I am a bit freaked.

Last month I received an email message from American Express.  I very nearly deleted it unread: it was obviously phish, right?  (I was teaching in Toronto that week, so I had even more reason to turf it unread rather than look at it.)

However, since I do have an Amex card, I decided to at least have a look at it, and possibly try and find some way to send it to them.  So I looked at it.

And promptly freaked out.

The phishers had my card number.  (Or, at least, the last five digits of it.)  They knew the due date of my statement.  The knew the balance amount of my last statement.

(The fact that this was all happening while I am aware from home wasn’t making me feel any more comfortable with it …)

So I had a look at the headers.  And couldn’t find a single thing indicating that this wasn’t from American Express.

(I had paid my bill before I left.  Or, at least, I *thought* I had.  So I checked my bank.  Sure enough, that balance had been paid a couple of days before.  However, I guess banks never actually transfer money on the weekend or something …)

A couple of days later I got another message: Amex was telling me that my payment was received.  That’s nice of them.  They were once again sending, in an unencrypted email message, the last five digits of my card number, and the last balance paid on my account.

Well, I figured that it might have been an experiment, and that they’d probably realize the error of their ways, and I didn’t necessarily need to point this out.  Apparently I was wrong on all counts, since I got another reminder message today.

Are these people completely unaware of the existence and risk of phishing?  Are they so totally ignorant of online security that they are encouraging their customers to be looking for legitimate email from a financial institution, thus increasing the risk of deception and fraud?

Going to their Website, I notice that there is now an “Account Alerts” function.  It may have been there for a while: I don’t know, since I’ve never used it.  Since I’ve never used it, I assume it was populated by default when they created it.  It seems to, by default, send you a payment due notice a week before the deadline, a payment received notice when payment is received, and a notice when you approach your credit limit.  (Fortunately, someone had the good sense not to automatically populate the option that sends you your statement balance every week.)  These options may be useful to some people.  But they should be options: they shouldn’t be sending a bunch of information about everybody’s account, in the clear, by default.

(There are, of course, “Terms and Conditions” applicable to this service, which basically say, as usual, that Amex isn’t responsible for much of anything, have warned you, and that you take all the risks arising from this function.  I find this heavily ironic, since I knew nothing of the service, don’t want it, and got it automatically.  I never even knew the “Terms and Conditions” existed, but in order to turn the service off I’ll have to read them.)

(In trying to send a copy of this to Amex, I note that their Website only lists phone and snailmail as contact options, you aren’t supposed to be able to send them email.)

It won’t surprise you if I say the achilles heel of the Internet is passwords. But the problem is not that our passwords are too weak: in fact, the bigger problem is that our passwords are too strong.

Preventing brute force password attacks is a problem we know how to solve. The problem is that web service providers have bad habits that cause our passwords to be less secure. Remember the saying “the chain is only strong as the weakest link?” If you are strengthening an already strong link in the chain but weakening another, you are not improving security and usually decreasing the overall security of the system. Those “bad habits”, mostly of web services that require a login, are all wrapped in supposedly ‘security concerns’: meaning some security consultant fed the CSO a strict compliance document and by implementing these rigid security methods they are actually making their users less secure.

Here are some examples.

Don’t you remember who I am?
What’s the easiest way to fight phishing? Have the web site properly identify itself. When the bank calls, most people don’t ask the person on the other side of the line to prove they are really from the bank (though they really should). The reason is you assume that if they knew how to reach you, they are indeed your bank.

So why not do the same for phishing? The bank of America uses Sitekey, which is a really neat trick. But you don’t have to go that far: just remember my username and I’ll have more confidence that you are the right web site. In fact, if I see a login page that does not remember my username I’ll have to stop and think (since I typically don’t remember all the usernames) and that gives me more time to spot suspicious things about the page.

If you can tell me what my username is, there are higher chances you are the legitimate site. But some sites block my browser from remembering my username, on the excuse of increasing security. Well, they’re not.

Let me manage my passwords

This is where most financial sites really fight me – they work so hard to prevent the browser from remembering my passwords.

