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Common Applications Are Now The Weakest Link

Rich November 17, 2008 No Comments

Edited: I stupidly credited Nate Lawson for Mark Dowd’s work with Sotirov. Dumb mistake, and I apologize. Since my travel is slowing down a bit, I’m finally able catch up a little on my reading. Two articles this week reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to talk about. First, Chris Wysopal talks about how we’ve reached an application security tipping point. How the OS vendors are doing such a (relatively) good job at hardening the operating system that it’s become easier and more lucrative for attackers to go after common applications. Since nearly everyone online has a reasonably common set of Internet-enabled desktop apps running, it’s nearly as effective as targeting the OS. Heck, in some cases these apps are cross platform, and in a few cases we even see cross platform exploits. To top it off, many of these applications do not activate or use anti-exploitation features like ASLR or DEP, even when it’s little more than a checkbox during the development process. Thus, as we saw during Alex Sotirov and Mark Dowd’s demo at Black Hat this year, you can use these applications to totally circumvent host operating system security, even through the web browser. As Chris states: Whoa. Millions of dollars spent on securing the most prevalent piece of software and it could be meaningless? Yes, it’s true. Since attackers typically only need one vulnerability, if it isn”t in the network, and it isn”t in the host configuration, and it isn”t in the OS, they will happily exploit a vulnerability in an application. Mike Andrews also nails it: They don’t just go away, they go to the next level of lowest hanging fruit. It might be other vendors (Apple, Adobe, Google for example) which may not have the focus that Microsoft has been forced to have, or even worse, smaller players like custom websites or things like WordPress, Movable Type, phpbb, vbulletin, etc — software that has a huge install base, but perhaps not the resources to deal with a full-frontal attack. …snip… Think of it security”s own Hydra — cut of one head (vulns in a major vendor), two grow back (vulns in smaller vendors), and that”s a worrying proposition. As I often say on this blog we have a term for this… it’s called job security. Share:

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An Amusing Use For DLP

Rich November 17, 2008 No Comments

Here’s a valuable lesson for you college students out there, from Dave Meizlik: if your professor is married to one of the leads at a DLP vendor, think twice before plagiarizing a published dissertation. We talked generally for a while about the problem and then it hit me what if I downloaded a bunch of relevant dissertations, fingerprinted them with a DLP solution, and then sent the girls dissertation through the systems analysis engine for comparison? Would the DLP solution be able to detect plagiarism? It almost seemed too simple. … So when we got home from lunch I started up my laptop and RDP”d into my DLP system. I had my wife download a bunch of relevant dissertations from her school”s database, and within minutes I fingerprinted roughly 50 dissertation files, many of which were a couple hundred pages in length, and built a policy to block transmission of any of the data in those files. I then took her students dissertation and emailed it from a client station to my personal email. Now because the system was monitoring SMTP traffic it sent the email (with the student”s paper as an attachment) to the content analysis engine. I waited a second another and then I impatiently hit send receive and there it was, an automated notification telling me that my email had violated my new policy and had been blocked. I suspect that’s one grad student who’s going to be serving fries soon… Share:

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