Well it’s the last day of April (can’t believe it!) and I’m stuck home with the Flu. I hadn’t been sick all winter so I guess I was due.

Here’s the list for today:

A Safer Apple Experience per Grandma Roberts

In these days where everyone is getting worked up over OS X vulnerabilities it’s somewhat easy to not know quite how to respond. I love my grandmother partially because even though she may not read all the warnings on SANS Internet Storm Center or read John Grubers surprisingly enjoyable and fair interview with Dino Dia Zovi she will email me anything she sees on CNN.com or gets via email about computer security. It’s really quite touching and means a lot that she cares enough to take an interest in what I do.

Addressing Privacy: There Will Never Be a Technology-Only Solution Because of the Human Factors Involved – I completely agree.

I’ve written about many times, but it is worth repeating many times more; technology alone will not solve a company’s information security, privacy or compliance challenges and requirements. The human factor is significant and must be addressed.

Friday Quickies – April 27, 2007 – I don’t agree with Rothman’s declaration that SIM is dead. Just because a vendor adds log management, an important data point when performing incident handling, doesn’t mean that they’re grasping at straws. As he said in his own article…the space is “evolving”.

SIMs not dead, eh? – Then why is almost every SIM vendor announcing a dedicated log management appliance? NetForensics is the latest (NetForensics press release) and they also extended their monitoring capability to databases (another NetForensics release). How many more data points do we need about the evolving SIM space before we can finally start shoveling dirt on it?

Video: Exploring Metasploit 3 and the New and Improved Web Interface – Part 1 – Make sure you turn down your volume as the music is A LITTLE LOUD FOR WORK!!!!

In this video we explore the revised MSFWeb interface for the Metasploit Framework 3.0. We specifically take a look at running auxiliary modules against a server running MSSQL, and then we’ll take a look at using the MSFweb GUI to run the idq exploit with the meterpreter payload. What is unique about the idq bug is that it will NOT give you administrator or system on the box, but you can use the rev2self command in meterpreter to elevate your privileges from IUSR_MACHINENAME to SYSTEM. While we’re at it, we also dump the hashes using hashdump for a little extra fun.

Video: Exploring Metasploit 3 and the New and Improved Web Interface – Part 2 – Part 2 (and the music isn’t as loud this time)

In this video we explore the revised MSFWeb interface for the Metasploit Framework 3.0. We specifically take a look at running “browser” exploits where you have to get the victim to connect back to your listening Metasploit instance. We’ll use the ie_createobject exploit via the MSFweb GUI, and then we’ll use the wmf_setabortproc exploit using the built in msfconsole (a new addition in MSFWeb 3.0). We’ll also take a look at using custom meterpreter scripts; first to see if the victim is running in vmware and second, to clear the event logs.

Something New To Look For – Danger…danger…

So, what’s this all about? Remember how some malware tries to shut off AV software or the Windows Firewall? Well, the script that Hogfly found uses reg.exe to set all of the values (except the first one) to 0, and effectively shuts down any error reporting, which is essentially a visual notification that something is wrong on the system.

CSIRTM resources online – I’ll have to make time in the coming days to read through this white paper.

As part of the preparations for a new graduate course in CSIRTM to be offered to students as an elective in the Norwich University Master’s of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA) program, I put all my articles together into an edited white paper on the subject and added some new material.

Protected but Owned: My Little Investigation – Good write-up with screen captures.

Check out my write-up here. It is about my investigation of a desktop protected by various security software, but 0wned nonetheless. And to those paranoids who are dying to ask a question “Was this my own system?” I can give a resounding “NO!” 🙂

Movie Time: DNS Changer trojan – Grab your popcorn…it’s MOVIE TIME!

Adam Thomas in our malware research labs took a video of a Trojan DNS Changer a while back. This is a piece of malware that uses rootkit technology and changes your Windows DNS settings. Its purpose is to redirect your search results in popular search engines.

Log Management Summit Wrap-Up – I’ll have to go to this some day.

My favorite presentation on Monday, though, was Chris Brenton’s talk, entitled Compliance Reporting – The Top Five most important Reports and Why. As you know, I’ve been doing a lot of work recently on NSM reports, and although log reporting isn’t quite the same, the types of things that an analyst looks for are very similar. I got some great ideas which may show up in my Sguil reports soon.

