Tag: OSVDB

  • Buying Into the Bias: Why Vulnerability Statistics Suck [Abstract]

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] Last week, Steve Christey and I gave a presentation at Black Hat Briefings 2013 in Las Vegas about vulnerability statistics. We submitted a brief whitepaper on the topic, reproduced below, to accompany the slides that are now available. Buying Into the Bias: Why Vulnerability Statistics SuckBy Steve […]

  • Seriously RIM? Call it the HackBerry from now on…

    [This was originally posted on the OSVDB blog.] Our sponsor Risk Based Security (RBS) posted an interesting blog this morning about Research In Motion (RIM), creator of the BlackBerry device. The behavior outlined in the blog, and from the original blog by Frank Rieger is shocking to say the least. In addition to the vulnerability […]

  • Cybercrime Stats: From Bad to Bad

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] Since vulnerabilities are a cornerstone of computer crime, stats on it are of interest to us. Statistics on cybercrime have always been dodgy; more so than real-world crime statistics. When your car is broken into or stolen, you know it. More often than not, you will report […]

  • Android versus iOS Security – Not Again…

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] About two weeks ago, another round of vulnerability stats got passed around. Like others before, it claims to use CVE to compare Apple iOS versus Android in an attempt to establish which is more secure based on “vulnerability counts”. The statistics put forth are basically meaningless, because […]

  • The curiously creeping value of the iOS vulnerability…

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] The market for vulnerabilities has grown rapidly the last five years. While the market is certainly not new, going back well over ten years, more organizations are interested in acquiring 0-day / private vulnerabilities for a variety of needs. These vulnerabilities cover the gambit in applications and […]

  • Local File Inclusion vs Arbitrary File Access

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] Notes for this blog have been lingering for over three years now. In the daily grind to aggregate vulnerabilities, the time to write about them gets put on the back burner frequently. Rest assured, this is not a new issue by any means. Back in the day, […]

  • Mobile Devices and Exploit Vector Absurdity

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] The last few days has seen several vulnerabilities disclosed that include serious gaps in logic with regard to exploitation vectors. What is being called “remote” is not. What is being called “critical” is not. Here are a few examples to highlight the problem. We beg of you, […]

  • Security, Ethics, and University

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] In the U.S., you are expected to know and live by certain ethical standards related to school. You are taught early on that plagiarism is bad for example. You are taught that school experiments should be done in a safe manner, that does not harm people or […]

  • OSVDB Blog Migration

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] For years, we have used Typo3 for our blog, hosted on one of our servers. It isn’t bad software at all, I actually like it. That changes entirely when it sits behind Cloudflare. Despite our server being up and reachable, Cloudflare frequently reports the blog offline. When […]

  • CVSSv2 Shortcomings, Faults, and Failures Formulation

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] The Open Security Foundation (OSF) and Risk Based Security wrote an open letter to FIRST regarding the upcoming Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) version 3 proposal. While we were not formally asked to provide input, given the expertise of managing vulnerability databases, along with the daily use […]