Interesting Information Security Bits for July 30th, 2008

Howdy folks. Here are today’s tidbits

From the Blogosphere

Lori MacVittie has put up a post that takes a little deeper look at port knocking than the typical geek response of “Wow. That’s cool!” She brings up some very valid points that need to be considered when thinking about deploying technologies.

Rob talks about how a new survery for PCI folks came into being and then asks us to go take it. Help him out.

Augusto points out that just because we will probably have some neat and nifty new things to worry about after BlackHat and Defcon, the old stuff still has to be watched for. Go check it out.

CG brings a nifty tool for port mapping from Microsoft to our attention. Thanks.

From the Newsosphere

Via the Register, the Neosploit back-by-numbers kit is being retired.

Via SearchSecurity, IBM X-Force report slams independent security researchers.

Via DarkReading, Automated DNSSEC App Secures Against DNS Flaw.

Via SecurityFocus, Poisoned DNS servers pop up as ISPs patch.

That’s it for today. Have a good one.

Kevin

Technorati Tags: security, pci, port mapping

Interesting Information Security Bits for July 29th, 2008

Hiya all. I know I have been less than vigilant in my posting here. I am not going to promise I will get better since that hasn’t worked so far, but things might get a little more regular around here in the near future. Anywho, on with the show.

From the Blogosphere

Nathan McFeters has penned a nice post about responding to the DNS vulnerability and attacks. He also points to a post on The Frequency X Blog which also talks about the same topic.

Tom points to 0×0e’s post that puts forward a list of skills that a good pentesting team should have. It is a good list and worth keeping in mind when both building a team and when contracting for a team to do work.

Rich has written an interesting post about spies and infosec and self-interest. He also asks, Security Operations: Do you CAER? (Collection, Analysis, Escalations and Resolution.) A very intersting read.

Dave Lewis points out that NIST has revised several security guidelines.

Billy explores what can happen when your browser is registered to handle several protocols.

I didn’t get a chance to look at the Newsosphere, so this is it for the 29th.

Have a great day.

Kevin

Technorati Tags: dns, pentesting, skills, nist, protocol, browser

Interesting Information Security Bits for July 21st, 2008

And we’re off.

From the Blogosphere

Via F-Secure’s blog, a discussion of what needs to happen to exploit the Microsoft Access Viewer vulnerability under a couple of different scenario’s. Worth a look.

Gunnar Peterson has an pointed view of outside vs. inside as it applies to our enterprise networks. I won’t spoil it for you since it is a good read.

Jeramiah has survey up for Web Application Security Professionals. He will be releasing the results in the near future. I took it and so should you if you have anything to do with WebApp security. Good questions.

Via Wesley McGrew, Princeton released their tools for dumping and retrieving keys from memory after a cold boot. There was a bit of twittering going on about these tools during The Last Hope conference. Intersting stuff.

Via DevCentral, a new Google tech talk is up. This time covering SQL injection, XSRF, and XSSI. Good stuff.

LearnSecurityOnline has released Crackme 0×04 for us to solve.

TaoSecurity has a perspective on the recent DNS vulnerability that is worth reading.

The tisecurityguy brings to our attention an open source tool for tracking your laptop should it be stolen. As he says, “best of all, it’s open source, which means free.”

From the Newsosphere

DarkReading: The U.K.’s Ministry of Defence lost some USB sticks….with secret information on them.

DarkReading: Damballa Inc. is to release and new tool for malware analysis at Black Hat 2008 in Las Vegas. Free to enterprises and vendors.

Information Week: RIM has fixed the BlackBerry Enterprise Server pdf vulnerability.

That’s all folks. Have a great day.

Kevin

Technorati Tags: vulnerablity, perimeter, web appsec, memory, keys, google tech talk, crackme, laptop

Interesting Information Security Bits for July 18th, 2008

Here ya go.

From the Blogoshpere

0×000000 has the first of a series of pieces that cover Mozilla malware, how to write it and how to detect it, posted. Interesting stuff.

CG has a post up about a tool called Metagoofil and how it can be used to develop an email list. Very interesting stuff. I haven’t played with it yet, but will be soon.

Tenable has setup a way for charities and classrooms that provide information security training to get a full professional feed for free. Way to go Tenable.

Have a good one.

Kevin

Technorati Tags: malware, mozilla, pentest, nessus

Interesting Information Security Bits for July 17th, 2008

Hello all. I apologize for the lack of posts over the last couple of weeks. Life and death have taken up all my time. Things should be back to normal now. So without further ado, here’s are some things to take a look at today.

From the Blogosphere

Wesley over at McGrewSecurity has collected a bunch of links and embedded a bunch of videos of Dan Kaminsky talks. Very cool.

Craig at SecurityWannabe gives us a link to a video of Lee Kushner and Mike Murry’s talk about a career in Information Security. I attended their session at Defcon 15 and the informal Q&A after. Really good stuff. Go watch the video or even better attend their session at this year’s Defcon.

Rich Mogull writes on Securosis that he will be giving a webcast entitled Using Data Leakage Prevention and Database Activity Monitoring for Data Protection on July 29th. Register here. I’ll be watching. You should too.

Via security4all, VMWare has released an updated paper on hardening ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. It can be found here.

From the Newsosphere

Via Dark Reading, Half of Financial Firms Don’t Investigate. That’s not good.

Via Tech Republic, When your network admin hijacks your system. Talks about the San Fransisco situation you have already heard about.

Via Search Security, Blackberry server faced with critical zero-day. There is a flaw in the PDF handling function of the BlackBerrty Attachement Service. Bad stuff.

Via Dark Reading, MessageLabs Reveals Most Spammed States. Illinois apparently has the largest bulls eye painted on its forehead.

Via Information Week, Gmail Privacy Hole Shows User Names. Be careful with Google calendar.

That’s it for today’s bits. Have a great day.

Kevin

Taxonomy of coding errors…

A quick note about something that @cji tweeted about.

Fortify has a taxonomy of coding errors that affect security. The really cool thing is the examples in many different languages.

Its right here, go check it out.