Why? I can see the point when I’m on a public terminal. But what if I’m using my own laptop? By letting my browser remember the password I am decreasing the chance of phishing, and in fact if I know for certain a web site will let me remember the password (rather than force to type it in) I select a strong, complicated password – since I don’t have to remember it. In some cases I even stick with the random-assigned password; I don’t care as long as my browser remembers it.

But some people are stuck with “security!=usability” equation. They are wrong; in many cases usability increases security. This is one of those cases.

Not to mention they will almost always lose the fight. If paypal won’t let firefox remember the password, I’ll find ways around it. Or maybe I’ll just write a post-it note and put it on my monitor. All of those ways are less secure than firefox’s built-in password manager.

Oh, and forcing me to choose a strong password (‘strong’ being something absurd and twisted that makes no security sense)? Good luck with that. I don’t really mind these silly efforts just because they are so easy to circumvent they are not even a bother anymore. But just remember that putting security measures in place that will be circumvented by 90% of your users means teaching them not to take your security seriously.

Stop blocking me
Next week I will have my annual conversation with the Lufthansa ‘frequent flyer’ club support people. It’s a conversation I have at least once a year (sometimes more) when my login gets blocked.

Why does my login get blocked? Because I get the password wrong too many times. What’s “too many”? I wish I knew. Since I usually pretty much know what my password is, I get it right within 4-5 tries, so I guess Lufthansa blocks me after 3 or 4. I don’t know for sure, because I also need to guess my username (long story, lets just say Lufthansa has 2 sets of usernames and passwords and you need to match them up correctly). So the bottom line is that I get routinely blocked and need to call their office in Germany to release it.

Why are they blocking me? I’m guessing to prevent brute-force password attacks, and that’s a good thing. But why not release it automatically after a day? A week? An hour? Why not authenticate me some other way (e-mail)? I bet I can guess why: Because everybody that complains is told that “it’s due to security concerns”. Nobody can argue with that, can they? After all, security is the opposite of usability. Our goal as security professionals is to make our services not work, and hence infinitely secure.

So Lufthansa is losing my web site visit, which means less advertising money, and they are making me agitated which is not the right customer retention policy. Some credit card issuers like to do this a lot, which means I can’t login to see my credit card balance and watch if there is any suspicious activity. Now that’s cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Don’t encourage me to give out my password
How many web sites have my real twitter password? Must be over half a dozen, maybe more. If you are using any twitter client, you have given them your twitter username and password. If you are using twitterpic, or any of the other hundreds of web 2.0 that automatically tweet for you, they have your login credentials. Heck, even facebook has my twitter credentials – I bet Facebook can flood twitter in an instant if they decide to fight dirty.

Twitter wants me to use all these clients because it raises my twitter activity, and that’s ok. But there are plenty of single-sign-on methods out there, that are not too complicated, and are all more secure than spreading my real username and password all over the place. Even Boxee has my twitter login, which makes me think. If I was building a web 2.0 service and asked everyone who opens an account to give me their twitter login details – how many would do that just out of habit?
Giving my credentials is not necessarily a bad thing. Services like mint and pageonce are good because they make it unnecessary for me to login to all my financial web sites; the less I login the better: assuming these sites have better security than my own computer, I’d rather have them login to my financial accounts than me. This leap of faith is not for everyone – some will ask what happens if these startups go out of business. Cybercrime experts like Richard Stiennon will argue that an insider breach in one of those companies can be devastating. And of course Noam will say that until they’ve been scanned by Beyond Security he won’t give them any sensitive information. I agree with them all, and yet I use both Mint.com and PageOnce. So I guess it boils down to a personal judgment call. I personally think there’s value in these type of services.

