Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 68

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 68

Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist, Ron Gula, CEO/CTO, and Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • Nessus App for iPhone - The Video
  • Passively Detect all of your Exploitable Vulnerabilities - PVS 3.4 Released
• Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials, including the new 3D Tool Beta.


• We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable web site 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 various announcements, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Stories

• Kaspersky Source Code Leaked - Turns out an former employee had distributed copies of the software. This is a tricky thing to defend against, since how do you know if one of your employees is stealing source code? Sure, many would say that you need to limit and control access to the source code, but you still need to allow the developers to access it. Now, antivirus software in particular probably gets a high bounty on the computer underground because if you could analyze the source code directly, you stand a better chance of making malware that is more resilient. The former employee of Kaspersky was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison.

• Smartphone Botnet Code & Video - Unfortunately I was not able to attend this talk at ShmooCon, however, this is a really neat showcasing of mobile phone technology. And why not use SMS to control your Android phone botnet! Attackers can use this to send SMS spam, force your phone to make calls and more. The nice part is that most people don't update their phone or pay attention to security on mobile devices so if you stay stealthy you could create quite a large botnet. With 4G phones coming out as well, you will have plenty of bandwidth too, and I think this will drive more and more attackers to this medium.
• Plug and Prey: Malicious USB Devices - Adrian Crenshaw (a.k.a "Irongeek") has done a fantastic job of writing up how different malicious USB devices work, and more importantly what you can do to detect them. I really appreciate Adrian's efforts in this area, especially the details on detection and defense.
• Tapping 802.1x Links with "Marvin" - 802.1x was really big when I was working for a university. It was around 2003 and everyone was being hit by worms. If a workstation or laptop that was infected plugged into the network, all vulnerable hosts could be infected very quickly. Then along came NAC, which relies on 802.1x. It sounded great in 2003, and for the most part would challenge the user before getting on the network, even checking to see that they are not going to spread a worm. However, attackers have found many ways around this technology, including the bridging technique employed by this tool. If you are trying to keep attackers off your network, NAC may not be for you. I tend to lean towards getting the printer's IP address from the control panel, and then unplugging the printer and using the network jack (Joe Mcray made reference to this in his talk at Brucon as a way to bypass NAC).
• Asterisk Buffer Overflow in SIP Channel Driver Lets Remote Authenticated Users Execute Arbitrary Code - If you are an authenticated user of an Asterisk server, using the caller ID field can trigger a buffer overflow. I like flaws like this because the attack comes from an authenticated user, so people think "oh, I have a firewall so I don't need to patch it". What if someone compromises a workstation and uses a soft phone? What if phones in your environment have vulnerabilities? Now you give the attacker control of your phone system, which only leads to bad things.
• Lab Discovers 50 Millionth Virus - "That comes out to about 55,000 new viruses each day, 2,300 per hour, 38 per minute, and one every two seconds, according to Website AV-Test." Whatever the numbers work out to, there is a lot of malware in circulation. What I don't understand is that so many people are still focused on "can attackers get into my network" and "I don't need to test against 0-day exploits". What I believe people need to come to grips with is that malware has infected machines on the inside of your network and it contains 0-days. Now what defenses do you have in place to detect, monitor, react and prevent bad things from happening?