Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 46

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 56

Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist & Kelly Todd, Compliance Analyst

Announcements

• Two new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • Microsoft Patch Tuesday Roundup - August 2010 - "Geronimo!" Edition
  • San Francisco Security Showcase - Sept 15, 2010
• New Nessus training is now being offered at BruCon 2010. It's a two-day course that will put students into a real-world environment where they will have to solve problems and identify vulnerabilities using the advanced features of the Nessus vulnerability scanner.


• Ron, Marcus, and Renaud present the San Francisco Security Showcase on September 15, 2010! This is a free event that will feature topics such as Nessus overview and future plans, The advantages of pairing active and passive scanning, An overview and discussion of current security strategies and new industry trends, The past, present and future of regulatory compliance, and Tenable Network Security product/solutions overview.


• Be certain to check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus tutorials.


• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions.


• You can subscribe to the Tenable Network Security Podcast on iTunes!


• Tenable Tweets - You can find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tenablesecurity where we make various announcements, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Stories

• Ruby XSS Vulnerability - I find two things interesting about this article. First, I think it's scary when a programming language itself, or supporting libraries, contains a flaw. This means that all of the programs using it are vulnerable. I think this is also scary because we don't often audit code that is popular and has been in wide use. For example, when performing an assessment you typically don't find a penetration tester looking through Apache source code for vulnerabilities. Several people have likely been there before and it's not worthwhile, however the payoff is big, and how big depends on how widespread the deployment. The second thing about this story that I find interesting is that Apple patched it first. Normally Apple seems behind the curve, releases fixes whenever they feel like it and provides few details on any vulnerabilities being fixed.
• Facebook "dislike" Scam - I like how Facebook is like the new AOL, except with more users and more nefarious activity.
• Adobe ColdFusion "directory traversal" CVE-2010-2862 - You may look at this vulnerability at first and say, "big deal, people could read files on my web server". Dig a bit deeper and find that it leads to command execution on the server hosting the vulnerable code. Again, I will stress that when making a decision about implementing a patch or workaround, take into consideration all of the potential attack vectors and don't always trust the vendor's criticality rating.
• RIPS PHP Source Code Scanner - I have to say, it can't hurt to run this tool (or similar tools) against your PHP apps. Homegrown apps need some type of code checking, especially PHP as it's easy for developers to make mistakes that lead to vulnerabilities. Even with open-source or commercial apps, it never hurts to be certain they are not coding in something ridiculously easy to exploit.
• Collecting Common Usernames From Facebook - I think this is neat research. If you structure your security program and think, "no one should be able to harvest or collect my user's usernames", think again. I believe that if you can collect 150 million usernames from a popular site like Facebook, and come up with the top ten or twenty usernames (like "jsmith"), this is valuable data to attackers and security professionals alike.
• More Fun with Nessus Reports - This is a really nice Python script that sorts the Nessus report by vulnerability, by host. By default, as of the current version, Nessus does not export this report (SecurityCenter does). So, this is a neat little program to generate this type of report. I have heard from the Nessus developers and there are some things in the works along these lines, so stay tuned.