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$16,000 Bounty for Sendmail, Apache Zero-Day Flaws
Famestay writes "Verisign's iDefense is putting up a $16,000 prize for any hacker who can find a remotely exploitable vulnerability in six critical Internet infrastructure applications. The bounty is for a zero-day code execution hole on the following Internet infrastructure technologies: Apache httpd, Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) daemon, Sendmail SMTP daemon, OpenSSH sshd, Microsoft Internet Information (IIS) Server and Microsoft Exchange Server. 'Immunity founder Dave Aitel, who also purchases flaws and exploits for use in the CANVAS pen testing tool, says its doubtful iDefense will get any submissions from hackers. "It's very hard to exploit [those listed applications]," Aitel said. "IIS 6 hasn't had a public remotely exploitable bug in it. Ever." Several other hackers I spoke to had very much the same message, arguing that $16,000 can never equate to the amount of work/expertise required to find and exploit a hole in the six targeted technologies.'"
arguing that $16,000 can never equate to the amount of work/expertise required to find and exploit a hole in the six targeted technologies. Clearly, the so called experts aren't aware of the multitudes of enterprising folks living outside the inflated Western wage spectrum. For someone a little more eastbound, that's a nice chunk of change.
If you want to talk easy money think Sendmail.
It's a great reward if you've stumbled across a hole. Also, you may be able to collect multiple bounties from different organizations for the same hole. I think the bounty system has plenty of merit.
IIS 6 hasn't had a public remotely exploitable bug in it. Ever.
How can that be? IIS is crap! Slashdot tells me so!
$16000 is not worth the time to make the internet safer. Now stop bothering me while I spend my time trying to figure out how to save $15 by cracking DVDs. After that, I'm off to steal some music.
Considering that creating exploits and/or publishing them is considered a criminal offense in some jurisdictions, I wonder how many submissions they'll get. Especially when a good unknown exploit could be worth far more than 16,000.
Hax-fu?
Also, you may be able to collect multiple bounties from different organizations for the same hole.
... but I bet breaking an NDA with the Russian mob could adversely affect your ability to work in the computer-security field in the future.
True
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wonder if the current rise in prizes being offered for discovering vulnerabilities in code might lead to some sneaky behavior.
1. Leave subtle flaw in your code
2. Share information with distant acquaintance
3. Profit!
Here are the terms of the challenge -
* The vulnerability must be remotely exploitable and must allow arbitrary code execution in a typical installation of one of the technologies listed above
Ok, so you pick some of the oldest and most robust technologies around - things that have had a LOT of the bugs worked out of them already and things are you're not that likely to have to pay out on.
* The vulnerability must exist in the latest version of the affected technology with all available patches and/or upgrades applied
* 'RC' (Release candidate), 'Beta', 'Technology Preview' and similar versions of the listed technologies are not included in this challenge
So you eliminate any upcoming versions, but you forget to exclude the previous versions....
* The vulnerability must be original and not previously disclosed to any party
So if I've already informed the software maker, it's out, further reducing the likelihood of any kind of a payment having to be made.
* The vulnerability cannot be caused by or require any additional third party software installed on the target system
Reasonable, but...and this is a big but....many things are quite secure on their own, but not so much so when you actually start using them. Prime example, Apache. Apache on it's own is fine. Install one of the open source PHP web apps and then see how secure it is. How many people run Apache serving up hand coded HTML?
* The vulnerability must not require any social engineering
This is because we all know that there is no patch for human stupidity...though I've never seen it admitted quite so blatantly.
PHOOEY ON YOUR CHALLENGE
It would take me a lot of man hours to come up with something, more to code an exploit for it and by the time I'm done...I'd be better off financially if I had worked at Wal-Mart for those hours. $16,000 divided by 4 (people on my team) = $4000 each. Let's say we spend 5 weeks on this. That's 200 hours each. That works out to having a chance to get $20/hr. And frankly, I think that 200 hours each is pretty optimistic. We're talking about pouring over their code base, becoming familiar with it, and looking for places that we can try to break it. That's in excess of 89,000 lines of code just for Apache and more than another 70,000 for Sendmail. Then we have to load it up, write some code to test the exploit, and run it to see if works. If it doesn't on the first try, it's rinse and repeat until we give up on that possible exploit and try a different one.
I'm guessing that this is more of a publicity stunt than anything else. Anyone in the industry should know better. This has to be something that the marketing poohbah's have dreamed up. Just more marketing hype so that they can say, "We're more secure than those other guys. We ran our challenge and we didn't get anything. These apps are safe to use."
2 cents,
Queen B.
HDGary secures my bank
Hax-fu?
"Do you sell it to those guys for $16K ... or do you see what Microsoft will pay you NOT to sell it to them?"
Neither. You auction it off to the highest bidding spamgang. Or so I've heard.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Yes because we all know the public exploits just sitting out there are totally ignored by hackers in favour of the um non-public ones. Ummmm .... so ..... IIS must therefore be insecure because surely we can't say anything good about it here. I mean it's a piece of shit because we can hypothesize unstated scenarios about it.
I think it does means a lot to many people when a piece of software has never had a publicly exploitable hole.
I guess some people reading this may be more used to Windows and therefore not entirely familiar with the functionality of the Unix packages that were mentioned. Allow me to summarise :
OpenSSH - A service you can install on a Unix system to enable remote admin access for known users.
Sendmail - A service you can install on a Unix system to enable remote admin access for complete strangers.
Hope this helps.....
What the fuck? Employee figures out way to save us $15 million. Employee parts with $1 million. Net savings: $14 million. So the company netted $14 million, and suddenly thinks this whole thing was a bad idea?
No comment.