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Billy Rios

Biography

Billy Rios is a security engineer for a well known software company based out of Redmond. Billy is helping to secure software used by millions of people across the world. Prior to his current role, Billy was a penetration tester for both VeriSign and Ernst and Young. As a penetration tester, Billy was hired by numerous organizations within the Fortune 500 to assess the effectiveness of their organization's security posture. Billy made his living by outsmarting security teams, bypassing security measures, and demonstrating the business risk of security exposures to executives and organizational decision makers.

Before his life as a penetration tester, Billy worked as an Information Assurance Analyst for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). While at DISA, Billy helped protect Department of Defense (DoD) information systems by performing network intrusion detection, vulnerability analysis, incident handling, and formal incident reporting on security related events involving DoD information systems. Before attacking and defending information systems, Billy was an active duty Officer in the United States Marine Corps.

Billy has spoken at numerous security conferences including: Blackhat briefings, Bluehat, RSA and Hack in the Box. Billy holds a Bachelors degree in Business Administration, Master of Science degree in Information Systems, and is currently pursuing his Master of Business Administration.

Books

Hacking: The Next Generation Hacking: The Next Generation
by Nitesh Dhanjani , Billy Rios , Brett Hardin
September 2009
Print: $39.99
Ebook: $31.99

Blog

Billy's blog posts are hosted at:
http://xs-sniper.com/blog/

Safari 3.2.2 Feed Protocol Handler Issues

June 09 2009

A few weeks ago, Apple released a patch for their Safari browser.  The patch included a fix for a RSS feed handling vulnerability I had reported to them a while back.  The advisory can be found here.  This particular vulnerability is actually a variation of a previous RSS feed handling… read more

Catching Up!

March 30 2009

Whew!  It’s been a busy couple of months for me.  I’m always curious as to how I get so much on my plate.  A quick recap of some of the stuff I’ve been working on / or have coming in the near future:   1)      HITB Dubai is almost here!  I’ve been… read more

Stealing More Files with Safari

February 13 2009

Apple recently patched a vulnerability in Safari’s RSS feed handling mechanisms I reported to them.  The advisory for Safari on OS X can be found here and the Safari for Windows advisory can be found here.  As always, Apple was excellent in their handling of the issue.  Two other researchers… read more

SUN Fixes GIFARs

December 17 2008

Last week, Sun released a patch for a vulnerability I reported to them.  The patch I’m talking about fixes the “GIFAR” issue.  I was unable to speak on the issue at Black Hat (for various reasons), but Nate McFeters did a great job of presenting the concept of GIFARs at… read more

Stealing Files with Safari

November 19 2008

Apple recently patched a vulnerability Nitesh “Leisure Suit” Dhanjani and I reported to them last week (CVE-2008-4216).  We had reported a similar vulnerability to Apple about two months ago (CVE-2008-3638).  In fact, the exploitation technique was so similar we held off releasing details until this 2nd patch was released. The… read more

Pwnichiwa from PacSec!

November 19 2008

WOW, it’s been a busy couple of weeks!  I was in Tokyo last week for PacSec.  PacSec was a great time, there were some GREAT talks, and Dragos knows how to party!  I co-presented a talk entitled “Cross-Domain Leakiness: Divulging Sensitive Information and Attacking SSL Sessions” with Chris Evans from… read more

House Keeping

October 22 2008

It’s been a crazy couple weeks! Some quick housekeeping: ChicagoCon – I’ll be in Chi-Town next week giving one of the Keynotes at ChicagoCon. If you’re going to be in the area, hit me up and we’ll grab a few drinks. Bluehat - I’m glad to see all the young… read more

Surf Jacking Secure Cookies

September 24 2008

I was thinking back to Sandro’s paper on Surf Jacking and I realized that there was one small caveat where the “Secure” flag wouldn’t protect your cookies from Surf Jacking… The Side Jacking and Surf Jacking techniques basically stipulate that the attacker has to be on the same network segment… read more

Hostile Hotel Networks?!?!

September 15 2008

Dark Reading recently had an interesting article related to the security of Hotel networks; you can find the article I’m talking about here. As I read the article… I couldn’t help but smile… the article made it seem like Hotels have horribly insecure networks!  The truth is, THEY DO…along with… read more

Simple Lesson on Secure Cookies

September 09 2008

I recently read a paper written by Sandro Gauci from Enable Security entitled “Surf Jacking - HTTPS will not save you”. You can find the paper here. It’s an interesting read and extremely relevant to today’s web applications.  The heart of the paper describes some simple tricks to force a… read more

IE8b2 XSS Filter

September 04 2008

I run a number of different browsers, for various reasons.  I was once even called a “browserholic” by a colleague!   I pulled down IE8b2 when it went live a week ago.  I don’t want to talk about the myriad of security features or browsing features as I think they’ve been… read more

Opera Stuff - Followup

August 22 2008

It always takes me a few weeks to work the booze out of my system after Blackhat and Defcon… but on the show…   Opera 9.52 was released a few days ago…  I hope you’ve upgraded!  Working with the Opera Security Team was a pleasure.  I think they have the most creative… read more

A Look at MFSA 2008-35

July 21 2008

As promised… a quick look at MFSA2008-35:    When FireFox is installed, it registers the following protocol handlers: Gopher:// FirefoxURL:// Note, Firefox3 no longer registers the Gopher protocol handler, which is a great security decision.   Both of these protocol handlers point to Firefox.exe in the following manner: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -requestPending -osint -url “%1″… read more

FireFox Vulns - MFSA 2008-35

July 17 2008

Mozilla issued a patch related to an issue I recently reported to them.  The MFSA with details on the issue can be found here.  It’s an interesting issue that demonstrates some of the complexities related to interaction between software from different vendors.  This particular issue makes use of one of… read more

Opera Stuff

July 12 2008

I recently came across an issue in Opera that could allow for some bad stuff.  Although the issue has been addressed, I’ve been asked by the Opera security team to hold off on details until they can fully investigate other possibly related issues.  I’ll respect that request.  I do however,… read more
Billy Rios