antiworm

In a simple demonstration, a hapless team discovers the truth. "Your server is vulnerable. It's already been cracked. Oh, and by the way, it's already distributing malware for a botnet." A Big Case of Oops! Attitude of management in many organizations is one of the biggest barriers to improved security on the internet. People simply don't want to believe that their systems are vulnerable. Denial is pervasive, and affects organizations from the biggest of the Fortune 500 or Federal government agencies, down to modestly sized companies, local governments, and non-profit corporations. The attitude of the unnamed client described at the "Following the White Rabbit" blog (link above) is all too common. I suspect that an underlying cause is that people want to believe several things that worked pretty well from an evolutionary perspective, but don't work very well on the internet. When everybody around is a bunch of cave dwellers, consumed entirely with...

Yes, the Washington Times is not exactly a premier source of security information, but with analysis and reporting like this, who needs enemies? Two fascinating tidbits from this article: China blocks U.S. from cyber warfare . The first is an absolutely classic Freudian slip: U.S. offensive cyberwar capabilities have been focused on getting into Chinese government and military computers outfitted with less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp. (This observation isn't attributed in the article.) That ought to have you rolling on the floor, laughing, until you realize that these are the very same "less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp." which the bureaucrats at every level of Federal, State, and local governance in the U.S. have been "standardizing" on. Then your sphincters pucker. The point of the article is that the Chinese have developed and deployed their own operating system and "hardened" ...

That didn't take long, did it? Apparently Microsoft released their "out of band" patch in a hurry because they had already seen exploits "in the wild" for this defect. They guessed a worm couldn't be far behind, and they were right. Gimmiv: New worm feeds on latest Microsoft bug The cycle of patching will never fix this problem. If you are a CIO or manager of an enterprise or government network which has been hit by new worms this week, contact Intrinsic Security to discuss FireBreak AntiWorm. Worms are detected instantly and trapped without signatures.

The flaws discovered in DNS recently by Dan Kaminsky have existed for years. He linked several of them together, a concept known as " exploit chaining " to reveal a much more serious flaw. His technique makes it possible to hijack and misdirect a user's web browser to a malicious web site, even in cases where the user types the correct URL. ' That, of course, completely makes a fool of Verisign's Ken Silva, chief technology officer, who's been running around to the press saying irresponsible if not utterly foolish things like: "We have anticipated these flaws in DNS for many years and we have basically engineered around them." Kudos to Mr. Kaminsky, for working in private with the major vendors of DNS server software, who had patches ready to go before the flaw was announced. This kept the script kiddies from having a field day with the vulnerabilities, which were endemic to nearly all DNS servers. Apparently there remain some issues not yet addr...

Security training for application developers is an under-funded activity in most of the organizations that build software. Fixing security defects in custom applications remains an underfunded activity, even after defects are identified. Why does this continue to be the case? It can be easier to find defects for a customer in a security penetration test than it is to convince the customer that the problem is serious enough to fix. Sometimes this is because the incentives are messed up. I'm not the only person who has observed that the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) seem to have given Federal agencies a much higher incentive to find problems and write lengthy, complicated reports on those problems, than to fix them. Other times, managers may not understand the technical details of various vulnerabilities, or may be interested in a certain category of defects, while wearing blinders to other types of defects, particularly outside their comfort zone. If ...