Web Security

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]

Scientists at Microsoft Research have unveiled a new way to secure complex Web applications by effectively cloning the user’s browser and running it remotely. Many of the latest Web applications split their executable code between the server and the client. The problem is detecting whether the code running on the user’s home PC has been compromised in some way. The new Microsoft solution, known as Ripley, was announced on Tuesday at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer and Communications Security Conference in Chicago. Read the full article. [MIT Technology Review]

Hackers can exploit
a flaw in Adobe’s Flash to compromise nearly every Web site that allows
users to upload content, including Google’s Gmail, then launch silent
attacks on visitors to those sites, security researchers said today. Adobe
did not dispute the researchers’ claims, but said that Web designers
and administrators have a responsibility to craft their applications
and sites to prevent such attacks. Read the full article. [Computerworld] Read the research. [Foreground Security]

WASHINGTON–There has been a big push in recent years in the security community toward metrics, and measurements of all types have become a hot topic in certain corners of the industry. But measurement for measurement’s sake is useless-and perhaps even counterproductive–if the security team in an organization doesn’t define its goals and parameters ahead of time, experts say.

A researcher is working on tools for
penetration testers that’s a first step toward ultimately integrating
and correlating data among different types of penetration-testing
products. Josh Abraham, a.k.a. “Jabra,” will release some proof-of-concept tools at the OWASP AppSec Conference in Washington, D.C., that let pen testers integrate data they gather in their white-hat hacking projects. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]

By Vitaly KamlukWe’ve been looking at the infrastructure of the Gumblar malware and found some curious facts on how Gumblar operates which we would like to share to make hosting owners aware of the Gumblar threat.Analysis of some infected websites showed that the only way to inject the infection of Gumblar was by using FTP access, because those websites have no server-side scripting. Later this was proved by an analysis of FTP log files.