Stick with passwords

One thing I am almost allergic to, is the “next thing to replace passwords”. Don’t give me USB tokens or credit-card sized authentication cards. SMS me if you must, but even that’s marginal. Don’t talk to me about new ideas to revolutionize logins. A non-trivial password along with a mechanism that blocks multiple replies (blocks for a certain period of time, not forever – got that Lufthansa?) is good enough. It’s not foolproof – a keylogger will defeat all of those methods, but those keylogging Trojans are also capable of modifying traffic so no matter what off-line method you use for authentication, the transaction itself will be modified and the account will be compromised. So Trojans is a war we have lost – lets admit that and move on. Any other threat can be stopped by simple and proper login policies that do not include making the user wish he never signed up for your service.
There are other password ideas out there. Bruce Schneier suggests to have passwords be displayed while typing them. I think that makes absolutely no sense for 99% of the people out there, but I do agree that we are fighting the wrong wars when it comes to passwords, and I think fresh thinking about passwords is a good thing. The current situation is that on one hand we are preventing our users from using passwords properly, and on the other hand we leaving our services open to attack. That doesn’t help anyone.

God bless the law that forces companies to disclose when they are hacked and customer information is compromised. Not only do we get a chance to protect ourselves but it also reminds us that this apparently happens more often then we would think.

This time it’s elance.com:

Dear (my account name),
We recently learned that certain Elance user information was accessed without authorization, including potentially yours. The data accessed was contact information — specifically name, email address, telephone number, city location and Elance login information (passwords were protected with encryption). This incident did NOT involve any credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers.
We have remedied the cause of the breach and are working with appropriate authorities. We have also implemented additional security measures and have strengthened password requirements to protect all of our users.
We sincerely regret any inconvenience or disruption this may cause.
If you have any unanswered questions and for ongoing information about this matter, please visit this page in our Trust & Safety center: http://www.elance.com/p/trust/account_security.html
For information on re-setting your password, visit: http://help.elance.com/forums/30969/entries/47262
Thank you for your understanding,
Michael Culver
Vice President
Elance

What I would like to see, is what “additional security measures” are they really taking. Also (and I’ll admit I have a one-track-mind) did they do a proper security scan to ensure the servers don’t have any holes? What were the results?

Somebody had to do it, and I’m glad it’s Aviv Raff who finally went for it. This is just the first of what I’m sure will be many twitter-related vulnerabilities.
There’s a lot to check in twitter, and I’m sure this will be an interesting month. While Aviv is bringing home the meat, here’s a question to ask yourself in the meantime: How many web services have your twitter password? More than 5? More than 10? How many of them are still active and what happens if one of them goes bankrupt and sells the list to someone?

Update: apparently this was fixed after a few hours. The power of “Month of Bugs” I guess.

A few years ago, the personal blog of the Iran president Ahmadinejad included a special piece of malware code that would only be displayed for Israeli IP addresses, attempting to infect Israeli machines visiting the site while preserving a seemingly harmless appearance for any western visitor that is not an Israeli. I thought that was quite a clever attack at the time.
But now the Iraqis are flexing their cyber-muscles too. According to a Hebrew article in law.co.il (this is not yet available on their English site, but may be soon), several domain names of Israeli government entities and large Israeli institutions have been registered by users outside Israel, some users having addresses in Iraq.

These domains use names with Hebrew characters, which are now available under the IDN. However, the method of typing Hebrew domain names is not in wide use and companies still prefer the English domains with the .il or .com suffix, which is why those Hebrew domains were available for purchase. Some of the domain names that were purchased include the Mossad, the Shabak (the “Shin Bet”), the IDF, Israel Police, Knesset, and several major banks.

Since the domain name is in Hebrew and contains the full name of the company or institution, it is incredibly useful for phishing attacks. law.co.il traced many of the domain names, particularly those of major ministries and public service names to a company called “ICU Agency” with a registered address in Baghdad. I’m sure there are other clever uses for such domains in war time that exceed simple phishing. With the speed in which news travel on the Internet these days, it shouldn’t be difficult to do some psychological warefare if you own “credible” domain names.

According to ITWorldCanada, C-level executives are pushing for greater access to social networking sites and facilities, while even IT managers and security specialists are unprepared to deal with the full range of risks from this type of activity.

In order to get some traction with senior management on this issue, you might want to remind them that, when they take off with funds they’ve obtained via fraud, it’s best not to post boasts on Facebook.

