Security

The H-Online: The German Federal Office of Information Security (BSI (German), BSI English) has compiled security recommendations for Windows PCs that will probably sound familiar to regular readers of The H: Anti-virus software – including free solutions –, backups, security updates, an alternative browser such as Google Chrome and “a healthy level of mistrust” are the main components of its proposal for a secure Windows PC. As the UK lacks a governmental organization that makes such recommendations, as usually such organizations recommend policy for public projects, it is worth seeing what Germany’s BSI suggests. ...

The H-Security: The PHP developers are working to fix a critical security vulnerability in PHP that they introduced with a recent security patch. The current stable release is affected; however, it is not yet clear whether the questionable patch was also applied to older versions. The cause of the problem is the security update to PHP 5.3.9, which was written to prevent denial of service (DoS) attacks using hash collisions. To do so, the developers limited the maximum possible number of input parameters to 1,000 in php_variables.c using max_input_vars. Because of mistakes in the implementation, hackers can intentionally exceed this limit and inject and execute code. The bug is considered to be critical as code can be remotely injected over the web. ...

SophosLabs: Visa is investigating a potential security breach that may have compromised payment cards of Eastern Europeans. Although Visa hasn’t disclosed which countries were hit, the Romanian state-owned CEC Bank has blocked and reissued 17,000 cards on suspicion that they had been compromised. CEC Bank said in a statement that “a number” of cards issued by banks both in Romania and abroad might have been compromised via an international database. ...

Schneier on Security: A newly discovered piece of malware, Duqu, seems to be a precursor to the next Stuxnet-like worm and uses some of the same techniques as the original. Link to Source Symantec: W32.Duqu: The Precursor to the Next Stuxnet Duqu is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack. The threat was written by the same authors (or those that have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered. Duqu’s purpose is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party. The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility. Read Full Article ...

MSDN: One of the things we talk quite a bit about with Windows 8 is making sure Windows is a safe, secure, and reliable computing environment. We have always provided a broad range of solutions for achieving these goals and work closely with a broad range of industry partners. We continue to enhance these capabilities with Windows 8 while making sure you always have choice and control over how to protect and manage your PC. With Windows 8 we are extending the protections provided by Defender to address a broader range of potential threats. Jason Garms, the group program manager of our reliability and security team authored this post that represents work across several teams. –Steven ...

Web of Trust (WOT), the world’s leading website reputation rating service, and Mail.ru Group, Russia’s largest Internet company, have partnered together to improve online protection for 300 million people using Russia’s leading free e-mail service, Mail.ru. All links contained in emails received by Mail.ru users are checked through WOT’s reputation database to warn users from following untrustworthy links that could lead to scams, identity theft, malware and other online threats. ...

Read it yourself… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 ———- Forwarded message ———- From: J.H. Date: 2011/8/29 Subject: [kernel.org users] [KORG] Master back-end break-in To: [email protected] —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—– Hash: SHA1 Afternoon Everyone, As you can guess from the subject line, I've not had what many would consider a “good” day. Earlier today discovered a trojan existing on HPA's personal colo machine, as well as hera. Upon some investigation there are a couple of kernel.org boxes, specifically hera and odin1, with potential pre-cursors on demeter2, zeus1 and zeus2, that have been hit by this. As it stands right now, HPA is working on cleaning his box, and I'm working on hera (odin1 and zeus1 are out of rotation still for other reasons), mainly so that if one of us finds something of interest, we can deal with it and compare notes on the other box. Points of interest: – – Break-in seems to have initially occurred no later than August 12th – – Files belonging to ssh (openssh, openssh-server and openssh-clients) were modified and running live. These have been uninstalled and removed, all processes were killed and known good copies were reinstalled. That said all users may wish to consider taking this opportunity to change their passwords and update ssh keys (particularly if you had an ssh private key on hera). This seems to have occurred on or around August 19th. – – A trojan startup file was added to rc3.d – – User interactions were logged, as well as some exploit code. We have retained this for now. – – Trojan initially discovered due to the Xnest /dev/mem error message w/o Xnest installed; have been seen on other systems. It is unclear if systems that exhibit this message are susceptible, compromised or not. If you see this, and you don't have Xnest installed, please investigate. – – It \*appears\* that 3.1-rc2 might have blocked the exploit injector, we don't know if this is intentional or a side affect of another bugfix or change. – – System is being verified from backups, signatures, etc. As of right now things look correct, however we may take the system down soon to do a full reinstall and for more invasive checking. – – As a precaution a number of packages have been removed from the system, if something was removed that you were using please let us know so we can put it back. – – At this time we do not know the vector that was used to get into the systems, but the attackers had gained root access level privileges. That's what we know right now, some of the recent instabilities may have been caused by these intrusions, and we are looking into everything. If you are on the box, keep an eye out, and if you see something please let us know immediately. Beyond that, verify your git trees and make sure things are correct. – – John ‘Warthog9' Hawley Chief Kernel.org Administrator —–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—– Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora – http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk5a5U0ACgkQ/E3kyWU9dif+1ACfYPlgq/keFrFO77AmQVduKGwx TAcAnRAu6nHt74+5aC+fPeb8aT0hcy2K =Semd —–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

Mozilla Security Blog: Mozilla just released an update to Firefox for Desktop, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. Updates are now available for: Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux (final release) Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux (3.6.21 final release) Firefox Aurora for Windows, Mac and Linux Firefox Nightly for Windows, Mac and Linux SeaMonkey (2.3.2) Thunderbird (6.0.1) We strongly recommend that all users upgrade to these releases. If you already have Firefox, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. Users can also manually check for updates if they do not want to wait for the automatic update. ...

Microsoft Malware Protection Center: We’ve had reports of a new worm in the wild and that generates increased RDP traffic for our users on port 3389. Although the overall numbers of computers reporting detections are low in comparison to more established malware families, the traffic it generates is noticeable. The worm is detected as Worm:Win32/Morto.A and you can see a detailed description of at http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Threat/Encyclopedia/Entry.aspx?Name=Worm%3aWin32%2fMorto.A. Morto attempts to compromise Remote Desktop connections in order to penetrate remote systems, by exploiting weak administrator passwords. Once a new system is compromised, it connects to a remote server in order to download additional information and update its components. It also terminates processes for locally running security applications in order to ensure its activity continues uninterrupted. Affected users should note that a reboot may be required in order to complete the cleaning process. ...

Sunbelt: Facebook recently published a guide for it’s users on how to secure their online accounts from anything that threatens one’s Facebook security. Among those covered are Wall, Chat, and Comment spams, weak passwords, fake applications, and account hacking. Personally, I’m quite happy that Facebook is actually doing something that concerns user security, despite it being quite late come to think about it. Still, better to have something than nothing. ...