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The Twenty Most Critical Internet Security Holes
Ant writes: "A little over a year ago, the SANS Institute and the
National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC)
released a document summarizing the Ten Most
Critical Internet Security Vulnerabilities. Thousands of
organizations used that list to prioritize their efforts so
they could close the most dangerous holes first. This
new list, released on October 1, 2001, updates and
expands the Top Ten list. With this new release, we
have increased the list to the Top Twenty
vulnerabilities, and we have segmented it into three
categories: General Vulnerabilities, Windows
Vulnerabilities, and Unix Vulnerabilities."
That the top ten list of last year makes an appearance in the top 20 of this year?
Haven't we learned anything?
O.K. So some of them (no/weak passwords) are user related, but so many of them are admin related (bind vulnerabilities, IIS RDS vulnerabilities)
Don't any admins care about these?
Of course, inside a company network some of these problems can be ignored if that is the decision. R commands are useful, but I wouldn't want people using them across the internet to my machines... But at the very least firewall... Please.
Z.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
As far as the *nix vulnerabilities, I think that a large majority of Slashdot readers could name off NFS, Bind, Sendmail, rlogin/rsh as critical (and many have already disabled / blocked those services).
Just my $0.02
Ed
But rather the slacking sysadmins who do not keep up with the latest security patches. Like anyother form of security (i.e. virus scanning) they should be monitored and maintained on a constant basis.
I like fire ants. They are very spicy!
No.
There is a security hole where any user with physical access who randomly guesses the root password on the first try immediately gains full access to the system!!!! There is NO KNOWN FIX!!!!!!
m00.
Intuitive Linux
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Of course, all security holes are important.. but some are more important than others.
1. For instance, say you run a public Webserver.. then remote root-exploits are normally more important than local root-exloits.
2. Difficulty. If the exploit is very easy to trigger, then it's generally more important than a devilishly hard one.
3. Widespread use. Holes that are used by every script-kiddie or worm on the Web, is generally more important than others. See 2. as well.
4. Level of access. Exploits that lead to user-access is normally less important than exploits that lead to root-access. This is one of the advantages of most versions of UNIX/Linux vs. Windows. They are normally better at making sure services run as a less priviliged user, and not as root, thus making sure that any exploits in them do not lead to root-access... of course, there are exceptions.
I have worked for SANS in the past but I have to disagree with the way they compiled this list. The fact that there are a larger number of "vulnerabilities" for *NIX than Windows is misleading. I just bet the M$ people latch onto this "See, Windows is less vulnerable!" Even though most of the *NIX stuff is so old you rarely find it occuring in the real world.
What is more useful IMO is to have a ranking of these "vulnerabilities". Right now an unpatched IIS box can be hit even though you have it firewalled so only port 80 is open. With the *NIX stuff, the only way to hit a sytem via port 80 is bad CGI or a new exploit to the webserver software. And when was the last time an Apache exploit was released?
Look at the CVE numbers. That tells a tale of what is going on _now_. The number has the year and there are many of the *NIX exploits that are 2 years old or more. Many of the Win exploits are within the last year.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
Linux boxes are much more secure than any of the competitors. Solaris is getting better; UnixWare is pretty hopeless (see BUGTRAQ). NT is ... well, draw your own conclusions about NT. I feel much safer with a Linux server than with any other OS and the security just keeps getting better.
-sting3r
Until managers understand and treat computer security SERIOUSLY, the same basic weaknesses will remain.
One thing that helps is for companies to hire computer security specialists, and make this their primary job. Instead, many businesses that I work with expect their already-overburdened sysadmin or network administrator to "protect" the network, something he/she has never been trained to do. The average NT Administrator does NOT know much about network security. The new Win2K Security certification is a step in the right direction, but it is only a baby step.
-------------
"Against stupidity the gods themselves content in vain." - Schiller
Nah, I say non computer literate users... that is the biggest risk...
Think of the chaos one could start by simply emailing everyone instructions on how to 'protect your system', while in reality sending instructions on how to disable their firewalls... The amount of people that would fall for it would be insane!
No, I say the biggest vulnerability is lack of knowledge and ignorance.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
In one credible place with annotations and links are the most common problems. Sure most of them aren't news to /.'ers but they're likely news to lots of other folks and exactly the thing to light a fire under the PHB's of the world. It's almost a checklist of "Are these implemented and if not *why* not?"-items for the semi-technical and as such is invaluable.
My thanks to the SANS Institute and the NIPC for releasing such a well-written & useful document.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that all of those unix holes are silly. There is absolutely NO reason for RPC, rsh/rcp, LPD, sadmin/mountd or SNMP to be open to the outside world. Just no reason for it.
