Slashdot Mirror

eldavojohn writes "As more and more businesses become dependent on barcodes, people are pointing out common problems involving the security of one- or two-dimensional barcode software. You might scoff at this as a highly unlikely hacking platform but from the article, 'FX tested the access system of an automatically operated DVD hire shop near his home. This actually demanded a biometric check as well, but he simply refused it. There remained a membership card with barcode, membership number and PIN. After studying the significance of the bar sequences and the linear digit combinations underneath, FX managed to obtain DVDs that other clients had already paid for, but had not yet taken away. Automated attacks on systems were also possible, he claimed. But you had to remember not to use your own membership number.' The article also points out that boarding passes work on this basis — with something like GNU Barcode software and a template of printed out tickets, one might be able to take some nice vacations."

juct sends us Heise Security's summary of an article detailing the abilities of 17 current anti-virus solutions. German computer magazine c't has found that, compared to last year, the virus scanners are having a more difficult time recognizing malware. Quoting Heise: "For real protection, however, in view of the flood of new malware, the way these programs cope with new and completely unfamiliar attacks is more important. And that's where almost all of the products performed significantly worse than just a year ago. The typical recognition rates of their heuristics fell from approximately 40-50 per cent in the last test - at the beginning of 2007 - to a pitiful 20-30 per cent."

juct writes "The long-standing suspicion that the anonymizing network TOR is abused to catch sensitive data by Chinese, Russian, and American government agencies as well as hacking groups gets new support. Members of the Teamfurry community found TOR exit-nodes which only forward unencrypted versions of certain protocols. These peculiar configurations invite speculation as to why they are set up in this way. Another tor exit node has been caught doing MITM attacks using fake SSL certificates."

Enon writes "eEye Digital Security has discovered 14 vulnerabilities in the FLAC file format that affect a huge range of media players on every supported operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, BSD, Solaris, and even some hardware players are vulnerable). Heise points out a number of vulnerable apps that use the open source libavcodec audio codec library, which in turn relies on the flawed libFLAC library. These vulnerabilities could allow a person of ill will to trojanize FLAC files that could compromise your computer if they are played on a vulnerable media player. eEye worked with US-CERT to notify vulnerable vendors."

cycoj writes with a report in the German IT magazine Heise, taking a look at the new OS X Leopard firewall. They find it flawed. When setting access to specific services and programs to only allow SSH access, for example, they found that a manually started service was still accessible. From the article: "So the first step after starting Leopard should be to activate the firewall. The obvious choice to do so is the option to 'Set access to specific services and programs,' which promises more control over network traffic. Mac OS X automatically enters all shared resources set up by the user, such as 'Remote login' for SSH servers, into the list of accessible resources... However, initial functional testing quickly dispels any feeling of improved security. A service started for testing purposes was able to be addressed from outside without any difficulty. The firewall records this occurrence... Even with the firewall set to 'Block all incoming connections' ports to netbios, ntp and other services were still open... Specifically these results mean that users can't rely on the firewall."

dg2fer writes "For more than two months, the vulnerability of parsing URIs has been known for a number of Windows programs, including Outlook, Adobe Reader, IRC clients, and many more. Microsoft admitted the vulnerability only last week. The latest Microsoft patches published on October's Patch Tuesday did not include a solution, so hackers have taken on the problem themselves. One, KJK::Hyperion, has published (as open source) an unofficial patch that cleans up the critical parameters of URI system calls before calling the vulnerable Windows system function."

Several readers wrote in to inform us that Swedish security researcher Dan Egerstad has revealed how he collected 100 passwords from embassies and governments worldwide, without hacking into anything: he sniffed Tor exit routers. Both Ars and heise have writeups on Egerstad's blog post, but neither adds much to the original. It's not news that unencrypted traffic exits the Tor network unencrypted, but Egerstad correctly perceived, and called attention to, the lack of appreciation for this fact in organizations worldwide.

juct writes "Heise describes a new demo showing how Firefox running under Windows XP SP2 can be abused to start applications. For this to work, however, Internet Explorer 7 needs to be installed. This severe security problem promises another round in the 'who-is-to-blame-war' between Mozilla and Microsoft. Mozilla currently is leading the race for a patch, as they have one ready in their bugzilla database. 'The authors of the demo note that there are many further examples of such vulnerabilities via registered URIs. What is so far visible is just "the tip of the iceberg". They state that registered URIs are tantamount to a remote gateway into your computer. To be on the safe side, users should, in the authors' opinion, deregister all unnecessary URIs - without, however, elucidating which are superfluous.'"

