Category: InfoSec
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Rebuttal: How to avoid headaches when publishing a CVE
On May 12, 2022, Adeeb Shah published an article on Help Net Security titled “How to avoid headaches when publishing a CVE”. Shah is a Senior Security Consultant with SpiderLabs, part of Trustwave. Note that it also appears on Trustwave’s blog and includes a second name in the byline, Bobby Cooke. For the sake of…
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Rebuttal: A blended look at what makes the CVE program try to tick
A few days ago, Tod Beardsley published an article on SC Magazine titled “An inside look at what makes the CVE Program tick“. Overall the article is well-written and offers some insights into MITRE, CVE, and their “CNA” program or CVE Numbering Authorities. Beardsley does a good job enumerating some basics about the program, the…
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CVE ID Created Date != Much of Anything
Yesterday, SanSec published a blog post discussing the recent Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source vulnerability that was discovered being exploited in the wild. In the blog, they said: Adobe has been aware of the issue since at least January 27th but decided to issue a patch on Sunday, which is highly unusual. They draw…
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Log4Shell: Redefining Painful Disclosure
Log4Shell is yet another example of why we simply don’t get security right, and it strongly suggests there is little hope for change. There are plenty of blogs and articles that do a great analysis of the vulnerability from the exploitation and impact angle of this vulnerability. There are a lot fewer that examine why…
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Privasec’s Ridiculous Claim of a “World Record” in Vulnerability Disclosure
On May 9, 2019, Privasec published an odd press release with a URL slug of “privasec-queensland-telstra-acquisition” but a title of “Privasec Red’s Consultant Breaks World Record By Disclosing Most Number Of Open-Source CVEs.” This claim is simply wrong. To believe it requires either a complete understanding of the vulnerability disclosure landscape or intent to deceive.…
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CISA’s BOD 22-01: How to Prioritize 100 Vulnerabilities in Two Weeks
[This was originally published on riskbasedsecurity.com, and had considerable edits/enhancements done by Curtis Kang.] CISA BOD 22-01 introduces the directive for government vendors to mitigate 292 CVE IDs, or 301 vulnerabilities, 100 of them within a short timeframe. It is well-meaning and brings potentially valuable focus, but it will put pressure on teams working with…
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Forbes: Lazy Vulnerability Reporting & A Bit of Bias
It may have been almost two decades ago, I joked with colleagues that many Information Security news articles could just be done via Mad Libs. We later joked that breach notifications often appeared to be done via Mad Libs, using the same phrases with different organization names and the number of affected customers. Over the…
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An 83 Word Excuse Instead of a 1 Character Fix (NCSC.nl)
The National Cyber Security Center of the Netherlands (NCSC.nl) has a curious take on sharing security information. On October 25, 2021 I contacted them to inform them of a simple typo in one of their advisories. I send mails or Tweets like this several times a week to researchers, vendors, and news outlets as CVE…
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Assessing the ‘War on Tech’: Huawei vs. U.S.
[I wrote this with Curtis Kang who did a lot of work researching various aspects of this article and provided invaluable help. His research and written contributions made this article possible. It was originally intended to be published on RiskBasedSecurity.com in early 2020 but was passed over so I am publishing it here.] In 2019,…
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Commentary on Trend Micro’s Linux Threat Report 2021
On August 23, 2021, Trend Micro released a report titled “Linux Threat Report 2021 1H” by Magno Logan and Pawan Kinger. The report is based on Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network (SPN) which they call “the data lake for all detections across all Trend Micro’s products“. Basically, every security product they make that detects vulnerabilities…