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Peter Schooff
Peter Twenty-Four Seven Security
Peter Schooff's blog is a daily look at what's going on in the world of computer security with an emphasis on how it affects businesses.

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July 31, 2007
Threats You Need to Know About

While keeping up with all the big and important threats like the Storm worm, the recent wave of PDF attacks, and continually resisting those special greeting cards from your ‘best friends’ who refuse to tell you their name, the fact remains: the biggest security risk to you is the attack that gets through.

So what follows is a list of lesser-known vulnerabilities that, because they have been underreported, perhaps have snuck by unnoticed by you. This list is taken from Dark Reading and follows:

1. Cross-Site Request Forgery: Almost every Website is vulnerable to it, and allows a hacker to take a legitimate URL used for conducting transactions or changing email addresses and load it onto a page that they control. When visiting a compromised page, the browser is forced to make malicious requests, but the good news is neither the Website nor the visitor is necessarily compromised.

The CSRF -- in the form of the Samy worm -- wrecked havoc on MySpace last year, where the attacker used a combination of XSS and CSFR exploits.

How to protect your site? Fix the XSS bugs, and make sure users log off one site before going to another and clear-out their cookies regularly. This is important, because cleaning an XSS mess up required recoding your Web applications.

2. Network Access Control Flaws: Many companies are adopting NAC technology, which has become synonymous with endpoint security, because it makes sense to stop users from bringing insecure machines onto a network.

But the NAC technology currently in use has shown to have a great many flaws. Through Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP), which is used to restrict network access, but an insider with access can often configure their machine with a static IP address, with essentially renders the perimeter defenseless. And to do that, all you need is a user name and password.

This is the result of two major flaws in NAC. The first is the lack of authentication between a client and an ACS server. The second flaw is there is no way to tell if a client is actually telling the truth about authentication.

3. Bogus Anti-Spyware: This threat, where malware imitates anti-spyware, has quickly grown 500 percent as a total of all infections, as reported by Trend Micro via its free Housecall scanning service.

This starts out almost as more of a social engineering scam, tricking unsuspecting users into downloading a fake security solutions. Attackers can make in the range of $30 to $80 dollars a victim they can get to download. The malware tends to act like genuine spyware while at the same time stealing your sensitive credit card or banking info.

The best way to defeat this is make sure you have legitimate anti-virus and anti-spyware running on your machine.

The five more are PHP Remote File Inclusion, Stealth Malware by Design, Targeted Attacks, Rustock Trojan Horses, and SOX-Breaking Accounting Flaws, which, to read more on, I recommend going to Dark Reader.

Posted by pschooff in Better Protection |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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