Dinosaur that I am, it never occurred to me that long URLs were a major problem.  Sure, I’d gotten lots that were broken, particularly after going through Web-based mailing lists.  But you could generally put them back together again with a few mouse clicks.  So what?

So the fact that there were actually sites that would allow you to proactively pre-empt the problem, by shortening the URL, came as a surprise.  What was even more of a surprise was that there were lots of them.  Go ahead.  Do a search on “+shorten +url” and see what you get.  Thousands.  http://bit.ly/ http://tubeurl.com/ http://www.shortenurl.com/index.php http://urlzoom.org/ http://ayuurl.com/ http://urlsnip.com/ http://url.co.uk/ http://metamark.net/ http://8ez.com/ http://notlong.com/ http://shorten.ws/ http://myurl.si/ http://dwindle.me/ http://nuurl.us/ http://myurlpro.com/ http://2url.org/ http://tiny.cc/

I would not, by the way, advise visiting that last.  .cc is a domain used by those on the dark side.  In fact, I wouldn’t recommend visiting many of those: I have no idea where they came from, except that a search pops them up.  Which is part of the point.

Are URL shorteners a good thing?  Joshua Schachter says no.  Therefore, in opposition, Ben Parr says yes.  There are legitimate points to be made on both sides.  They add complexity to the process.  (Shorteners aren’t shorteners: they are redirectors.)  They make it easier to tweet (and marginally easier to email).  They disguise spam.  Some of the sites give you link use data.  They create another failure point.  They hide the fact that most Twitter users are, in fact, posting exactly the same link as 49,000 other Twitter users.

URL shorteners/redirectors are going to be used: that is a given.  Now that they here, they are not going away.  Those of pure heart and altruistic (or, at least, monetary only) motive will provide the services, have reasonable respect for privacy, and add functions such as those providing link use data to the originator (and, possibly, user).  A number of the sites will be set up to install malware on the originator’s machine, to preferentially try to break the Websites identified, to mine and cross-corelate URL and use data, and to redirect users to malicious sites.

If you are going to use them (and you are, I can tell), then choose wisely, grasshopper.  There are lots to choose from.  Choose sites that offer preview capabilities.  If someone doesn’t use the preview options, you can still add them.  http://tinyurl.com/a-short-url-that-expands is the same as http://preview.tinyurl.com/a-short-url-that-expands : you just have to add the “preview.” part.  http://is.gd/ is even easier: just add a hyphen to the end of the shortened URL.  I’m hoping that one of the sites will start checking the database for already existing links, and returning the same “short form”: it’d make it easier to identify all the identical tweets.  (With the increasing use of the sites, it will also ensure that the hash space doesn’t expand too quickly, which would be to the advantage of the shortening sites.)

This is interesting:

Dear Vonage Member,

Your Vonage Account will expire in: January, 20 2009

This might have happened due to the following reasons:
- You did not accessed your account for more than a month.
- You have dynamic IP address and due to that our system might have interpretated it as a hacking attempt.
- You entered a wrong password 3 times when you tried to connect to your Vonage Account.

To avoid an account suspension, please click link below:

http://www.adsmirchi.com/vonage/login.htm

*We will check your IP address, time zone, and confront it with our database logs.

We are very sorry if this affects you in any way but our client’s security is a top priority for Vonage Inc.

Regards,

Vonage Security Team.

The link points to a phishing site that is stored in India and collects your vonage username and password. Go one directory up to see the complete kit.

This is a cute attack: you may be thinking, what can they possibly gain by logging into a vonage account? Well, Vonage has a useful feature of redirecting your calls to another number. If that other number is a paid service (or an international number, say, in India) you will pay extra and Vonage will pay that service provider (or telcom company). At that point, they just need to call your number and hold the line while counting the revenue coming in – very oldschool.