Ahhhh….Friday!

Here’s the list for today:

Introduction to Identity Management – Part II – A topic that is on everyone’s mind.

Before we delve any deeper into IDM, we should take a moment to acknowledge three “interim solutions” to the IDM problem that have supported IT for many years. Each of these solutions was designed to support centralized credentials for a specific class of system.

Student evades Cisco NAC; gets suspended – Should the student be suspended for bypassing the default setting on the device that the Administrator left unchanged?

The exploit was the work of a sophomore who was suspended for doing it, and further use of the weakness has been blocked by changing a setting on the Cisco Clean Access box involved, according to Cisco.

NY teen hacks AOL, infects systems – That’s quite the list of alleged exploits.

In a complaint filed in Criminal Court of the City of New York, the DA’s office alleges that, between December 24, 2006 and April 7, 2007, 17-year old Mike Nieves committed offenses like computer tampering, computer trespass and criminal possession of computer material.

Bot Infections Surges to 1.2 Million – Something needs to be done.

The number of compromised computers that are part of a centrally controlled bot net has tripled in the past two weeks, according to data gathered by the Shadowserver Foundation, a bot-net takedown group.

The weekly tally of bot-infected PCs tracked by the group rose to nearly 1.2 million this week, up from less than 400,000 infected machines two weeks ago. The surge reversed a sudden drop in infected systems–from 500,000 to less than 400,000–last December.

Project Honey Pot Files Massive Anti-Spam Suit Against Millions of IP Addresses – I guess that’s one tactic.

An anti-spam organization that collected millions of spam messages sent to fake email addresses seeded on volunteers’ websites and blogs filed a lawsuit against every spammer who harvested those addresses and spammed them. The suit, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, seeks more than $1 billion in damages. The suit names John Doe defendants based on their IP addresses.

Pen-test cost versus being sued – No one wants to pay the money up front…but they typically regret after the fact.

I had to laugh, well kind of anyways, when I saw the following article. Reason being is that I have had clients in the past balk at the cost of my per diem, and by extension the pen-test that I was contracted for. Well, if you factor in the cost of a class action lawsuit, or simple litigation, guess which is by far cheaper. Much as I stated to the client, is that my fee, while four figures, is a heck of a lot less then being sued for not practicing due diligence. Having a yearly pen-test of vulnerability assessment done is no longer an option, but a business necessity.

I’ve got another new CoOp student starting today. That brings my team up to 8 people in total (including two CoOp students). Everything at work is finally starting to fall into place 🙂

Here’s the list for today:

Intro to hackernomics – I wonder if this term will make it into the next Webster’s version?

Hackernomics (noun, singular or plural): A social science concerned with description and analysis of attacker motivations, economics and business risk. It is characterized by five fundamental laws and eight corollaries.

New approaches to malware detection coming into view – Good idea of what’s coming down the pipe.

The traditional signature-based method to detect viruses and other malware is increasingly seen as an insufficient defense given the rapid pace at which attackers are churning out virus and spyware variants. All of which raises the question: What’s next?

SSA 1.5.1 Released – Security System Analyzer an OVAL Based Scanner – Something to test out.

SSA is a scanner based on OVAL, the command line tool provided by MITRE is not very easy to use so the guys at Security Database decided to write a GUI to make it simple to use and understand and then free the security testers community to take advantage of it.

Spam Attack: RARed Trojan – More details on this piece of malware.

Symantec Security Response has seen an increasing number of submissions of Trojan.Peacomm and related malware arriving in emails containing password-protected RAR archives.

White House Task Force Proposes Criminalizing Harmless Hacks – I can’t wait to see who the first person to burn at the stake for this is.

The Identity Theft Task Force appointed by President Bush and headed by embattled attorney general Alberto Gonzales wants to close a loophole in a federal computer crime law that’s letting slick computer intruders escape federal prosecution merely by doing no harm.

Perfect Setup Of Snort + Base + PostgreSQL On Ubuntu 6.06 LTS – Good reference article if you don’t have a Snort sensor and analysis station up and running.

