Category: exploit

  • Vulnerabilities and hype

    Take some vulnerabilities, don’t investigate the conditions which are needed to exploit them, and you got a good old fashioned security hype. The gist of it: there are some flaws in the ActiveX controls VMWare installs. The possible attack scenario for these vulnerabilities looks like this: The user has VMWare (or VMWare Disk Mounter for…

  • Month of PHP bugs roundup

    The month of PHP bugs is over and I thought that I make a little list with things you can do to mitigate the bugs where possible: Update to PHP 5.2.1 and watch out for the next version and update to it as soon as it comes out. Do not PHP4, because there is a…

  • Update on the Month of PHP Bugs

    The month is nearing to an end (but fear not, next month we will have a month of MySpace bugs it seems), and here are the latest developments: Two bugs using which you can bypass the open_basedir restriction. They are in the user-contributed PECL modules, so there is a chance that they will be fixed…

  • Month of PHP Bugs (MOPB) update

    As the days pass by, new vulnerabilities are disclosed on the Month of PHP bugs. An important (and very useful) change is that markings have been added to the main page which show the vulnerabilities that are not addressed in the latest (5.2.1) release and the ones which are not directly related to PHP (for…

  • Security Update – MOPB, DMA, etc

    First just a fun little post on Slashdot which debates what /etc stands for Now for the security related stuff: The Month of PHP Bugs continues with two new vulnerabilities. Fortunately these bugs were disclosed to the PHP team beforehand, so updating to the latest version solves them. Also, one of them is in the…

  • The progress of MOPB

    The Month of PHP bugs is progressing nicely and the counter is up to nine (at this rate – supposing that we have a linear progression – we will have almost 70 vulnerabilities!). The new ones repeat the same patterns as the previous ones: they can be mitigated in environments where a single user controls…

  • Month of PHP bugs started

    The Month of PHP bugs started off today with not one, but three bugs. Two of them can be protected against by using Suhosin (you might accuse the guy of some grey area marketing – but you can’t since his product is both free and open source) and the third by upgrading to PHP5 (because…

  • On disclosure

    Disclosure and responsible disclosure is a very much discussed topics these days as the MOAB (no, not that one – yes it is a cheap shot, but maybe there are people who didn’t read it on ten other blogs :)). Here is one blog entry which says: I completely disagree with the decision for security…

  • Cookie viruses? Me thinks not

    The only reader of mine had a question: what is my opinion about cookie viruses? (If you also read this blog, I apologize and also I’m werry happy in this case that I have more than reader. If you have questions or topics you would like me to discuss, please post them in the comments)…

  • Things you (probably) didn’t know about your webserver

    Today’s webservers are incredibly complex beasts. I don’t know how many of the people operating Apache have read the full specifications. I sure didn’t. So it should come as no surprise that there are hidden features in our servers (and some of them turned on by default), which can weaken our defenses. There are two…