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This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include "House Legislators Slam Bush's Cyber Initiative," "Why Do We Need Specialist Security Distros," and "SELinux Blocks Real-World Exploits."

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LinuxSecurity.com Feature Extras:

Open Source Tool of March: ZoneMinder - For January and February, we chose some of the staples of open source security (GnuPG and Nmap) as the tool of the month. And deservedly so; both have just celebrated their ten-year anniversary in the open source realm, a rare feat for any open source project, much less one founded on security.

But for the month of March, we wanted to move ahead and change gears. This month's Open Source Tool is no newbie for sure, but we bet that most of you reading haven't heard of it. While most Linux security tools deal with digital security, this month's tool is one of the few to cross that divide;

Welcome to Zone Minder, the Open Source Tool for March...

Meet the Anti-Nmap: PSAD - Introduction

Having a great defense involves proper detection and recognition of an attack. In our security world we have great IDS tools to properly recognize when we are being attacked as well as firewalls to prevent such attacks from happening. However, certain attacks are not blindly thrown at you - a good attacker knows that a certain amount of reconnaissance and knowledge about your defenses greatly increases the chances of a successful attack. How would you know if someone is scanning your defenses? Is there any way to properly respond to such scans? You bet there is...

Thank you for reading the LinuxSecurity.com weekly security newsletter. The purpose of this document is to provide our readers with a quick summary of each week's most relevant Linux security headline.

EnGarde Secure Community v3.0.18 Now Available! (Dec 4)

Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.18 (Version 3.0, Release 18). This release includes the brand new Health Center, new packages for FWKNP and PSAD, updated packages and bug fixes, some feature enhancements to Guardian Digital WebTool and the SELinux policy, as well as other new features.

In distribution since 2001, EnGarde Secure Community was one of the very first security platforms developed entirely from open source, and has been engineered from the ground-up to provide users and organizations with complete, secure Web functionality, DNS, database and e-mail security, integrated intrusion detection and SELinux policies and more.
VMWare's VMSafe: Security Industry Defibrilator (Mar 3)

VMware and virtualization security is just beginning to heat up. In this article, we get an interesting view into the nature of this debacle. Should it be a surprise that security is going to be such an issue? According to this blogger, far, far from it; virtualization provides such a compelling shift in computing, that being caught "flatfooted" is embarrassing...

For the purpose of this post, I'm going to focus on the security implications of virtualization and simply summarize by suggesting that virtualization up until now has quietly marked a tipping point where we see the disruption stretch security architectures and technologies to their breaking point and in many cases make much of our invested security portfolio redundant and irrelevant.

Ouch! Read on...
House Legislators Slam Bush's Cyber Initiative (Feb 29)

The initiative is a long-range plan to upgrade the security of the federal government's networks and comprises a number of separate proposals, most notably an overhaul and expansion of the government's intrusion detection system, known as Einstein. Currently, Einstein is simply a passive traffic-monitoring system that records basic data such as the originating IP address of a packet, its size and where the packet came from and where it is headed. But the data that the system captures is not analyzed in real time, so attacks and other anomalies aren't caught until well after the fact. And, Einstein is a voluntary program and is not in place at all of the federal agencies right now.

If there was one place where you'd think that security would be state-of-the-art and cutting edge, it would be our own federal government networks. I really don't see any necessary trade-off between "security" and "convenience" when it comes down to national security. What do you think a government IDS should have to set the benchmark for security?

news/government/house-legislators-slam-bushs-cyber-initiative
VMware Opens Hypervisor to Security Vendors (Feb 28)

VMware plans to open its hypervisor to security vendors with a set of APIs that make it easier to protect virtual machines from threats including viruses, Trojans and keyloggers. Without these APIs, security vendors building antivirus and firewall tools for virtual servers are removed from the hypervisor by several layers and therefore cannot see everything that happens within the virtual environment, according to Yankee Group Analyst Phil Hochmuth.

So what do you do when critical vulnerabilities are found in your virtual machines? Open-source to the rescue - read on for an interesting account of VMsafe, a set of APIs which should allow for better security through more isolation of virtual machines. Do you see any real improvements in security with VMsafe?

news/security-projects/vmware-opens-hypervisor-to-security-vendors
Critical VMWare Desktop Vulnerability Abuses Default Security Settings (Feb 27)

Engineers from CoreLabs, the research arm of Core Security, discovered that an attacker could gain complete access to a host system by exploiting this vulnerability in VMware