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Java Zero-Day Vulnerability Rolled Into Exploit Packs
tsu doh nimh writes "The miscreants who maintain Blackhole and Nuclear Pack — competing crimeware products that are made to be stitched into hacked sites and use browser flaws to foist malware — say they've added a brand new exploit that attacks a previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in Java. The curator of Blackhole, a miscreant who uses the nickname 'Paunch,' announced yesterday on several Underweb forums that the Java zero-day was a 'New Year's Gift,' to customers who use his exploit kit. The exploit has since been verified to work on all Java 7 versions by AlienVault Labs. The news comes days after it was revealed that Paunch was reserving his best exploits for a more closely-held exploit pack called Cool Exploit Kit, a license for which costs $10,000 per month."
At this point there is no reason for most home user systems to have Java on them at all. Just uninstall it and remove this never ending hole from your life.
If you do need it for something (like Minecraft), you can remove it from the browser, which tends to also solve the security problems (unless the Java updater adds itself back in, which it's been known to do). Still a better option than just leaving it. There's very few websites left that actually use Java for anything today.
It sucks more in the corporate world, where there's a lot more Java and thus no easy answer for the security problems that plague it. But for home users? Just remove it and make your life easier.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
It would be very difficult to cull Java in an Enterprise environment that was build on it even if you wanted to. Convincing your Boss that you have to redevelop the entire system just to do it would also be a difficult task.
Seriously? This person is licensing an exploit kit for $10,000 per month and nobody has bothered following the money to shut him down? I have a hard time believing anyone could make $10K/mo doing this anyway. Wouldn't the first order of business by the exploit buyers be to make it work without the payments? What's the author going to do? Sue them for non-payment?
You know the difference between a browser plugin and the JRE?
Do you really think that having eclipse or matlab installed on your computer (both contain a JRE) makes it magically vulnerable?
Why would you not develop systemns in it, or rewrite existing ones? Just stop using the ridiculous browser plug-in. It's the new ActiveX.
At this point does any tech savvy user don't know the difference between the Java Runtime Environment and the Java Browser Plugin? Just disable/remove the plugin.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
These are the idiots who make life so difficult for legit network guys. That summary reads like George Washington just raided another British outpost. Whether for curiosity or profit, remember who the bad guys are!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I have been coding in Java for quite a long time and there are essentially two archetypes of very crappy coders:
1) The people who don't have what it takes to be a decent engineer (in any language) and are just creating horrible crap because that's the only thing they were taught in college.
2) The people who "Would rather be coding something else". Often (but not always) a bit older engineers who might not have had any education in Java and any understanding they do have (whether it's from formal education or from them having read half a book a decade ago) is horribly outdated and incomplete. They stubbornly insist that if some of the architectural structures that they learned decades ago for different type of applications and for different environments end up creating a bad Java application, Java is to blame.
The first archetype are useless but harmless: They write bad code but do so very slowly and don't dare to touch anything that looks intimidating which means they generally can't screw anything important up. The second archetype is who I immediately blame whenever I get a "WTF was someone thinking?" moment when looking at some major design decision.
For fun? Minecraft.
For work? Burp suite (there are other HTTP proxies, but none that do as well what I need them to do).
There's also things like Eclipse and NetBeans (developers are people too... even if they are Java developers), of course... Java begets Java, to a certain degree, and there's already so much Java out there that it's pretty much impossible to stop creating more of it anytime in the reasonable future.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...