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Two channel authentication
I’m no Bruce Schneier, so I welcome the comments of any more informed and/or more intelligent readers (which shouldn’t be too hard ;-)). Two factor authentication is the buzz these days, it’s the silver bullet of the security industry. To provide a short explanation (which will almost certainly leave out essential facts and get others…
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Computer immune system
Disclaimer: this post (as all the others) are my personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the opinions of any of my past or current employer. From time to time I get questions from people like: how to best secure my computer? or which security products to use?. Other times they me is product X…
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Input validation
The month of PHP bugs is over, but you should still watch the PHP-Security blog, since there are good things coming from there, like this article: Holes in most preg_match() filters. Go read it if you are using regular expressions for input validation. Two tips to avoid these pitfalls: Cast your input to the datatype…
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How to submit suspected malware samples?
A quick tip: if you have file(s) which you suspect that are malicious, submit them to any of the following places: VirusTotal VirScan Jotti’s malware scan Virus.Org Rogue File Scanning Service Virus Chief FilterBit NoVirusThanks Beside the fact that these sites will eliminate or enforce your suspicion (based on the number and types of detection…
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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…
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How not to get your application signed by AV
Disclaimer: these are my own opinions and they do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of any of my current or past employers. There is a class of applications which can be categorized as greyware: programs which can be used for both good and evil. A few examples (in no particular order): nmap, the…
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Mobile malware – hype or not?
I’m not entirely dead yet, just very busy 🙂 Anyway, I came across this blog posting (Mobile Virus FUD) which in turns references this article about Kaspersky Labs (not the one at heise security as I stated – erroneously – before). Before we continue, a disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed here are my own…
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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…
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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…
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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…