SSH-nanigans - Busting Open the Mainframe's Iron Fortress through Unix

Explore advanced mainframe penetration testing techniques through a comprehensive conference talk that reveals how to exploit IBM z/OS Unix System Services (OMVS) vulnerabilities. Learn about multiple unique attack paths discovered over years of mainframe security research, including live demonstrations of real-world scenarios encountered during penetration tests. Discover how poor file hygiene can lead to database compromises, inadequate file permissions enable privilege escalation, and lack of ESM resource understanding allows for privileged command execution. Understand why dataset protection fails to prevent these attacks and witness demonstrations of buffer overflow exploits in APF authorized datasets. Master the use of freely available open-source tools for testing these security controls and gain insights into partial detection methods for these attacks. Recognize the critical security implications of Unix superuser access on mainframes and why it can be as dangerous, if not more so, than traditional TSO access, fundamentally challenging assumptions about mainframe security through the Unix subsystem.