juct writes "Although the Mozilla developers have fixed a known hole in the password manager of Firefox & Co, a door remains open for exploitation. According to an article on the heise site, hackers can still use JavaScript to steal passwords from users of the Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari browsers. However, the real problem might not be Firefox' password manager. If users can set up their own pages containing script code on a server, the JavaScript security model breaks. Heise Security demonstrates the possible password theft in a demo. 'From the users' perspective, this means that they should not entrust their passwords to the password manager on web sites that allow other users to create their own pages containing scripts. Otherwise somebody can easily create a page that steals the password as soon as the page is opened ... Users could also disable JavaScript or use add-ons such as NoScript to set up rules to provide additional protection. In the age of Web 2.0 this would, however, mean that many pages would cease to function. On the other hand it is doubtful that by not using a password manager security levels would be raised, since the resultant need to remember passwords often induces users to choose simplistic passwords and use them on multiple sites.'"

juct writes "The FBI has used PC spyware for the first time to reveal the identity of an offender who sent bomb threats to a high school in Washington state. According to heise Security, a declaration from the FBI official who applied for the search warrant describes the mode of operation of the spyware which the FBI is using under the abbreviation CIPAV (Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier)."

An anonymous reader writes "At the Black Hat Conference in Amsterdam, security experts from India demonstrated a special boot loader that gets around Vista's code-signing mechanisms. Indian security experts Nitin and Vipin Kumar of NV labs have developed a program called the VBootkit that launches from a CD and boots Vista, making on-the-fly changes in memory and in files being read. In a demonstration, the 'boot kit' managed to run with kernel privileges and issue system rights to a CMD shell when running on Vista, even without a Microsoft signature. The demo was run on Vista RC2. The researchers say the only reason they didn't do it on Vista final was cost. Schneier blogged the exploit."

juct writes "In the wake of heise Security's report on the garrulous WGA Notification, Microsoft has now supplied additional details on the data sent. They have revealed to developers that apparently all updates relay information to the company in Redmond."

juct writes "In the wake of heise Security's report on the garrulous WGA Notification, Microsoft has now supplied additional details on the data sent. They have revealed to developers that apparently all updates relay information to the company in Redmond."

Palljon1123 writes "A stack-based buffer overflow in the Snort intrusion detection system could leave government and enterprise installations vulnerable to remote unauthenticated code execution attacks. The flaw, found by researchers at IBM's ISS X-Force, affects the Snort DCE/RPC preprocessor and could be used to execute code with the same privileges (usually root or SYSTEM) as the Snort binary. No user action is required." Sourcefire has an update to fix the vulnerability in versions 2.6.1, 2.6.1.1, and 2.6.1.2; Heise Security spells out the workaround for the 2.7.0 beta version.

An anonymous reader writes "Opera 9.10 released in December seemed to be a rather cosmetic update. But as heise Security reports, behind the scenes Opera patched two remote code execution holes — neither of them mentioned in the changelog. In addition, Opera rates an exploitable heap overflow as 'moderate' because it is 'not trivial to exploit it reliably'. From the article: 'JPEG images can be specially prepared to cause a buffer overflow on the heap. Even though Opera suggests in the heading to its security notice that this problem only causes the browser to crash, the flaw can nonetheless be exploited to inject and execute code. Security service provider iDefense, which reported the hole to Opera, has confirmed this. The same holds true for a flawed type conversion in the JavaScript support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Attackers can specially call the function createSVGTransformFromMatrix to have the browser execute code with the user's rights.'"

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "Heise Security did a year end review — for the upcoming year 2007. In their crystal ball they see P2P bots, (almost) crashing stock exchanges, dropping prices for zero day exploits and private mails of gmail users published on the google search engine." Speculatory and amusing.

An anonymous reader writes "Ever wondered, how P2P software like Skype directly exchanges data — despite the fact, that both machines are sitting behind a firewall that only permits outgoing traffic? Read about the hole punching techniques, that make a firewall admin's nightmares come true."

juct writes "PHP security holes have a name — quite often it was Stefan Esser who found and reported them. Now Esser has quit the PHP security team. He feels that his attempt to make PHP safer "from the inside" is futile. Basic security issues are not addressed sufficiently by the developers. Zeev Suraski, Zend's CTO of course disagrees and urges Stefan to work with the PHP development team instead of working against it. But given the number of remote code execution holes in PHP apps this year, Esser might have a point. And he plans to continue his quest for security holes in PHP. Only that from now on, he will publish them after reasonable time — regardless if a patch is available or not." Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Zeev Suraski wrote in to protest: "I'm quoted as if I 'point fingers at inexperienced developers,' and of course, there's no link to that — because it's not true! The two issues — security problems in Web apps written in PHP, and security problems in PHP itself — are two distinct issues. Nobody, including myself, is saying that there are no security problems in PHP — not unlike pretty much any other piece of software. Nobody, I think, argues the fact that there have been many more security problems at the application level, then there were at the language level. I never replied to Stefan's accusations of security problems in PHP saying 'that's bull, it's all the developers' fault,' and I have no intention to do it in the future."