Attacking MD5 to create a rogue CA that is trusted by most modern browsers is a very cool attack. I have to admit that whenever I read about a practical cryptanalysis attack I feel a bit inferior: probably what a desk officer at the Pentagon feels when they meet a Marines soldier coming back from Iraq. It’s like I’m not a “real” security researcher – I only play with SQL injections and Cross Site Scripting when the real soldiers are in the field breaking algorithms.

I can’t remember many times when our team was impressed as much as they were when Zvi Gutterman gave us a talk about breaking the Linux kernel PRNG. That week, everybody stopped looking for buffer overflows and started reading Donald Knuth instead.

But inferiority complex aside, this hole won’t have much impact. SSL certificates are a great idea, that just doesn’t work. When SSL Certificates started, you only got one after the CA verified your identity. This involved sending them a bunch of documents to prove the company’s identity, and them giving you a surprise phone call to see if the information on the web site really matches the submission you gave them, and perhaps other subtle tests. It took a while to get a certificate and so having one meant “you” could be trusted.

But today, it’s hard to say who “you” are. Companies have many web sites for many different purposes, and it’s very difficult to deny them a certificate based on some logic. But it gets worse: SSL Certificates are so abused, that users don’t really care about them. I had two different banks show me certificates that generated browsers errors. Some valid google URLs still produce SSL warnings. This is apparantly so common firefox had to put a scary warning message on top of their regular, already scary, warning message.

So broken SSL certificates are ignored, and valid SSL certificate mean very little – until Firefox 3.0, you had to click on the little lock on the lower right corner to know who the company is behind the certificate. Now that you know – does that mean anything? Is the Banc of America  the same as the Bank of America? Pretty much, yes. So what about the band of america? They can apply for a valid SSL certificate and it will match the organiations name nicely.

SSL Certificates are long broken, and not because of a clever attack. However, the fact that there is an effective crypto attack against them may help bury this cadaver and perhaps help bring another solution to the surface.

I’ve been noticing that most of the spam I get (and nearly all that gets through the filters) arrives during the week, not the weekends. Actually, looking at my spam box, it looks like I receive around twice as much on week days than weekend days.

My point being, and I sure there are some good answers: Is spamming a full time job for a lot of spammers, or even a 40 hour a week job? I’d have to say for at least the dedicated ones, it probably is. Or, do they just figure more people check their mail on the weekdays?

Either way, spam sucks.

A woman working in HP Israel sent an email to hundreds of co-workers accusing (falsely) that a snack made by Osem, one of the largest food manufacturers in Israel and the local subsidiary of the Nestle food giant, is causing infant death.

This email quickly spread and the immediate result was a 6% drop in Osem’s stock in just a few hours.

The email wasn’t very sophisticated. It wasn’t even remotely true and the ministry of health immediately issued a statement confirming the rumour is false. Still, Osem – one of the largest companies in Israel – will see its stock down a few percent over this rumor.

Earlier this month, Apple’s stock went down following rumors that Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack. The Apple stock takes a beating every time that rumor surfaces, and that happens regularly.

Stocks going up or down because of rumors is old as the invention of the stock market. But the Internet makes it easier to create a rumor that reaches far and wide within hours; there is just one more component that is missing: credibility.

Imagine if you saw a news item on Apple.com that discussed the death of CEO and chairman Steve Jobs. Imagine if you saw a clarification text on Osem’s web site explaining that the ‘bamba’ snack is indeed suspect of poisoning infants. This is not difficult to do – I don’t really need to break in or deface the web sites for this to happen – I just need to find a cross site scripting vulnerability and use it for attack.

In fact, we made a quick proof of concept to the Tel Aviv stock exchange a few years ago when we planted a false news item using a cross site scripting attack. The reaction from TASE was familiar to anyone who ever reported a XSS vulnerability: “oh, this is not really a problem as it does not permanently changes the page” (for something that is “not a problem” they sure fixed it within the hour, though).

We’ve repeated this exercise almost every time our vulnerability scanning service found a XSS vulnerability and we had to explain why the report claims it’s a serious issue. We planted false financial reports in the ‘investors’ section, altered news items and in almost all cases, met with the standard reaction: “this is not a real vulnerability” and “how can this really affect me?”

