vulnerabilities Archives

Tag: vulnerabilities

For Cyber Security Awareness Month: Change Your Passwords, Or Ditch Them?

October 1, 2014 Paul Roberts

October has arrived. And while that means colorful foliage and Halloween for many of us, it is also a special time in the information security industry: cyber security awareness month – or NCSAM. Security Ledger will be supporting NCSAM this month with banner ads and other content that highlight NCSAM events. Cyber Security Awareness Month – in its 11th year- is a public-private effort to raise public awareness about online security and safety. It’s best known for the “Stop. Think. Connect.” meme, but also is an occasion for elected officials and private sector firms to highlight cyber security issues. In a Presidential Proclamation released on Tuesday, President Obama called cyber threats “one of the gravest national security dangers the United States faces.” “They jeopardize our country’s critical infrastructure, endanger our individual liberties, and threaten every American’s way of life. When our Nation’s intellectual property is stolen, it harms our economy, […]

Whack-A-Bash: New Vulnerabilities add to Patch Confusion

September 29, 2014 Paul Roberts

The good news about the rapid, industry response to the revelations about exploitable security holes in GNU Bash (Bourne Again Shell) (aka “Shellshock”) is that Linux users had a fix in hand almost as soon as they became aware of the problem those patches addressed. The bad news about the quick fixes for the two issues, CVE-2014-6271 and CVE-2014-7169, from the likes of Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian and others is that – in being early- they fail to fix the problems we don’t yet know about. And that’s what we’re seeing in the wake of last week’s storm of patches: a steady drip-drip of disclosures that suggest that Bash may contain other problems worthy of new fixes. Within hours of the disclosure of the first holes, there were problems discovered by Red Hat Product Security researcher Todd Sabin, who found additional “off by one” errors in Bash that were assigned CVE-2014-7186 and CVE-2014-7187 and […]

Update: ShellShock’s Long Tail in the Enterprise

September 26, 2014 Paul Roberts

The recently disclosed vulnerability in the Linux Bash function dubbed “ShellShock” is creating a firestorm of coverage – and rightly so. The 22 year-old security hole is remotely exploitable and affects Linux based web servers and an unknown number of other devices that might run on linux and contain vulnerable services. However, unlike the recent “Heartbleed” OpenSSL vulnerability, identifying systems vulnerable to Shellshock won’t be easy. Shellshocked first came to light on Wednesday, when Linux vendors including Red Hat began warning about the security hole. The vulnerability allows a malicious actor to take advantage of built in Bash functions, wrapping them in environmental variables and then appending malicious code to the end of function definitions within the variable. In a blog post, Redhat said that any application that runs a shell script using Bash as the command interpreter, or that is hooked onto a shell is vulnerable to attack. Paul Venezia, writing over at InfoWorld, gives one […]

Infographic: Possible Attacks on The Internet of Things

September 24, 2014 Paul Roberts

The folks over at Trend Micro have put together a nice infographic that reminds us that all those smart devices connected to the Internet communicate through some well worn channels, namely: standard communications protocols like Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth that connect devices to each other and the global Internet, as well as HTTP that are used to transmit data to and from cloud based resources like management interfaces. Of course those standard protocols also leave IoT devices vulnerable to a wide range of commodity attacks: from brute force password cracking on web based management consoles to Man in the Middle attacks that can sniff out authentication credentials and hijack sessions. Trend’s infographic does a good job of depicting the various layers in the IoT stack and some of the likely attack vectors for each layer. It also gives advice on how to protect yourself (use encryption, patch software vulnerabilities, disable unused ports). Nothing ground breaking […]

Report: Home Depot Fallout Reveals History of Lax Security, Hiring

September 23, 2014 Paul Roberts

Its a truism in cyber security that behind every great hack often lies a string of bad decisions and missed opportunities. Its also true that when you dig into the details of damaging cyber incidents, the root causes are personal and psychological as often as they are technical in nature. Organizations -even sophisticated and wealthy organizations – end up making bad decisions for all the wrong reason: failing to properly assess their risk, or pursuing short term savings when long term investment is needed. Home Depot learned via law enforcement that a breach of transaction data exposed as many as 52 million credit card transactions, the largest retail credit card breach to date. But as more comes out about the breach at home improvement giant Home Depot, it starts to look a lot more like the root causes there may have started in the HR department rather than the data center. The […]