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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.
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
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.