I first came across the Mu Security Analyzer when a co-worker on a multi-company government project raved about how the appliance found a zero-day vulnerability in an e-mail inspection device that was protecting a top secret government agency. It was a rather simple script bug in the other vendor's product, but it would have allowed uncontrolled code execution. The implication was that our top secret project could have been compromised by an external hacker running penetration tests against our e-mail services. Initially, the manufacturer of the compromised mail filter refused to believe that a weakness existed in its product. That is, until we sent the exploit, automatically generated by the Mu analyzer, that the vendor's engineers could run to see for themselves.
A hash is cryptographic algorithm that attempts to uniquely describe inputted content by outputting a value that is unique for a given piece of inputted content. A good hash algorithm has several characteristics, including:
I just love how many Web sites take my complex, hard-to-guess password and make it as easy to crack as guessing my favorite color or the city of my birth. It seems nearly every Web site comes with user-accessible, self-service, password reset questions, and nearly all of those same sites make resetting or obtaining my password magnitudes easier than actually knowing my correct password. Thanks.
Remember when computer security was simple? Advice was as easy as, "Don't boot with a floppy drive in your A: drive" and "Don't enable the macro to run." Boy, do I long for the days of yesteryear.
Good computer security is driven by role-based, least-privilege access control. Each user should be given only the access that is necessary to perform their job -- no, make that the specific task they are performing at a specific point in time.
Amit Klein recently released details on DNS server cache poisoning attacks that affect both BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) and Windows DNS servers. It goes to show that every time you think a problem with a well-known protocol or service has been solved, it may not be.
In a previous column, I revealed how the vast majority of computer security threats facing your environment live on the client side and require end-user involvement. Users have to be socially engineered to click an item on their desktop (an e-mail, a file attachment, a URL, or an application) that they should not have. This is not to say that truly remote exploits aren't a threat. They are.
The recent OS X-specific Mac Trojan ignited many hot conversations on various security mailing lists last week. Supposedly, the excitement regarding the Trojan is that it is the first time profit-seeking criminals have paid attention to the OS X platform, versus script kiddies and the hobbyists. Personally, I don't know what the big deal is; Mac-based computers have been host to all the normal types of malware for more than two decades, albeit not as frequently as Microsoft Windows PCs.
In April of this year, Estonia suffered under a huge denial-of-service attack. Lest you think that Estonia is some little, underprepared country that doesn't follow basic computer security practices, you need to know that the same thing could happen to your country.
Server-side polymorphism is a challenging problem for anti-malware software vendors. Much of today's malware, such as the Storm worm, creates tens of thousands of variants each month, a development that has made many anti-virus software programs that use static signatures significantly less accurate.
I've often said in my columns how client-side attacks should be most administrators' No. 1 exploit worry. It's less and less common for attackers to break in through the front door. If I want to steal from a company over the Internet, it's much harder (these days) to find an exploit on the company's Web site or back-end database server. This is not to say that these types of attacks don't happen; they do, as any day's headlines will reveal. But it's not the most common way my clients are reporting. It's more likely that an end-user accidentally launched a worm or a bot that led to the compromise.
I travel the world helping people make their computers and networks more secure. A question I get asked every week is, "What are the best steps I can take to protect my network?" I can understand the concern. Despite increasing amounts of the IT budget being thrown at the problem, nearly every computer security survey taken says malicious computer hacking has never been worse. It's more criminal in nature and more pervasive, and it's stealing more money and identities than ever before.
A few of my previous columns discussed my vision of creating a more secure Internet. It involved replacing the Internet's default anonymity with pervasive authentication, from the hardware initialization, through the OS and all applications, the user, and ending with a verifiable network stream. It is my strong belief that without a complete overhaul of default authentication, malicious hacking is going to continue indefinitely.
Continuing the theme from my previous column on the relative security of Internet Information Service (IIS) vs. Apache, I've come across more studies to support my initial conclusion.
People who know me know what a honeypot proponent I am. I run several around the world, collecting information on malware and malicious hackers, and I think every company should have one.