On my recent trip to Dubai I was waiting at my hotel room for my brother to leave so meanwhile the “hacker in me” decided to play a little with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) national proxy that filters everything considered infidel.
Lo primero que hice fue abrir el navegador y ver si podía acceder a los buscadores, en mi caso Bing. Efectivamente esto no está censurado y además sale todo en árabe :)
First thing I did was open the browser and see if I could access search engines, Bing of course. Actually it was not censored and all text was in Arabic :)
Let’s proceed with the experiment and see how far we can go. For this test we searched for something infidel ;) and now we get a warning message that our search has been blocked by “Surf Safely”, the proxy.
The truth is that bypassing the proxy is relatively easy and only took me minutes to find the key and now I was totally free to surf the web ;) I will not go into the details on how to bypass it but a warning to UAE is that they should improve its proxy software and do not filter by content in one language only.
Además mediante un análisis de los metadatos del PDF obtenidos de la web de censura sobre lo que es infiel hemos podido obtener una cuenta de usuario que podríamos usar como vector de ataque, y que el documento se creó recientemente (abril) con Office 2007 :)
Y por cierto este hack era hacking ético por lo tanto legal según la ley (ver PDF sección 7, excepciones) }:-)
Un saludo y hasta el próximo hack en algún lugar del mundo!!
A metadata analysis of the retrieved PDF from the censorship website reveals a user name that could be used as an attack vector, and that the document was created recently (April) with Office 2007 :)
Of course this hack was ethical hacking therefore legal according to law (see PDF section 7, exemptions) }:-)
See ya and until next hack somewhere in the world!
— Simon Roses Femerling
