Tenable Network Security Podcast Episode 114 - "0day exploit sales, software backdoors, Wifi everywhere"

Hosts

• Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist
• Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher
• Ron Gula, CEO/CTO

Announcements

• Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials. The "Top Ten Things You Didn't Know About Nessus" videos have been posted from #10 through #2, so check them out!
• We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable website for more information about open positions.
• You can subscribe to the Tenable Network Security Podcast on iTunes!
• Tenable Tweets - You can find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tenablesecurity where we make product and company announcements, provide Nessus plugin statistics, and more!
• Want to ask questions about Nessus, SecurityCenter, LCE, and PVS and get answers from the experts at Tenable? Join Tenable's Discussion Forum for custom scripts, announcements, and more!

New & Notable Plugins

Nessus:

• LDAP 'Domain Admins' Group Membership Enumeration
• PHP 5.3.9 'php_register_variable_ex()' Code Execution (intrusive check)
• phpLDAPadmin lib/QueryRender.php base Parameter XSS

Passive Vulnerability Scanner:

• Mozilla Firefox 10.x 10.0.2 'png_decompress_chunk' Integer Overflow
• Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.x 2.7.2 'png_decompress_chunk' Integer Overflow
• Mozilla Thunderbird 10.x 10.0.2 'png_decompress_chunk' Integer Overflow

Stories

1. '0-day exploit middlemen are cowboys, ticking bomb' | ZDNet - Christopher Soghoian claims that companies such as VUPPEN, FinFisher, and others are buying and/or discovering 0day vulnerabilities, writing or buying exploits for said vulnerabilities, then potentially selling them to foreign countries, where they are used against US targets. The article seemed to lack some evidence that this has actually occurred, but warns researchers not to sell exploits to so-called shady companies as its likely that it will end up in the wrong hands. This is a tough thing to regulate, control, or otherwise police, as international laws don't really apply to 0day exploits, as they do to say, nuclear materials to use in a bomb.
2. Southwest Airlines iPhone app vulnerable to hackers, study says - "Because the app submits username and password information as plain text to a remote server, a potential attacker can simply sniff for the data." Really?!? I love this app too and used to use it all the time, until I read the article. Makes me wonder just how many other apps suffer from this problem, and how quickly we will get a fix, if at all.
3. Horde Groupware contains backdoor - The H Security: News and Features - "Users who have installed a hacked version onto a server have thrown their systems wide open to the hackers – the backdoor enables them to execute arbitrary PHP code." This is one of the dangers of using open source. Oh wait, actually, this is one of the dangers of using anyone's software. There is always a possibility that the software itself contains a back door. This is an important exercise for everyone to go through. Run through a scenario where your "bullet-proof" systems and security measures have to deal with software that is "pre-0wned," and make sure you can detect if this happens, and quickly.
4. Using Metasm To Avoid Antivirus Detection (Ghost Writing ASM) - Really neat and technical article on how to use metasm to modify payloads so they are not detected by anti-virus.
5. Learning The Offensive Security: Bypassing Web Application Firewalls with SQLMap Tamper Scripts - Tamper scripts change the encoding and use other methods to bypass the filtering of web application firewalls.
6. Exploiting Sudo format string vulnerability - Nice article on creating an exploit for sudo, which is ironic because sudo is supposed to help add some security, but here we are using it to gain more privileges on a host via a format string vulnerability.
7. WordPress Security: Plugins and Vulnerability Scanning Tools - While it's good to use specialized tools to find vulnerabilities in Wordpress, most regular users are not going to do this. Also, I don't believe the tools shown here will find 0day vulnerabilities in WordPress. So, two things. One, hopefully Wordpress is using these tools to find any vulnerabilities they may not know about and patching them. Two, you can skip this whole process and just make sure you are on the latest version of Wordpress. Finally, nice mention of Nessus in this article.
8. Should we be focusing on vulnerabilities or exploits? - "If you’re in charge of product security, your official job description is probably something like 'make our products secure.' But in all likelihood, your effective job description, as your employer sees it, is more akin to 'make our products perceived as secure.'"I also believe that vendors put too much faith in the old "oh well, there's no exploit for that vulnerability yet" mentality. In the end, it doesn't matter, you should be correcting all of the security flaws. Yeah, good luck with that Adobe.
9. anti-virus rants: is the iphone really malware free? - Well, Apple doesn't want people to think there is.
10. How to survive the RSA and BSides Deconfalon - Advice for first-time attendees.
11. Adobe ships zero-day vulnerability patch for Flash Player - Just a word to all of our customers, be certain to keep up with Adobe updates. I am still working on getting Backtrack 5's Flash player updated, but not having much luck yet!
12. Russian polling cameras face DDoS attacks - One thing to be aware of, make sure your security tools and monitoring devices are not prone to vulnerabilities.
13. Intel Chefs Bake WiFi Into Mobile Chips - WiFi for everyone and everything! This means a couple of things. You will see more devices with Wifi, and as a result, you will see more open networks and easily guessable WPA pass phrases. Because, who wants to enter a 14-digit password into your wristwatch?