Hacking Blues

When each day brings a new collection of stories about the horrors of the cyberage, it's easy to forget why anyone would spend their professional lives in the security industry. Microsoft urged to sue exploit vendors! Huawei is coming -- hide your kids! The project I'm going to describe reminded me of the many tasks in this industry I enjoy. It also functioned as a soft target to run up the score a bit – after spending time fighting DEP, ASLR and process sandboxing, it is nice to pop a shell without the Rube Goldberg quality of a modern exploit every now and then (but that's fun too).