Messages

1

General Security Information / Interesting website

« on: February 28, 2006, 11:14:13 pm »

http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/

and my favorite part ..

http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/

2

General Security Information / Re: A cool idea

« on: February 28, 2006, 11:13:15 pm »

I think something neat would be if somebody found an exploit in Windows' wireless stack.  Write a worm for it that spreads by walking near somebody who is infected.  Release it quietly, and track the geographical progress.  It would be just like a people virus.

Something sorta like this has been discovered.

http://www.nmrc.org/pub/advise/20060114.txt

3

General Security Information / Re: Breaking Vista's filesystem encryption

« on: February 28, 2006, 11:01:55 pm »

Yeah, there is a difference between encryption, hashing, and encoding.  In this case, we're talking about encryption. 

But yeah, if they build a backdoor into their encryption, that would be stupid. 

Providing an example of something that can take ages to crack. ;x

4

General Security Information / Re: Lupper the Linux Worm!

« on: February 28, 2006, 10:54:53 pm »

Yes .. I'd say that's good.  There aren't many remote exploits that can target nix itself.

5

General Security Information / Re: Breaking Vista's filesystem encryption

« on: February 28, 2006, 12:04:56 am »

Hasn't encryption always been useless, though?  If you think about it, there's a plausible decryption for every encryption.  Sometimes it's blatantly obvious, sometimes it's not.

No, not useless.  If it was useless, it would be infinitely easy to crack!

Some encryption (by standard means) takes literally years to break.  By that time, the desired data is usually purposeless.

(md5)

6

General Security Information / Re: Lupper the Linux Worm!

« on: February 28, 2006, 12:00:44 am »

http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_136821.htm

Kind of neat. Too bad its exploiting PHP/CGI.

why too bad?

7

General Security Information / Re: Directly running a .zip, kinda

« on: February 21, 2006, 01:50:46 am »

Oh yes, an experienced sysadmin will stop a hacker with an exploit? Especially ones that allow a hacker to obtain control remotely.

Obviously experienced sysadmins do stop hackers with exploits.  Thus the intarweb exists today! HARR

So you presented an argument then took it down yourself then attempted to defend it again? Okay. Once they have access to the "make shift shell" it is more probable that there is already nothing that can be done right? Also not all hacks are found and documented right away because not all hackers help the security sites.

There's much that can be done. Remove the offending software, make sure that certain users&groups are given a null shell, update software, the list goes on. You are correct that not all vulnerabilities are published right away.  This is where those magical little things I mentioned called hardening patches come in.  Even w/out a hardening patch, disable wget/fetch/curl/gcc/etc for your user accounts that don't need them.  There are not many remote root vulnerabilites for *nix.

State the last one because other from this one I see no others in your post helping you at all.

Do I really have to? Ever notice how many people complain about spyware/adware? Why do you think all that keeps getting installed? It must serve a purpose somewhere .. oh yeah, that's right .. someone gets PAID to install that stuff. Who woulda thunk?

Also, see my edit.

8

General Security Information / Re: Directly running a .zip, kinda

« on: February 21, 2006, 01:26:32 am »

Linux boxes aren't the main target for quite a few reasons.

1. Persons running *nix usually have much more experience than your average windows user.  This in turn means that they usually have more experience implementing better security than your average windows user. 

2. Most major exploits for *nix are local, this means that you must already have some kind of access to a command line on the box to even try to execute the vulnerability. Sure more and more rce (remote code execution) exploits appear everyday, but this only gives the hacker access to a make-shift shell, and as I stated in point one, the average *nix administrator has more experience w/security, meaning most *nix boxes today have hardening patches installed (these tend to keep hackers out).

3. It is much harder to hide things on a *nix system.  If you haven't noticed, there are many different flavors of *nix.  This being true, it is much harder to develop a standard rootkit.  Sure shv5 works on a portion, but there are hardly any for freebsd.  In retrospect, if you look at windows there are numerous rootkits, backdoors, and ways to hide things away from the administrator.  Ever hear of ntfs streams?  So simple yet almost completey undetectable to the average user.

Also, if most 'hackers' targeted *nix so much it would get much more attention from the government.  I guess you've never seen what 17 kaitens can do compared to a couple thousand bots.  There are so many more reasons why *nix is a lesser target than windows to hackers, including one huge one that I didn't bother to mention.

EDIT:

To show how ridiculously insecure windows really is, here are a few public exploits:

http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1505
http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1504
http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1506
http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1502
http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1466
http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1420
http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1391
http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1352
http://milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1260

aww hell, there's too many to list so I'll just link the whole thing. http://milw0rm.com/parse.php?platform=windows