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Showing posts with label zero day exploit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zero day exploit. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

XP still Continues though "eXPired"

1.    XP has now got the authorized prefix and suffix to get renamed as "eXPired" since it has been now officially announced by Microsoft as discontinued and has advised XP and Office 2003 users to migrate to Windows 7 and Office 2010 and thus systems are left vulnerable to new forms of malware. No further support to XP...no patches to update...no updates by Microsoft.....but certainly it will take time for XP to get disowned by more then a decade old loyal user population most of whom made their first PC experience with a XP machine...for a home guy who surfs net...it will be difficult to make him/her understand about how vulnerable he/she is now....actually very difficult.

2.    But what about the corporates and govt sector offices? I am sure private sector will make a fast change since it may adversely effect their business model in case of a undesired info leakage or a hack!!!Only recently I made a visit to a post office in Delhi for doing a speed post...wherein the dedicated  loyal postmaster was using a xp machine connected to Internet.I informally asked him about any upgrades in OS planned in their department to which he replied confidently that it's not required since it is working fine.Today the Indian postal department is slowly getting online.Today thanks to vision implementation of the government(though late) that we are able to locate the movement of a speed post letter...what time it was opened..whats the location and when it got delivered...etc etc..but all this can go waste and get a setback if the backbone nodes are not updated and monitored....more so if the staff handling all the machines are low on security aspect.

3.   Well...this postal department is one of the examples cited here since I just interacted with one of them today...but the risk stakes are high when we see this at national level...all the online-governance machines located in remote areas...have they been ensured removed of XP?....if it has not been done....this can be just on the lines of zero day exploits...in this case there must be millions of machines thrown open to hacking....and invasion to classified information.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Keep Changing Your Antivirus : CRUDE but EFFECTIVE Solution to curb Virus menace

1.    We all understand the importance of anti virus today.From a naive user point of view, a user can go for the cheapest of the lot or may be if some one is worried enough he would go for the costliest one....but does that matter in an overall context? I mean w.r.t to the serious business model that this antivirus corporate sector has emerged like....lets see it here down below that brings out the country association of each leading antivirus company :

AVG                                                        :  Czech Republic

Kaspersky                                                :  Russia

Avast                                                        :  Czech Republic

Norton Symantec                                      :  U.S

Avira                                                         :  Germany

E-Set                                                        :  Slovakia

F-Secure                                                   : Finland

McAfee                                                     : U.S

MSE(Microsoft Software Essentials)          :  U.S

Panda                                                        :Spain

2.   Sadly we see,there are no Indian companies in this short list.Besides these,if we get specific to India we can quote two companies viz : Quick-heal and K7 Computing..well....that's not the point that I am here to share....the thing to note here is that all these leading companies have got a affiliation with some other country and none is Indian.So when we blindly load a antivirus or a internet security suite in our systems just on faith and word of mouth publicity from peers and friends...are we doing the right thing ? Do we know what is running in the background ? In the name of uploading our dumps what actually goes to their servers? What information does it contain?How does that company identify a virus or a malware?what's the logic that finds a virus?...all these questions are critical because this all is happening in our own machines.....but most of us hardly bother about all this...coz we have faith!!! :-)...and also because there are no standards existing for defining a QR for a antivirus....there is none to cross check what's being cooked?

3.  Besides having a question mark  on the privacy issues...lets think about the logic being applied or the signatures being released to thwart the known threats....but do we know that more then the known virus list it is the ZERO DAY threats that are getting serious by the day....off-course few bright companies are trying to check that by working on behavioral aspects of a virus or a suspected file...but that has it's set of constraints and is often limited in detecting....so whats the solution.....i recommend using all trial versions for a month each of all leading companies that will pass your one year and then format your windows PC and then start again.....a cheap...crude method of using the best without spending a penny!!!!!!!!!!!!

4.   By the way,just for info...virus detection by various companies have their own speeds...a company like kaspersky may be able to detect a virus soon and another company may detect it later or may not even at times detect one....and this time lag of detection is critical to all users!!!!!a second of compromise is enough on your PC with loads of bytes to upload in a matter of a seconds!!!

Comments invited!!!!



Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Internet Explorer : Vulnerable as always!!!


1.   Microsoft IE vulnerability CVE-2012-1889 is the latest to generate interest amongst avid cyber security readers. The special thing about this vulnerability is that it focusses on users using Gmail, MS Office and Internet Explorer. And the sad thing is that this is still a ZERO day exploit...... Rapid 7,Security software company,explains the vulnerability as follows:

“This is an uninitialized memory bug found in MSXML. According to Microsoft, such a component can be loaded from either Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. This vulnerability is rumored to be “state-sponsored”, and what makes it really critical is it’s still an 0-day hijacking Gmail accounts. That’s right, that means if you’re using Gmail as well as Internet Explorer or Microsoft Office, you’re at risk. We expect this vulnerability to grow even more dangerous since there’s no patch, and it’s rather easy to trigger.”

