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Honing in on the need for more security in application development, IBM Rational is planning an enterprise-level product that features two separately acquired technologies for security testing and code scanning.
ecause Unicode contains such a large number of characters and incorporates the varied writing systems of the world, incorrect usage can expose programs or systems to possible security attacks. This is especially important as more and more products are internationalized. This document describes some of the security considerations that programmers, system analysts, standards developers, and users should take into account, and provides specific recommendations to reduce the risk of problems.
UK users are being offered a 'hardened' version of Mozilla Firefox that can secure access to online bank accounts, maker Network Intercept has announced. Although the security built into the browser is identical in its workings to the US version which has been available for some weeks, the Secure-Me browser does feature some necessary localisation.
This project will use one of the web attacker's most trusted tools against them - the Open Proxy server. Instead of being the target of the attacks, we opt to be used as a conduit of the attack data in order to gather our intelligence. By deploying multiple, specially configured open proxy server (or proxypot), we aim to take a birds-eye look at the types of malicious traffic that traverse these systems. The honeypot systems will conduct real-time analysis on the HTTP traffic to categorize the requests into threat classifications outlined by the Web Security Threat Classification and report all logging data to a centralized location.
Compliance pressures often push companies to make security improvements they wouldn't have tackled otherwise. More budget goes toward technology needed to protect customer data. New policies are created to rein in what employees do online with company machines. But there's a dark side to this story.
The SANS Institute and MITRE Corp. issued an update to the CWE/SANS Top 25 Programming Errors List last week, focusing mitigation techniques that could be adopted into the security development lifecycle to help avoid multiple security bugs. But one expert says that while the programming error list helps contribute to improving software development, actually getting companies to implement a more secure software development process is a different story.
When it comes to programming errors, some are more common than others. A new report from the SANS Institute identifies the top 25 programming errors that have led to nearly every type of IT security threat over the last year. The report draws on the input of 28 different groups including those in government and the private sector and leverages the CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) numbering system to label vulnerabilities.
Ksplice Uptrack is a subscription service that lets you apply 100% of the important kernel security updates released by your Linux vendor without rebooting. Ksplice Uptrack is freely available for the desktop versions of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic and Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. This tutorial shows how to install and use it on an Ubuntu 9.10 desktop.
While security vulnerability research can expose technical weaknesses that may be exploited, incident research provides in-depth information about the most common targets, motives and attack vectors of modern hackers.
Mark Cox, Director of Security Response at Red Hat, compiles a list of the top most serious security flaw types for 2009 and compares them with the past. During the creation and review of the list we spent some time to see how closely last years list matched the types of flaws we deal with at Red Hat. We first looked at all the issues that Red Hat fixed across our entire product portfolio in the 2009 calendar year and filtered out those that had the highest severity. All our 2009 vulnerabilities have CVSS scores, so we filtered on those that have a CVSS base score of 7.0 or above.
The Internet Storm Center (ISC) has made the effort to list the hash values of around 40 million programs contained in the US National Software Reference Library (NSRL) in a database in such a way that they can be retrieved via a web front end. This potentially presents an alternative to anti-virus scanners searching for malicious code.
The Live Hacking CD is a new Linux distribution packed with tools and utilities for ethical hacking, penetration testing and countermeasure verification. Based on Ubuntu this
This is a major release, incorporating enhancements and bug fixes that have accumulated in a year and a half of development since the 3.2.5 release. Apart from some new or changed dependencies on perl modules, this version is compatible to large extent with existing installations, so the upgrade is not expected to be problematic (neither is downgrading, if need arises). Please consult the list of known incompatibilities below before upgrading.
Members of the Open Source Club, a student group formed in 1999, are exploring the world of technology. Specifically, they are interested in open source software. The Open Source Club focuses
Do you manage Apache based web server farms with Web Application Firewall (WAF) requirements that revolve primarily around a need for central thresholding/rate limiting features? Have you found an open source WAF solution that fulfills this need? Well if you haven't, I take extra special joy in the public sharing of two open projects that I'm involved with, serving the roles of cheerleader ;), tester and injecting scope creep whenever possible to solve various forms of abuse.
The Insecure.org developers have announced the release of version 5.20 of Nmap, their popular network scanner and mapper. According to the developers, this first stable update since Nmap 5.00, released last July, includes more than 150 "significant improvements".
Arbor has released their 2009 Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report and it is an interesting read. The largest DDoS increased nearly 5-fold from 2004 to 2008 (and doubled from 2006 to 2008) to 49Gbps. At that size, you definitely need the assistance of your upstream service provider to mitigate. The report also shows the continuing trend of not reporting/referring attacks to law enforcement.
The ability of attackers to dig deeper and wider thanks to the proliferation of botnets was covered in the first article of this series, DDoS Attacks Are Back (and Bigger Than Before). The trend is also covered at length in The Botnet Hunters. In this article, two IT security practitioners -- one with experience in dealing with DDoS attacks against government systems, the other an expert from the corporate side -- share what they've learned about the targets chosen for DDoS attacks and how to adjust security strategies based on those lessons.
The PHP development team recently introduced the latest version of the new PHP 5.3 branch, PHP 5.3.1. This version essentially does not change the essential core 5.3 PHP engine, but by focusing on stability and security, the PHP team has introduced more than 100 bug fixes and tweaks to the overall framework.
Finding and fixing security vulnerabilities in an enterprise is tough enough without someone looking over your shoulder. But when regulatory compliance requirements are involved -- and the auditors who come with them -- the process of vulnerability management brings on a new set of challenges.
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