Randy Westergren

A few months ago an article in the local news covering the launch of the Rave Panic Button caught my attention. I hadn’t heard of it before but the idea seemed interesting: efficiently coordinate emergency 9-1-1 notifications across multiple involved parties, i.e. emergency dispatch, on-site employees, and first responders. The system can also share important data about an affected location such as floor plans, emergency contacts, and even surveillance …

I’ve previously written about a server-side vulnerability in Verizon’s webmail client, but I thought it was also worth covering a couple of interesting client-side vulns I discovered that would’ve allowed an attacker to compromise a victim’s entire email account. I started by attempting to identify the allowed HTML elements/attributes in the webmail client. Although there’s probably a better way to …

The adoption of bug bounty programs, or vulnerability disclosure programs, has increased rapidly over the past few years, even extending to industries outside of the technology sector — United Airlines, GM, and the Pentagon are great examples. From enormous organizations like Google and Facebook, to small startups with a handful of employees, companies of all sizes seem to be …

I have worked with Verizon numerous times in the past while reporting serious security vulnerabilities, including a critical vulnerability in their MyFiOS app’s API that exposed the email accounts of all users. While I was recently researching the Verizon webmail portal, I discovered multiple vulnerabilities of varying severities — some of which I will likely write about in the …

Shortly after my recent blog post concerning widespread XSS in ad network code, I discovered similar vulnerabilities in Flash video ads (and other Flash products/components), resulting in a substantial industry-wide mitigation of XSS in Flash-to-JavaScript communication. Perhaps most interestingly, these vulnerabilities presented risks similar to my previous findings except that, in most cases, Ad-Block solutions employed by the …

I had almost forgotten about my experience with Worldpay’s Merchant Portal from just over a year ago, but my recent post regarding another payment processor helped to refresh my memory. I occasionally help one of my family members’ small business with almost anything technology-related, including their e-commerce solution. In this case, I was helping them switch their payment gateway …

Following a visit to our area hospital, my wife received an email notifying her of an account that was setup on her behalf to facilitate payments online, presumably because she had elected to receive bills electronically when initially filling out her paperwork. It sounded a lot like a phishing email at first, so I started to look into it further. …

For most of us, the title of this post may not be very surprising. Any time we allow 3rd party scripts to run on our sites, we effectively relinquish control of the code that executes on the client. This is particularly important when integrating ad network scripts since they are inherently more dynamic than most other types of integrations, the cause of which is the …

I have written about some of my research into the Verizon My FiOS app in the past, including a vulnerability that compromised the email accounts of all users. I recently revisited this app after considering another possible attack vector against the My FiOS APIs. As a result, I identified a vulnerability that would have allowed an attacker to completely steal another …

The Docker craze is in full force and shows no signs of slowing down. Software containers seem to be one of the most significant game changers for DevOps since virtual machines. Docker’s development is active and its supporting projects (Compose, Machine, Swarm) are maturing quickly. Though the complete Docker ecosystem is interesting enough, Docker Compose has caught …