Friday already. I have to remember to go to the butcher tomorrow morning to pick up my brisket….mmmm…..brisket. On another note, I’ve noticed a decrease in posting on my RSS feeds today. I suspect that this may be due to everyone getting ready for Interop in Vegas next week.

Here’s the list:

pwdump6 1.5.0 as well as fgdump 1.5.0 Released for Download – New versions of some great tools.

A while ago some updates of pwdump and fgdump were released, namely pwdump6 1.5.0 as well as fgdump 1.5.0.

Version 1.5.0 of both programs takes advantage of some changes which makes them less likely to be detected by antivirus, at least as of today. This will be particularly helpful to those of you dealing with recent, more aggressive AV solutions. The README file for pwdump6 has also been updated to give some examples, as it seems some folks were having a hard time figuring out how to get started with it.

Does Using “Certified” Software Products Improve Compliance? – What does “Certified” really mean anyway?

You see software vendors touting that their products have been certified and that they will help companies meet “compliance,” but I have found very little research into what this really means, or if it means anything at all.

Estonian DDoS Attacks – A summary to date – Good analysis of the issues that Estonia was facing.

Largest attacks we measured: 10 attacks measured at 90 Mbps, lasting upwards of 10 hours. All in all, someone is very, very deliberate in putting the hurt on Estonia, and this kind of thing is only going to get more severe in the coming years.

Gone in 120 seconds: cracking Wi-Fi security – Does it scare you? It should.

When WEP was compromised in 2001, the attack needed more than five million packets to succeed. During the summer of 2004, a hacker named KoreK published a new WEP attack (called chopper) that reduced by an order of magnitude the number of packets requested, letting people crack keys with hundreds of thousands of packets, instead of millions.

Last month, three researchers, Erik Tews, Andrei Pychkine and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann developed a faster attack (based on a cryptanalysis of RC4 by Andreas Klein), that works with ARP packets and just needs 85,000 packets to crack the key with a 95 per cent probablity. This means getting the key in less than two minutes.

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.