The Glider

According to this announcement:

http://secunia.com/advisories/40780/

The problem is that passwords may in certain cases be logged to /var/log/messages while running GNOME Display Manager in debug mode (disabled by default)



This was originally reported on 02-15-2009 here:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=571846

A patch was issued the same day. A supported patch was issued 05-14-2010.



The secunia advisory did not have many details.

The sunblog link provided did not have very much information.

http://blogs.sun.com/security/entry/cve_2010_2387_password_disclosure



The CVE is reserved and not available yet.

The rest of the information is apparently in the Customer Are.



Does this mean we can count on a no public disclosure policy for SUN products now that Oracle owns them?













(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

The Google Online Security Blog posted a brief article on their opinion the full vs responsible disclosure debate... likely in the wake of the controversy of one of their researchers publishing a security vulnerability. The debate on publishing security vulnerabilities has been and remains a hot one. Almost all vendors support responsible disclosure(a term that I absolutely detest) where a researcher discloses the bug only to the software vendor who then (hopefully) patches the bug. Full disclosure is publishing the vulnerability publicly once it is discovered (or in some cases, once a PRfirm has been hired to manage the hype).
There are pros and cons to both approaches. Responsible disclosure really only works when there is responsible software development. However, if the good guys have the vulnerability, the bad guys have it and at least 12 more. With the exception of the few vendors which buy vulnerabilities, responsible disclosure does not allow the security community to develop counter-measures to protect against the threat while a patch is being developed. For instance, it took about a week for software to be developed to detect the LNKvulnerability and there are still problems with it. On the other hand, full disclosure hands the details to the bad guys in public so they can immediately exploit the vulnerability. It does, however, get vendors and researchers to move quickly.
What are your thoughts on how disclosure should be handled?
--

John Bambenek

bambenek at gmail /dot/ com (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

SophosLabs has just released a free tool that provides detection against the Windows shortcut exploit that we published last week here and here. Sophos has indicated it works with any antivirus software and it works with Windows XP/Vista/7 but not 2000. When Windows tries to display an icon with a shortcut, the tool will intercept the request in order to validate it and give back control to the user if not found to be malicious.
SophosLabs has made a video available on what is the exploit and how the tool works here and the tool is available for downloaded here.
Update 1: This tool currently only protects against LNK files and does not protect against PIF based exploits. It also does not protect against LNK files or targets stored on the local disk. Thanks to ISC reader Gerrit for the additional information.
-----------
Guy Bruneau IPSS Inc. gbruneau at isc dot sans dot org (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

I've been out of touch the last month or two with special projects and vacation so today was my day to catch up on some old email. One item that caught my interest is an update to one of Mandiant's free tools, Web Historian to version 2.0. If you are an incident responder or forensic investigator Web Historian may be of interest to you.
Web Historian is a great tool for collecting and analyzing web browsing history information. The original version of this software dates back a few years to when Mandiant was still RedCliff and was showing a little rust. The new version is a complete rewrite and redesign of this popular tool. This version of Web Historian has a bunch of new features and supports Firefox 2/3+, Chrome 3+, and Internet Explorer versions 5 through 8.
For more information about Web Historian 2.0 see the Mandiant Blog.
To download and try Web Historian 2.0 go to the download page.

-- Rick Wanner - rwanner at isc dot sans dot org - http://rwanner.blogspot.com/ (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

There is nothing new on the issue of unsecured sensitive data traveling across the network in plain-text. In fact, many popular websites use SSL to crypt information because they became aware of the man in the middle attack, soowners secured their webpages to avoid the attack.
Unfortunately, there are many companies that thinks nothing will happen if they use plain-text to send logon information. You can say there is noproblem with hashed passwords, but they are not enough. Rainbow tables are widely used so if a hash is grabbed from the network, it will be cracked in no time.
Delivering SSL and authenticating both ends might be a cheap and reliable solution for this. Yes, I know SSL is vulnerable to Man-in-the-middlleattacks,but it you authenticate certificates on both ends and pay attention when something like this appears, the risks is adecuately minimized:


How many of us have clicked directly into continue to this website without paying attention on what is the error in the certificate?
I have seen universities where students capture professor's usernames and passwords and start to sell grade changes. I have seen many hijacked e-mail accounts on ISPs that doesn't crypt logon information.
These controls are easy to deploy: IIS hasSSLclient certificate authenticationand Apache also implements it. If you use all the available security functionality you have in your IT infrastructure,you will minimize many information security risks like this one.
-- Manuel Humberto Santander Pelez | http://twitter.com/manuelsantander| http://manuel.santander.name| msantand at isc dot sans dot org (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

-- Rick Wanner - rwanner at isc dot sans dot org - http://rwanner.blogspot.com/ (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

-- Rick Wanner - rwanner at isc dot sans dot org - http://rwanner.blogspot.com/ (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

gpgsm is a tool similar to gpg designed to provide digital encryption and signing services on X.509 certificates and the CMS protocol. There is a bug with this tool when importing a X509 certificate with more than 98 subject alternate names or implicitly while verifying a signature.

Version 2.0.16 is affected and older versions should be affected as well. More information at http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2010q3/000302.html
-- Manuel Humberto Santander Pelez | http://twitter.com/manuelsantander| http://manuel.santander.name| msantand at isc dot sans dot org (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Wewould like to clarify something to our readers because of an e-mail received today.There are two types of diary: One-liners where we tell you things you should know and where we don't have anything else to add and full diarieswhere we discuss a subject. For example, we use one-liners to talk about many updates on popular software.We just pointyou to the link.These are not advertisement to other companies :)
-- Manuel Humberto Santander Pelez | http://twitter.com/manuelsantander| http://manuel.santander.name| msantand at isc dot sans dot org (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.