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Security Company Says NASDAQ Waited Two Weeks To Fix XSS Flaw

Posted by samzenpus on from the better-late-than-never dept.

alphadogg writes "A Swiss security company said the NASDAQ website had a serious cross-site scripting vulnerability for two weeks before being fixed on Monday, despite earlier warnings. Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of the Geneva-based penetration testing company High-Tech Bridge, said he repeatedly emailed NASDAQ and warned of the XSS flaw. 'I can basically say I have spammed them,' Kolochenko said in an interview. A NASDAQ spokesman did not have immediate comment. NASDAQ.com lets users create accounts and build a profile to monitor stocks and news."

11 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Very difficult. by d33tah · · Score: 4, Funny

    What are you laughing at, it's clearly very difficult to fix one XSS vulnerability.

    1. Re:Very difficult. by cbhacking · · Score: 5, Insightful

      For the unaware: this is serious sarcasm. Fixing XSS is usually pretty trivial; just apply output encoding (usually HTML entity encoding, but there are other valid approaches) to the user-supplied data before reflecting it into the page. Even in weird edge cases, like where the user is explicitly allowed to insert their own HTML (Slashdot, for example) you can get around the problem by whitelisting certain elements and parameters, and rejecting (or removing, though this must be done carefully) anything which doesn't conform. It's A long-ago solved problem that some people still have incredible difficulty with.

      Doing security work myself, I've seen XSS fix times ranging from "within the hour" to "three weeks or so", and the median is probably about two days. I always wonder what the hell is up with the companies on the long end of that scale.

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
  2. Sounds like a fast response... by CajunArson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Despite the twitch mindset that many people on this website have about security vulnerabilities, fixing a bug like that and deploying the fix in only 2-weeks is excellent for any project (open/closed/otherwise) and is especially good for a large commercial service like Nasdaq.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    1. Re:Sounds like a fast response... by cbhacking · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Um... no. Fixing XSS is trivial. I work in this field myself; only a small percentage of our clients take more than a week to fix a reported issue, and many manage it same-day. This includes quite large and well-known software companies and websites, including in the financial sector (although I'll admit that the financial sector tends to be on the slower end of things).

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
    2. Re:Sounds like a fast response... by QilessQi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, taking the time to
      (1) evaluate the problem,
      (2) determine the best approach for a fix,
      (3) weight the time commitment against any other critical activities going on,
      (4) assign the best person to code it,
      (5) review the code,
      (6) rebuild and deploy it up through various testing environments,
      (7) test the hell out of it in each environment, and
      (8) deploy it into production
      in a mere 10 work days is excellent, given the importance of the system. That's what Enterprise System timelines are often like.

      If a major financial system like NASDAQ had managers run into the developer area and shouting "ZOMG someone fix this and slam it into Production now now now!", then I'd be more concerned.

      --
      Koans and fables for the software engineer
    3. Re:Sounds like a fast response... by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is such a thing as too much process, this would be an example.

      Besides all those steps should take a couple days tops.

  3. How about the real story today? by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The NASDAQ today had it's 3rd significant pricing problem in the past few weeks.

    http://www.nasdaq.com/article/options-exchanges-halt-trading-20130916-00868

    These guys seriously need to improve their reliability.

  4. Who cares? by Gizzmonic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, it's the NASDAQ website. Who goes the NASDAQ website? You can't trade stocks there. Financial information was not leaked, so BFD. This is fairly common on any website. Sounds to me like a single security research got butthurt because they didn't acknowledge his finding quickly enough.

    --
    (-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
  5. NASDAQ web site != NASDAQ trading system by JoeyRox · · Score: 5, Informative

    nasdaq.com is a simple front-end fluff site for viewing quotes and doing basic company research. No critical systems or customer data.

    1. Re:NASDAQ web site != NASDAQ trading system by MXPS · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Seriously. With all the actual issues they have been having with trading system I'm sure the vulnerability on the website was the least of their worries. It is like saying FBI.gov or NSA.gov has a vulnerability so all our countries secrets will be exposed.

  6. Re:good process is not trivial by NatasRevol · · Score: 4, Funny

    In reality,

    Dev gets email, updates code, posts to live website.

    He's just 3 weeks behind on email.

    --
    There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure