"Previously, when people typed in a legitimate e-mail address on Facebook's password reset page they got a message either saying that their password had been reset or that an e-mail with instructions on how to reset the password had been sent to their e-mail account, thus providing verification that the e-mail address...
"The Safe C Library implements a subset of the functions defined in the ISO TR24731 specification which is designed to provide alternative functions for the C Library (as defined in ISO/IEC 9899:1999) that promotes safer, more secure programming in C. To recap: The Safe C Library (available for download here) provides bound...
There's been a bunch of news regarding a new report published indicating a wide spread Chinese espionage network dubbed 'ghostnet'. From the paper "This report documents the GhostNet - a suspected cyber espionage network of over 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries, 30% of which are high-value targets, including ministries of foreign...
"I’ve developed a new XSS scanner tool that’s written in Javascript called XSS Rays for Microsoft. They have given me permission to release the tool as open source which is awesome because it can be used for other open source applications. I recommend you use it as part of the web development...
"Watcher is designed as a Fiddler plugin that passively monitors HTTP/S traffic for vulnerabilities. It gives pen-testers hot-spot detection for user-controlled inputs, open redirects, and other issues, and it gives auditors an easy way to find PCI compliance and other organizational issues. Here’s some of the issues Watcher has checks for now:...
"The OWASP Security Spending Benchmark Report surveyed about 50 organizations to determine their spending on secure coding; OWASP found that 61% of those surveyed had an independent third-party security review of software code to find flaws before Web applications are used live. The percentage surprised Boaz Gelbord, executive director of information security...
"HP SWFScan is a free security tool to developers find and fix security vulnerabilities in applications developed with the Adobe Flash Platform. The tool is the first of its kind to decompile applications developed with the Flash platform and perform static analysis to understand their behaviors. This helps developers without security backgrounds...
"Aiming to better identify bugs that could lead to security issues, Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it planned to release a tool to help developers classify and assess program crashes. The tool, known as !exploitable and pronounced "bang exploitable," is a plugin for the Windows debugger that categorizes crash information using two...
"With only a few days left before the tournament starts, if a user searches for popular March Madness-related terms in Google, malicious URLs as high as the first result are returned. Search terms that currently exist within the Top 10 of Google's Hot Trends (the most popular search results) return these malicious...
"First the good news: Despite the global recession, two-thirds of organizations either have no plans to cut Web application security spending, or they expect their spending to increase this year. Now the bad news: Spending for security applications is less than 10 percent of the overall security budget in 36 percent of...
Sans published an entry about a new piece of malware that installs a rogue DHCP server that specifies a rogue DNS server, presumably for phishing and malware deployment. I wouldn't be surprised if this concept is fairly old but it appears to be the first time a common piece of malware is...
"Security researcher Charlie Miller held onto a vulnerability for an entire year, before using it on Wednesday to win $5,000 and an Apple laptop at the Pwn2Own contest here at the CanSecWest conference. Miller — a principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators — found two flaws in Apple's Safari Web browser more...
"A Los Angeles federal grand jury indicted a disgruntled tech employee Tuesday on allegations of temporarily disabling a computer system detecting pipeline leaks for three oil derricks off the Southern California coast. Mario Azar, 28, faces a maximum 10-year term after being accused of purposely impairing a computer system that monitored for...
"The BBC hacked into 22,000 computers as part of an investigation into cybercrime but the move quickly backfired, with legal experts claiming the broadcaster broke the law and security gurus saying the experiment went too far. The technology show Click acquired a network of 22,000 hijacked computers - known as a botnet...
I just released a paper on an attack vector against certain transparent proxy architectures via the use of client side plugins with sockets support. If you've been reading this site for awhile you can probably tell that I frown upon new industry buzzwords and often make fun of new silly sounding terms....
Dan Kaminsky has just published his latest paper on middleware attacks that I recommend checking out. "For CanSecWest this year, I thought it’d be interesting to take a look at the realm of Deep Packet Inspectors. It turns out we were doing a lot of this around 2000 through 2002, and then…well,...
For over a year in my spare time I've been working on a abuse case against transparent proxies at my employer, and have just released my latest paper '"Socket Capable Browser Plugins Result In Transparent Proxy Abuse". When certain transparent proxy architectures are in use an attacker can achieve a partial Same...
"Google confessed to a serious bug in its Docs sharing system over the weekend, but downplayed the security cockup by claiming only a tiny number of users had been affected. The internet search kingpin said that less than 0.05 per cent of Google Docs accounts were hit by a privacy breach after...
"A fix against an SMS spoofing flaw involving micro-blogging service Twitter offers only partial protection. Tests by Heise Security found that providing a user knew the number of a phone associated with a Twitter account, it would be possible to use an SMS sender faking service to post fake status updates that...
HD Moore sent the following to bugtraq this morning. "WarVOX is a suite of tools for exploring, classifying, and auditing telephone systems. Unlike normal wardialing tools, WarVOX works with the actual audio from each call and does not use a modem directly. This model allows WarVOX to find and classify a wide...
"The Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) described on this website is designed to help you understand and plan a software security initiative. BSIMM was created through a process of understanding and analyzing real-world data from nine leading software security initiatives. Though particular methodologies differ (think OWASP CLASP, Microsoft SDL, or the...
"Dan Bernstein has just admitted that a security issue has been found in the djbdns software, one of most popular alternatives for the BIND nameserver. As part of the djbdns security guarantee, $1000 will be paid to Matthew Dempsky, the researcher that found the bug. The bug allows a nameserver running djbdns...
"Mozilla Corp. today patched eight security vulnerabilities in Firefox, half of them critical memory corruption flaws in the browser's layout and JavaScript engines. Firefox 3.0.7, the second security update this year to the open-source browser, fixes about the same number of bugs that Mozilla patched a month ago. Of the eight vulnerabilities,...
I found the following post fairly amusing and had to link it here. "A few days ago I complained about the incredibly awkward IT Security Girl of the Year award that will be dished out later this year at the French IT security conference FRHACK. Apparently the FRHACK organizers did not like...
"More than two years after Symantec pulled the plug on L0phtCrack, the venerable password cracking tool is being prepped for a return to the spotlight. The original creators of L0phtCrack has reacquired the tool with plans to release a new version at next week’s SOURCE Boston conference. A teaser post on the...
"A researcher today released a proof-of-concept for a vulnerability he discovered in Google Gmail that lets an attacker change a Gmail user's password, wage a denial-of-service attack on the account, or even access other Gmail users' email. The cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw -- which researcher Vicente Aguilera Diaz from Madrid-based Internet...
From Opera's changelog Fixed an issue where specially crafted JPEG images ccould be used to execute arbitrary code, as reported by Tavis Ormandy of the Google Security Team; see our advisory Fixed an issue where plug-ins could be used to allow cross domain scripting, as reported by Adam Barth; details will be...
"For years, cryptographer Daniel J. Bernstein has touted his djbdns as so secure he promised a $1,000 bounty to anyone who can poke holes in the domain name resolution software. Now it could be time to pay up, as researchers said they've uncovered several vulnerabilities in the package that could lead end...
