Recently in security Category

Found on slashdot.org; Susan Saradon writes "The Honeynet Project has released a new paper which deals with the observation of botnets. "Know Your Enemy: Tracking Botnets" discusses what Botnets are, who is using them, how, and why. It als introduces the tools "mwcollect" and "drone" which can be used for collecting and tracking Botnet activity".

DNS is one of the core protocols on the internet. Without DNS we would all be stuck remembering the addresses of our favorite web and mail servers. While being a key part of the internet, DNS still remains out of view from the majority of internet users. From a glance DNS seems to be the perfect solution, however as usual this is not the case.

Imperva(tm)'s Application Defense Center (ADC) has released a new white paper titled How Safe is it Out There (Zeroing in on the vulnerabilities of application security). The paper, written by Moran Surf and Amichai Shulman, presents a statistical analysis of results obtained from numerous application level penetration tests performed for various customers over the years 2000 - 2003.

As seen on the Web Application Security Mailinglist, Jeff Williams has posted a collection of regular expressions for validating data input in webapps. Input validation shouldn't just be left to 'best practice' or whatever individual developers want to do. It takes some real design thinking to get it right for an enterprise application.

SecurityFocus has posted a nice survey of anti-spam technologies by spam expert Neal Krawetz, in which he delves deeply into the specifics and pitfalls of the numerous proposed solutions. Krawetz makes it obvious that securing the email infrastructure is a very complex problem that many of the current (simple) solutions can't solve alone.

David Barroso Berrueta has put together a list of rules and tools you can use to defeat Nmap OS fingerprinting. He's found several mechanisms on various OS flavors, and even shows simple rules to use in PF to defeat fingerprinting attempts.

As mentioned at heise-newsticker, a specialized security team of ISS (X-Force) discovered two major flaws in FireWall-1 from Checkpoint. The first issue regards a format string handling error, and the second concerns the VPN-products, including the VPN-gateway and the SecuRemote/Secure-clients. The firewall is vulnerable because of a boundary error in the isakmp processing, when FireWall-1 tries to authenticate a user. Sending an extremely large "certificate request" message could be used to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the isakmp-process, namely root or SYSTEM.

Many documents discuss the actual insertion of HTML into a vulnerable script, but stop short of explaining the full ramifications of what can be done with a successful XSS attack. This Paper found on net-security.org explores the possibilities of cross site scripting attacks.

An interesting paper has been posted to bugtraq, full-disclosure and vulnwatch. It deals with the principles of stealthily using network infrastructure as either short-term or long-term storage. (mirror)

Daniel E. Geer Jr., one of the primary authors of a report Reliance On "MS A Danger To National Security", was fired from @stake Thursday morning. The company said that 'The values and opinions of the report are not in line with @stake's views' and that Geer's participation was 'not sanctioned.'.