Vulnerabilities

Injection attacks top the 2010 OWASP Top 10 list of Web application security threats, including SQL, OS, and LDAP injection, followed by cross-site scripting (XSS), broken authentication and session management, insecure direct object references, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), security misconfiguration, failure to restrict URL access, unvalidated redirects and forwards, insecure cryptographic storage, and insufficient transport layer protection. The list is considered a “release candidate” that will be published in its final form in 2010. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]

In part two of his lecture on exploiting Microsoft Windows, Dino Dai Zovi discusses specific techniques for attacking Windows machines.

On the heels of last week’s release of exploit code for a crippling denial-of-service vulnerability in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft has issued a security advisory to confirm the issue and offer pre-patch mitigations.The flaw, in the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol which affects SMBv1 and SMBv2, could cause a system to stop functioning or become unreliable, Microsoft said, describing the published exploit code as “detailed.”

The vulnerability in the design of the SSL/TLS protocol revealed earlier this month can apparently be used to carry out attacks in practice. On his blog, student Anil Kurmus reports that he was able to steal a Twitter password by using a man-in-the-middle attack. Until now it had been assumed that the problem was largely theoretical and would be made manifest only in very limited scenarios.

According to research released by Infoblox and The Measurement Factory, there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of external name servers that are open to recursion. The study put the latest figure at 79.6 percent, a 27 percent increase from 2007. The number of DNSSEC signed zones increased by roughly 300 percent – indicating that DNSSEC is gaining momentum. However, in raw numbers the amount of DNSSEC signed zones is
miniscule next to the total number of zones out there. Read the full article. [eWEEK]

Security researchers have released a paper detailing successful man-in-the-middle attacks against several smartphones. The SSL enabled log in sessions on the tested, Nokia N95, HTC Tilt, Android G1 and iPhone 3GS devices was sniffed using the publicly available SSLstrip tool, with the attack taking place over insecure Wi-Fi network, now prevalent literally everywhere. Read the full article. [ZDNet]

Cyber-criminals have started preying on Verizon
Wireless customers, sending out spam e-mail messages that say their
accounts are over the limit and offering them a “balance checker”
program to review their payments. The e-mail messages, which
look like they come from Verizon Wireless, are fakes; the balance
checker is actually a malicious Trojan horse program. Read the full article. [Computerworld]