It’s May…and it’s snowing. Snow!?!?!?!

Here’s the list:

The Windows Vista Security Blog is Back – Sometimes it’s better to lay low while the dust settles 🙂

We’re back! You’ve probably noticed that the blog hasn’t been updated much lately. We’re going to change that and you can expect to see regular posts again. Windows Vista has been publicly available for over 100 days now, and we think we’re holding up pretty well. As we said, no software is 100% perfect and will contain vulnerabilities, but overall it’s nice to see the new security features in Windows Vista and the defense in depth strategy paying dividends. Look for more posts about Windows Vista security technologies soon.

ISIC – IP Stack Integrity & Stability Checker – Another tool to check out.

ISIC is a suite of utilities to exercise the stability of an IP Stack and its component stacks (TCP, UDP, ICMP et. al.) It generates piles of pseudo random packets of the target protocol. The packets be given tendencies to conform to. Ie 50% of the packets generated can have IP Options. 25% of the packets can be IP fragments… But the percentages are arbitrary and most of the packet fields have a configurable tendency.

NSM tip : Watch out for the quiet ones – I’m looking forward to the upcoming Unsniff release.

The Unsniff beta build (1.5) we are using at the site has a Top-N feature for a whole set of statistics (IPs, MACs, Conversations, protocols, subnets, interfaces, etc). This is a fairly common feature in many tools. We ran Top-N for a while on one of their key entry points. It was fine and produced great results from a traffic analysis point of view. Day in and day out, these Top-N feature the same hosts/subnets at the same time of day.

From a Network Security Monitoring (NSM) angle, this kind of data invariably features entities that already have a high trust level. Most Top-N analysis are soon taken over by the “usual guys” like Exchange, company video streaming, training, VoIP and so forth.

When Good Intentions Go Bad – You know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions 🙂

The author of W32.Uisgon.A appears to have been a computer science student who wanted to collect samples of viruses that were being brought into his college by USB sticks.

So he wrote a program that copies suspected virus samples to a Windows share and a ‘good’ worm to propagate his program. The worm copies itself to network shares and USB sticks and runs the sample collector from a remote Windows share.

Eventually, he intended to terminate the worm by replacing the sample collector on the Windows share with a fixtool.

However, his design resulted in the worm infecting machines outside his university and well beyond his control. In particular, USB sticks weren’t just plugged into computers within his university network, but computers outside the university as well causing his worm to spread uncontrollably. Once the worm began spreading outside the university he had no way to terminate them as he had no way of accessing them.

The end result is a ‘good’ worm that is infecting computer networks in-the-wild and is no better than the ‘bad’ worms it was supposed to catch.

Researcher Reveals 2-Step Vista UAC Hack – Hack Vista, cha -cha-cha, one, two, cha-cha-cha.

Paveza said in the paper that the vulnerability uses a two-part attack vector against a default Vista installation. The first step requires that malware called a proxy infection tool be downloaded and run without elevation. That software can behave as the victim expects it to while it sets up a second malicious payload in the background.