Most security researchers opt to explain XSS as an attack for stealing cookies. While this is true, I think there’s a greater risk in altering the information on the page to visitors which could be useful in a phishing attack, or like the examples above, a speculative attack.

I’m waiting for the first XSS attack that will tank a big company stock. If you’re reading this, make sure your company won’t be the one.

AVG Technologies (formerly Grisoft) has been through a lot the last 17 years. Its almost considered an adult! From specializing in security software to… well actually they still do the same thing, they just focus greatly on antivirus and antimalware technology today.

In April 2006, AVG acquired Ewido Networks and bumped up their own antivirus’s version from version 7.1 to 7.5. Soon thereafter, Microsoft (!@#$) stated that AVG’s products would even be DIRECTLY available from the Windows Security Center in Vista.

Not cutting many corners, lets shift our focus now on AVG’s acquisition of Exploit Prevention Labs in late in 2007. AVG liked their ‘LinkScanner’ code and later released it in the next huge ‘revision’ of the AVG antivius suite, AVG 8. Now before I bash AVG 8, I will tell you that I used to be a big AVG fan. I always recommended it to everyone, whenever I had the chance. It WAS great — AVG offered advanced protection and ran so smooth and so clean. But at the moment, its bloated, clunky, very slow, a huge resource hog, and I am glad that I don’t have to use it. LinkScanner seems to have great intentions but has, so far, gotten off to a rocky start (or finish). A friend of mine warned me about it when it first was released, and I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, keeping it on the ‘good’ list. I just simply don’t like the fact that it has been near ruined recently, thanks to AVG’s poor decisions.

Just like in poker, “Its about making the best decisions”, and how true that is when you think about it for the software industry too. Everyone makes mistakes, but AVG: PLEASE BE GOOD AGAIN!

Recently Kaspersky, the company who makes your favorite, or not-so-favorite anti-malicious software, called upon government and banking institutions to be more secure. But is it really up to these agencies to make draw the perfect picture of security, or should the end users stop making such bad decisions, both on and offline?

If these ‘safety nets’ are deployed, it won’t going to make the best out of security situation, but it will help. On the other side of the packet, using outdated software or insecure browsers (cough!*IE*cough!) that do little or nothing to protect the web surfers, directly and indirectly, should also be of major concern. Wouldn’t it be something if, when accessing one of these websites running INSECUREBROWSER, it suggested you use MORESECUREBROWSER, FOR SECURITY REASONS IF NOTHING ELSE? Woah, wouldn’t that be a different color light bulb. Especially if it was something like, say, Internet Explorer VS Firefox (Yes, I am saying that Firefox’s security is better than Internet Explorer. I believe both core and rendering engines are better, too).

Now, if they try to regulate the internet with security laws and cyber architecture boundaries, its just going to be one big mess. If you’d like one reason it wouldn’t work, just think about how outlawish the internet already is, and has been, since its inception. Then take a break and elaborate on it. I’m sure you’ll find more than one reason we can’t import some crazy set of regulations and actually believe they are going to work and/or solve our problems.

Here is some more fuel for thought: How about separating the internet for low and high bandwidth data flow. Interconnected, but bridged. Not a good idea? Well why not? As long as we are on the same network, there will be fighting over who owns what (more than just headers and footers). But as long as we put the big with the small, there is going to be controversy. There are going to be debates. This last part may have been a little off topic, but I feel like it needed to be said. Security isn’t made, its planned and implemented before regulation begins.

I almost never mistype domain names, so I’m glad firefox was able to catch my error when I did:

(click the image for a larger version)
If you haven’t noticed (I didn’t notice myself in the first 3-4 times; I kept clicking ok and reloading, I thought firefox was acting up) the url is adwords.gogole.com. The good news is that the site is owned by google, so I wouldn’t have been phished in any case. The bad news is that google should have either redirected me to the right site or give me an error message instead of showing me the site with the wrong certificate. I know why they are doing it – it’s easier to do a domain catch-all then a redirect, but it’s not good in terms of user experience.