The very first thing you need for a secure network is a firewall. And not an opt-out firewall. An opt-in firewall. As follows:
Rule #1: block in all
Rule #2: block out all
There, now that the firewall is secure you can add rules to it to allow the specific things you need to flow into and out of the building.
Justin Dubs
I bet in certain cases Google's cache could be a big security hole too. One that springs to mind is how after 9.11 nuclear power plants removed a bunch of info off of their sites. I just checked, and these pages (now 404's) are still in Google's cache.
daed si luap
The most secure system is a Unix box run by a 40+ year old bloke who has seen the virtual deaths of more script kiddies than I've had hot dinners.
Actually Mainframe admins run pretty tight ships as well. Its a sad reflection on the new generation of admins that most of these are things the old school had never even thought of doing wrong. The current raft of virii are an example. The people hit had new school systems, the old school companies survived untouched.
Old blokes in a distant room of the organisation, possibly called "Gary" or "Dave" never seem to be doing much, but their network never fails.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
...is that, for the Unix vulnerabilities, most of them have long since been replaced by better, more secure alternatives. Where I work, nobody has used the word "telnet" or "rexec" for years. Nobody here runs sendmail, or sadmind, or SNMP stuff. It's basically a list of "don't ever use this ancient crap" tools.
But for the Windows vulnerabilities, they're all related to current, recent, flagship, "this is what you should be using" products. No alternatives within the Windows world.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
"Why is that dangerous?" I hear you ask? As we drive more and more traffic to a small number of ports (read: everything on port 80) because of draconian firewall and proxy servers, and even driving all traffic to one protocol (read: http) a large number of services will still be running, but will now be undetectable without traffic analysis, which is mostly voodoo technology right now. The bugs and security holes are still there, but now they are hidden from us because we've conditioned everyone that non-80 is firewalled (see SOAP and Microsoft's dotNET -- in order to avoid firewalling, they are basically going to do RPC over port 80 using HTTP!)
I agree that unused services need to be shut down, but at the source of the problem and not at the firewall. We need to encourage new protocols to make use of new ports so that we can manage thus stuff -- the more we drive traffic away, the harder our job will be. Please, if you are in charge of a firewall, take time to think about what you are doing to everyone else when you institute strict policies that only make you safer in the very short term. Not only are you hurting yourself, but you're giving your users and network a false sense of security.
Besides, the attacks de jour of late have all propogated over SMTP and HTTP, haven't they?
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Linux boxes are much more secure than any of the competitors. Solaris is getting better; UnixWare is pretty hopeless (see BUGTRAQ). NT is
Bullshit. You're lying to yourself. One OS is not automatically more secure than another. Notice the first problem they noted: Default installations of operating systems and applications. They meant all operating systems, they didn't say 'RedHat and Debian are pretty good, you'll probably be okay with them, or at least more okay than someone using Windows.' Not only is this the most important point of the article, all other vulnerabilities stem from it. They all exist because of complacency with the current state of security of a system.
Security is not determined by OS. Period.
A systems security depends on the administrator's vigilance in keeping up to date on patches. Sure, windows has had a lot of exploits lately, but how many of these exploits were not patchable? Hmm. Conversly, Linux and other Unix systems have been not as widely or at least as publically attacked lately. Is this because they have less holes? Redhat 7.1, about 6 months old has 23 security alerts listed. 7.0 and 6.2 both have over 60. So, there's likely likely more out there in 7.1. Many of these are critical and involve remote root exploits. Feel safe? I hope not.
(Li||U)nix can be attacked with the same efficiency of what we've seen happen to Windows systems in the past few months. Administrators aren't simply better because they admin unix boxes, that's proven in the article that 50% of the copies of BIND that were running in mid 1999 were vulnerable. It would make sense that a similar percentage of other security risks exist as well.
I'm not bashing Unix, and I'm certainly not saying that Windows is a more secure OS. Its a moot point. What I'm saying is that people who blame the OS for their mistakes are wrong. They're using windows as a scapegoat, and ignoring the real problem behind this.
Unix will be hit by one of these sometime or another, and it will be just as publicized because it will likely use the same distrubution methods as before, email.
Go back, read the article again, paying close attention to the generic problems they mention. These are the basic things that any admin has to look at, every day. A machine is never secure. You can be sure of that.
> This is like banning hammers just because people have been known to hit their thumbs with them.
This is like banning unguarded circular saws just because people have been known to slice off their thumbs with them. Guess what? Circular saws come with guards. If a tool is really dangerous, and can be made safer through simple solutions, then we use those solutions to make it safer.
Strings are a source of problems for a lot of programs, including well-known programs that have very experianced programmers working on them. Unit testing will never catch all bugs. Many languages - Ada/Java/C++/Perl - have string types that won't cause buffer overflows - ever. Using an unsafe tool when you have a safe tool at hand that will do the job about as easily is just stupid, whether or not you think you're good enough to keep yourself safe.