juct writes "PHP security holes have a name — quite often it was Stefan Esser who found and reported them. Now Esser has quit the PHP security team. He feels that his attempt to make PHP safer "from the inside" is futile. Basic security issues are not addressed sufficiently by the developers. Zeev Suraski, Zend's CTO of course disagrees and urges Stefan to work with the PHP development team instead of working against it. But given the number of remote code execution holes in PHP apps this year, Esser might have a point. And he plans to continue his quest for security holes in PHP. Only that from now on, he will publish them after reasonable time — regardless if a patch is available or not." Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Zeev Suraski wrote in to protest: "I'm quoted as if I 'point fingers at inexperienced developers,' and of course, there's no link to that — because it's not true! The two issues — security problems in Web apps written in PHP, and security problems in PHP itself — are two distinct issues. Nobody, including myself, is saying that there are no security problems in PHP — not unlike pretty much any other piece of software. Nobody, I think, argues the fact that there have been many more security problems at the application level, then there were at the language level. I never replied to Stefan's accusations of security problems in PHP saying 'that's bull, it's all the developers' fault,' and I have no intention to do it in the future."

jginspace writes "As per the advance notification, Microsoft's monthly security bulletin, released yesterday, addressed five general Windows issues and one in Visual Studio. It also included a fix for a problem in Outlook Express for a total of seven updates. As patch Tuesdays go it was fairly unremarkable. The only general Windows update labeled 'critical' is for a flaw in Media Player. As usual, there's a cumulative update for Internet Explorer, but significantly, the only versions of IE affected are 5 and 6. Version 7 is clean — which is welcome news in this first update since the upgrade was pushed to the world last month. Microsoft was silent on the two zero-day Word holes, one reported here and a new one. Sans is calling this 'Black Tuesday' and recommends patches be applied urgently for the Visual Studio and Media Player vulnerabilities. Sans is recommending the Heise Offline Update utility covered in a previous story."

Karsten Violka writes "Looking for manageable Windows updates even without an internet connection? Heise's script collection Offline Update 3.0 downloads the entire body of fresh updates for Windows 2000, XP, or Server 2003 from Microsoft's servers in one fell swoop and then uses them to create ISO-Images for CD or DVD. Included is an intelligent installer script that allows you to update as many PCs as desired." Sounds like a great idea, given the danger of putting an unpatched PC on the Internet to download security updates.

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "Heise Security has a report about new Proof of Concept virus for Mac entitled as OSX.Macarena by AV vendor Symantec. Symantec suffered from a slight lapse when it recommended in the first version of the virus description that users clean the system by deactivating the system restoration (Windows ME/XP). It is known that the virus infects other data in the folder in which it is started, regardless of extension, says Heise."

An anonymous reader writes "Heise Security is reporting that the Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications is entertaining the idea of utilizing the 'Superintendant Trojan', a spyware program designed to allow eavesdropping on VoIP conversations. According to ERA IT Solutions, the creator of the software, it will only be distributed to investigation agencies in the hopes of keeping it out of the hands of malicious hackers since firewalls apparently 'do not present a problem' for the software."

mrogers writes "Following on the heels of last year's collision search attack against SHA-1, researchers at the Crypto 2006 conference have announced a new attack that allows the attacker to choose part of the colliding messages. "Using the new method, it is possible, for example, to produce two HTML documents with a long nonsense part after the closing </html> tag, which, despite slight differences in the HTML part, thanks to the adapted appendage have the same hash value." A similar attack against MD5 was announced last year."

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "The antivirus specialists at McAfee have warned of a Trojan that disguises itself as a Firefox extension. The trojan installs itself as a Firefox extension, presenting itself as a legitimate existing extension called numberedlinks. It then begins intercepting passwords and credit card numbers entered into the browser, which it then sends to an external server. The most dangerous part of the issue is that it records itself directly into the Firefox configuration data, avoiding the regular installation and confirmation process."

An anonymous reader writes "For the new Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats, Hollywood implemented a complete copy protection scheme; almost everything has to be encrypted and authenticated. Despite the crypto-stuff in Advanced Access Content System and High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection, they left the backdoor wide open — they forgot about the PrintScreen button. Using this function you can create exact digital copies of a film picture-by-picture and reassemble them into a stream."