Firefox’s behavior is interesting too. Note that the warning I got was accompanied with a popup dialog that forced me to press ‘ok’ to get to to a second warning on the page itself.

If you don’t remember the typical error message, here is what anybody surfing more than a day with firefox has seen:

(click the image for a larger version)

This typical firefox warning tries to let me know something is wrong. The problem is, I’m seeing it so much that I’m adding exceptions left-and-right. In this case of the ‘gogole’ typo, the problem is more sever (gogole.com is claiming to be google.com) so I guess firefox decided to add a dialog box to the error. I’m not sure what triggers it and how often it’s displayed, but for me this is the first time seeing it, so my guess is that firefox is trying to keep it for the rare occasion when you need the user to understand the warning has escalated.
I wonder if the next escalation will be a warning siren through the speakers with a small electric shock through the keyboard.

Opera the web browser is apparently now great at one thing: following the standards.

Yesterday, Opera 10 Alpha was released and flaunted its 100/100 score on the Acid3 test, passing with all the colors of the rainbow this time. But honestly, Opera, like several other ‘alternative’ browsers (and if your a hardcore fan/follower, excuse me), is just trying to catch up with the old dogs.

Firefox in particular has had many of Opera’s ‘new’ features and ‘improvements’ for quite a while. Security issues in Opera, often simple and totally trivial bugs, have been found and released. Not saying more than other browsers; both Firefox and Internet Explorer have them doubled to say the least, but I just never could bring myself to trust this unique web browser.

Auto-update has just been put in place, and I feel, as a security researcher, that it is an extremely valuable mitigation tool when new exploits spring up. Thank God the development team FINALLY put this sub-standard feature in place. Presto 2.2 has taken things to the next level with most of these improvements, more details of which you can find for windows, mac, and ‘linux/unix‘.

Has security been incorporated into Opera recently more than ever? Maybe. Has Opera been built with security from the ground up? Certainly not. Pay attention to your favorite XYZ exploit/advisory feed for inevitable updates.

Randy Abrams recently pointed out to me that today is the 20th anniversary of the Morris Worm. For all you kids out there who have no recollection of this event, I’ve just posted a blog at http://www.eset.com/threat-center/blog/?p=165 that recaps on the worm and includes some relevant references, but right now I want to expand on a thought I had while I was writing it.

The Morris worm was very much of its time. It was a proof of concept (actually of several concepts) item of malware that showed a certain interest in and knowledge of some vulnerabilities that were current at that time (mostly a fingerd buffer overflow exploit and a somewhat flaky implementation of sendmail debugging), and was clearly meant to be self-launching. Most current malware, while it may well use drive-by downloads and other exploits, seems to use some form of social engineering. So maybe the earlier CHRISTMA EXEC worm was the real pioneer, with its mass mailing payload and its chainletter appeal to the gullibility of the victim. Well, we can draw dotted lines between old and new malware from now to Christmas, which is the sort of thing that interests saddos like me but doesn’t necessarily gain us much in terms of securing the internet.

Looking through some historical resources, it strikes me that there are some moments in malware history that not only define the time, but in some way draw a line under it, though Morris was followed by a copycat VMS worm the following year). After that, though, we waited quite a while for a real mass mailer epidemic and for the big network worms of this decade. Melissa managed to mark both the beginning of heavy duty mass mailers and the end (or at least the decline) of macro malware. Yet there are no full stops here. In 2008, we’re still seeing new(-ish) stuff cheek-by-jowl with the sort of malware we’ve mostly forgotten about: old-time boot sector viruses and new-age MBR rootkits; macro viruses and office suite exploits; overflows and drive-bys; and an endless loop of social engineering tricks (phishes, 419s, fake admin messages, fake codecs, fake updates…) The only really substantial change is the disappearance of the hobbyist hacker/malware author, promoted into full-blown cyber-criminality.

It seems that what we really need to patch is human nature: the evil gene, the greed gene, the careless gene, the “what’s a patch?” gene, the “I can click on anything because I have anti-virus software” gene…

David Harley CISSP FBCS CITP
ESET LLC