This tutorial describes how you can install and configure the Snort IDS (intrusion detection system) and BASE (Basic Analysis and Security Engine) on an Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) system. With the help of Snort and BASE, you can monitor your system – with BASE you can perform analysis of intrusions that Snort has detected on your network. Snort will use a PostgreSQL database to store/log the data it gathers.

Cisco Security Advisory: Default Passwords in NetFlow Collection Engine – “The upgrade to NFC version 6.0 is not a free upgrade” – ya…that makes sense.

Versions of Cisco Network Services (CNS) NetFlow Collection Engine (NFC) prior to 6.0 create and use default accounts with identical usernames and passwords. An attacker with knowledge of these accounts can modify the application configuration and, in certain instances, gain user access to the host operating system.

The upgrade to NFC version 6.0 is not a free upgrade. This default password issue does not require a software upgrade and can be changed by a configuration command for all affected customers. The workaround detailed in this document demonstrates how to change the passwords in 5.0.

Asking Vista for its list of network interfaces

Tenable’s research group recently released plugin ID #24904 which speaks with the Link Layer Topology Discovery protocol. This is an Ethernet “layer 2” scan, so it is something you need to perform against a server within the collision domain of a Nessus scanner. LLTD allows you to enumerate a wide variety of information about the remote host.

Why Risk Management Fails (Or At Least Is Really, Really, Hard For Us) – Everyone has their opinion. I, however, think Risk must be able to be measured. It’s usually a question of “if” not “how” risk can be measured.

What really gets me, though, is when I see folks online and in mailing lists come up with all sorts of nonsense about how risk can’t be measured, or, even worse, that it’s too difficult and should be discarded in favor of their version of witchcraft.

Be Prepared – Just as you’re always prepared for Ninja’s to spring into attack….so should you be prepared for security problems 🙂

As security professionals, shouldn’t we also “Be Prepared?” We need to have a “tool bag of knowledge” that we can open whenever an event occurs. This is a set of resources, instructions or processes that you can use when responding to a security event. An organized and careful reaction to an incident can mean the difference between complete recovery and total disaster.

Battle of the Colored Boxes (part 1 of 2) – Good overview of the “colored box” methods of testing.

Lets look at Black, White, and Gray Box software testing from a high-level as it relates to a website security standpoint and highlight their strong points. I realize that not everyone will agree with my conclusions. So as always, feel free to comment and let me know if anything has been overlooked and should be considered. Also for perspective I’m of the opinion that all three methodologies require tools (scanners) and experienced personnel as part of the process. No exceptions.

Universities highlight IT forensics boom – Where was this kind of stuff when I was in school?

Universities offering postgraduate courses for IT professionals claim to be seeing increasing interest in computer forensics skills, both from employers and from applicants.

Peacomm RARs Its Ugly Head

Just like last time, a lot of this seems to be getting by traditional signature-based AV detection routines.

Security Leadership – I couldn’t agree more.

In my opinion the security industry is in need of leadership. It is a industry that is widely varied in scope and objective. You have many different disciplines that often doesn’t communicate with each other and often even openly criticizes or looks down on each other. If we are all fighting against a common enemy then why can’t and don’t we work together. Why should we each fight our own battles also fight each other?

URGENT: Unconfirmed Reports QuickTime Exploit Capture Is Circulating – UhOh…..

Remember what I said about “living dangerously”? Stop living dangerously, right now. Turn Java off in your browser. Watch this space for more details.

Default Deny All Applications (Part 1) – Good article on on SRP.

Software Restriction Policy (SRP) was introduced in October 2001 with the launch of Microsoft Windows XP Professional. Since then it has lived a pretty silent life – much too silent you could say. The purpose of this article series is to bring SRP ‘back to life’ out there in the real world, to encourage administrators around the world to re-think their software policies and maybe even implement SRP in its strongest setup: by the use of Whitelisting.

Hardware Key Logging Part 2: A Review Of Products From KeeLog and KeyGhost – A good review of some products out there.

As stated in the first article, installation of these sorts of devices is simple. Just plug the keylogger inline with the keyboard. From there it should start logging key strokes. Retrieval and configuration, on the other hand, varies somewhat from model to model.