely not saying memory exploitation doesn't happen, only that it's so comparatively infrequent in the 2020s that magically eliminating it wouldn't change the economics of attacks.

As a point of comparison, 10-15 years ago exploits in general were much more prevalent. Flash was still around, people read PDFs in Acrobat instead of PDF.js, Internet Explorer hadn't been displaced by Chrome, macros were just starting to make a comeback after signing restrictions from the early 2000s were lifted, crown jewels hadn't yet moved to the cloud via SaaS, and things just weren't commoditized like they are now with pentest frameworks, LOLBins, etc. In fact the most commoditized element in those days was exploit kits targeting IE memory vulnerabilities. The landscape has changed a lot since then.

I'm vendor-side research, which gives me pretty broad visibility here.

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