Tag: Vulnerability Disclosure

  • Zero-days: Two Questions from Perlroth

    I am currently reading “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends” by Nicole Perlroth, only on page 17 in Chapter 2, so a long ways to go before completing the 471 page tome. While only 17 pages in, there are already some annoyances to be sure, but the tone, scope, and feel of…

  • Commentary on Radware’s Top Web Exploits of 2020

    At the close of each year we see at least one article covering the top vulnerabilities / exploits from the prior year. This is usually written on the back of having large detection networks across the Internet that get a comprehensive view of exploitation. It’s a great way to get real intelligence for criminal hacking…

  • Sitting on Undisclosed Vulnerabilities (e.g. SolarWinds Stragglers)

    The company SolarWinds is in the news, victims of an attack that compromised their Orion Platform software by inserting a backdoor into it, allowing for remote code execution. Like most big breaches, we hear the term “sophisticated” used for the attack. And like many breaches, we quickly learn that it might not have been so…

  • Not all CVEs are Created Equal. Or even valid…

    [I wrote this early 2019 and it was scheduled for January 7 but it apparently did not actually publish and then got lost in my excessive drafts list. I touched it up this week to publish because the example that triggered this blog is old but the response is evergreen. Apologies for the long delay!]…

  • Thoughts on 0-days and Risk in 2020

    [Stupid WordPress. This was scheduled to publish Nov 23 but didn’t for some reason. Here it is, a bit late…] On Friday, Maddie Stone from the Google P0 team Tweeted about the 0-day exploits her team tracks. As someone who checks that sheet weekly and tracks vulnerabilities, including ones ‘discovered in the wild’, this is…

  • Disclosure Repair Timelines?

    For those in InfoSec, you have probably seen a vulnerability disclosure timeline. Part of that often includes the researcher’s interaction with the vendor including the vulnerability being fixed. After the issue is disclosed, the story typically ends there. Every so often, work needs to be done after that to ‘repair’ part of the disclosure. For…

  • CVE and the matter of “unique” ID numbers

    Common Vulnerability Enumeration, now known as Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a vulnerability database (ignore their silly claim to be a ‘dictionary’) that the information security industry relies on heavily, unfortunately. Per MITRE’s CVE page, “CVE® is a list of entries—each containing an identification number, a description, and at least one public reference—for publicly…

  • New libssh Vulnerability – No Logo But Plenty Of Attention

    [This was originally published on RiskBasedSecurity.com.] Earlier this week, Andreas Schneider announced the release of a new version of libssh, covering “an important security” that addressed “an authentication bypass vulnerability in the server code”. Pretty quickly we saw several news articles published that covered this issue, as well as third-party blogs that added commentary on the technical side of the vulnerability. Since we were following the…

  • Case Study: Not A Vulnerability (NAV)

    [This was originally published on RiskBasedSecurity.com in the 2018 Vulnerability Mid-year Report.] As stated earlier in this report, “incomplete information, constant updates and revisions, misinterpretation, and errors in reporting can all contribute to a level of confusion regarding the impact, severity and risk a vulnerability represents.” One way that this manifest is in vulnerability reports…

  • Efail: What A Disclosure FAIL That Was!

    [This was originally published on RiskBasedSecurity.com.] Yesterday, news broke of a “critical” vulnerability in OpenPGP and S/MIME, named ‘Efail’ that could lead to an attacker gaining access to plaintext emails. News broke in the form of a dire warning from the Electronic Frontier Foundation warning people to “immediately disable and/or uninstall tools that automatically decrypt PGP-encrypted email.”…