2008
Very decent Security Podcast..
I am probably one of the last ppl around to discover this, but ill post it here for the (probably) 2 other ppl in the world who have yet to stumble upon: Risky Business.
Its pretty hard to find good quality security podcasts without some pretty sad signal to noise ratios (or adverts on spinwrite) but risky business is def. a keeper..
i downloaded a few older episodes to help me through a long drive this weekend, and was very pleasantly surprised.. if u have not yet added it to your podcatcher.. u probably will..
rethinking ye old truths
since forever, i’ve been told (and told others) that the greatest threat is from the inside. turns out, not so much. verizon business (usa) apparently conducted a four year study on incidents inside their organisation and found that the vast majority, 73%, originated from outside. however, the majority of breaches occurred as a result of errors in internal behaviour such as misconfigs, missing patches etc. (62% of cases).
So attackers are generally outsiders taking advantage of bad internal behaviours, rather than local users finding 0-day. From the exec summary:
Carpet Bombing and eating Crow…
The recent Safari Carpet Bombing bug reported by Nitesh Dhanjani and ignored by Apple had all the makings of an egg-on-face incident. We were discussing it over foosball, and the obvious consensus was “if a line starts with: “thats not exploitable, its only..” then odds are you are wrong..”
But.. lots of people quicker and smarter than me [1, 2, 3] blogged (or twittered) about why this was a silly approach for apple to take..
This has nothing to do with anything technical..
but since it made me eat crow, i figured i would share it..
Although i read a fair bit, i stopped really reading fiction many many moons ago. Its something i often feel ill try to get back into when im a little older with more time (like playing golf), but right now it somehow always feels like fiction pieces give off less real information than their non-fiction counterparts..
To this end, i got through about 0.5 of one of the harry potter books, before deciding that it wasnt for me (but still stood in the queue at midnight for the final book because Deels has always been nuts about it..)
DefCon 16 – Hmm.. 2 of these talks seem familiar…
Some of the DC16 speaker summaries have been posted, and these 2 caught my eye:
Time-Based Blind SQL Injection using heavy queries and
New Tool for SQL Injection with DNS Exfiltration Both descriptions seem pretty much spot on with what we did in our DefCon talk last year..
hmm.. wonder if its new twists on it, or a little more of the same?
/mh
ActiveX Repurposing.. (aka: Other bugs your static analyzer will never find..) (aka 0day^H^H 485day bug!)
Earlier this week we had an internal presentation on Attacking ActiveX Controls. The main reason we had it is because of the ridiculously high hit rate we have whenever we look at controls with a slight security bent.. When building the presentation i dug up an old advisory we never publicly released (obviously we reported it to the vendor who (kinda) promptly fixed the bug (without giving us any credit at all, but hey.. ))
While the IEBlog promises updates to IE8 that will minimize the damage caused by owned controls in the future, the fundamental problems with ActiveX today are an attackers dream.
If you run Debian (or a Debian Derivative, like Ubuntu)…
Then you probably should get on this one… [Problems with Random Number Generator]
While it looks like an arb openssl bug, 2 seconds of reading should get you to:
-snip-
It is strongly recommended that all cryptographic key material which has
been generated by OpenSSL versions starting with 0.9.8c-1 on Debian
systems is recreated from scratch.
&&
Affected keys include SSH keys, OpenVPN keys, DNSSEC keys, and key
material for use in X.509 certificates and session keys used in SSL/TLS
connections.
-snip-
Should I stay or should I Gobi? Your support needed!
Hello All,
Some of you might remember that I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro two years ago. What you might not know is the REASON I did this (apart from the jol) was to o raise funds for CNCF, a Foundation that is a true oasis and a refuge to the street children of Vietnam and Mongolia.
CNCF – The Christina Noble Children’s Foundation is an International Partnership of people dedicated to serving children in need of emergency and long-term medical care, nutritional rehabilitation, educational opportunities, vocational training, job placement and the protection of children at risk of economic and sexual exploitation.
Phrack is dead.. long live Phrack ??
Uninformed has certainly done awesomely at filling in the gap left when phrack went silent, but there is something nostalgic about reading phrack… it seems like issue 65 has just hit the streets..
Its my SensePostaversary!
Whoa! time flies when you having fun…
(click for orig.)