Portable Document Format (PDF), is this secure or is it something to be suspicious about upon receiving? Jens Müller gave a convincing talk at Black Hat USA 2020, Portable Document Flaws 101, that it is something to think twice about before opening. This article will provide highlights from the insightful talk about the possible PDF-based attacks and the varying security of PDF-readers (purer viewers only and not editors).

When is hacking legal? Host and security researcher Laura Kankaala delves into this topic with guest and Detectify General Counsel Cecilia Wik. NOTE: this episode does not give any official legal advice, but Laura picks Cecilia’s brain about the legalities of hacking with her area of expertise, the law. Their discussion covers different laws concerning the information security community such as copyright law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and Wire Fraud Act.

In a fast-paced tech environment, the potential attack surface increases with each release. Tech companies can no longer only safeguard themselves with a firewall alone and network monitoring. Web applications are the new perimeter that security warriors are tasked with protecting as they can introduce new entry points into the company infrastructure. We look at how you can reduce attack surfaces.

Scope-creeping doesn’t always end up in a 0-day with a CVE assigned, and this was the fortune of Detectify Crowdsource hacker, Özgür Alp. He is an ethical hacker with 7+ years experience, well certified within offensive security and also high ranked on hacker leaderboards. Here is his success story on how he, with the help of the Detectify Crowdsource team, turned an open redirect into a public disclosed vulnerability known as CVE-2020-1323.