2.    Whatever may say...majority of the users still by default keep using IE across the globe....when I see my own blog stats,about 60 % of the visitors use IE...and as we all keep seeing the exponential growth in the users of internet across the globe....but sadly the awareness level of how vulnerable they all are is unknown and is growing at a similar rate!!!

3.    Got the reference from here.Thanks https://community.rapid7.com.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Stuxnet : A Milestone in Malicious Code History

1. Stuxnet,the internet worm,intent of which was thought to effect Iran's nuclear programme has now taken a U Turn towards HINDUSTAN....

2. American cyber warfare expert Jeffrey Carr has assured the GoI,that China the originator of this worm which has terrorised the world since Mid 2010. Ascribing the break down of ISRO's INSAT 4B satellite a few months ago ,Carr said it is China which gained from the satellite failure. Although he re affirms that the conclusions are not definite.Invariably the effected systems are loaded with a Siemens software which have been specifically targetted to which Siemens has released a detection and removal tool.Siemens recommends installing the Microsoft patch for vulnerabilities and disallowing the use of third-party USB sticks.It is further contemplated that incorrect remotion of the worm could cause irrepairable damage.

3. Jeffrey Carr says "The satellite in question (INSAT 4B) suffered the power `glitch' in an unexplained fashion and it's failure served another state's advantage -- in this case China," he said.The connecting link between INSAT 4B and Stuxnet is that the Siemens software is used in ISRO's Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre ie S7-400 PLC and SIMATIC WinCC.Something about Stuxnet...these attack Windows systems using four zero-day attacks and targets systems using Siemens' WinCC/PCS 7 SCADA software. It is initially spread using infected USB flash drives. Once inside the system it uses the default passwords to command the software.Few intretsing things about this :

- Half a megabyte in size 
- Written in different programming languages (including C and C++) 
- Digitally signed with two authentic certificates which were stolen from two certification authorities (JMicron and Realtek) which helped it remain undetected for a relatively long period of time. - Capabable to upgrade via peer to peer.
- Eric Byres, an expert in maintaining & troubleshooting Siemens systems, expects that writing the code would have taken many man-months.

4. Stuxnet is a threat aiming a specific industrial control system such as a gas pipeline,satellite systems & power plants. The ultimate goal of Stuxnet is to sabotage the facility by reprogramming programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to operate as the attackers intend them to, most likely out of their working and identified boundaries.This worm represents the first of many milestones in malicious code history ,it is the first to exploit four 0-day vulnerabilities, compromise two digital certificates, and inject code into industrial control systems and hide the code from the operator. Whether Stuxnet will usher in a new generation of malicious code attacks towards real-world infrastructure,overshadowing the vast majority of current attacks affecting more virtual or individual assets—or if it is a once- in-a-decade occurrence remains to be seen.Stuxnet is of such great complexity requiring significant resources to develop—that few attackers will be capable of producing a similar threat, to such an extent that we would not expect masses of threats of similar in sophistication to suddenly appear. However, Stuxnet has highlighted direct-attack attempts on critical infrastructure are possible and not just theory or movie plotlines.The real-world implications of Stuxnet are beyond any threat we have seen in the past. 

5. When is India actually going to work for itself rather then performing across the globe...y is the world telling us that we are effected here...even in the case of SHADOWS IN THE CLOUD...we were told by the Shadow server foundation that our institutes have been compromised inspite of the fact that we have all it takes to take the IT world by storm...but we are all working for ourselves...and not for own country...cream is flowing out and getting outsorced..IT IS ACTUALLY SAD THAT THE WORLD KNOWS INDIA'S POTENTIAL BUT THE INDIANS DONT KNOW THIER OWN.....

Friday, October 08, 2010

RISK MANAGEMENT : Beware while u update with Patches

1. A zero-day exploit as discussed at an earlier post in this blog .....Some thing more to it...

2. A good extract straight lift from Infosecurity-magazine.com

"For a vendor, developing the update is not the part that takes time – testing is. We have more than 600 million downloads when we publish an update. If we “just” break 10% of the systems the update is installed, it would be a huge denial of service. So testing is the name of the game. How well is an unofficial patch tested?Often the vendor publishes workarounds (at least we do). This should be part of your risk mitigation strategy. Would the workaround be acceptable to buy you time?

How far do you trust the author of the unofficial update? How big is the risk that the update comes with pre-installed malware? The question immediately comes up: Why should we trust a vendor? Well, you bought or downloaded the software at the first hand – so, you decided to trust the vendor at the beginning.

What do you do once the vendor releases an update? Can you de-install the unofficial update?

Basically, it is a risk management decision, which should include at least the questions I raised above. Do not just run for the unofficial update – to me it should be really the last resort, if even!"

3. A good site to follow : Check out http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com
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