Application Security: Opinions

There are a few highly publicised vulnerabilities at the moment which haven't completely been disclosed and which, it is claimed, could threaten the whole Internet as-we-know-it. Only, when the vulnerabilities are finally disclosed, it seems that the whole incident has been somewhat Chicken Little.

Mac antivirus maker, Intego, have published an interesting alert about a potential OS X virus that an enterprising individual is trying to sell through auction. With absolutely no technical information to go on, the antivirus maker is treating the announcement with caution.

Version 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools.

A less known part of the recent ARP attack against H D Moore's MetaSploit site was an attempted Denial of Service attack that coincided with the successful ARP attack.

Microsoft SQL server hasn't had a public vulnerability announcement since 2004. The SQL Slammer worm struck in 2005, but the hole the worm exploited had been patched six months before. The holes that MS-Blaster and Code Red worm attacked had been patched, too. But back just a few years ago, no one really cared about patching really. We just didn't patch.

In the adversarial environment of information security, new types of attacks emerge constantly. Just recently, a very highly targeted phishing attack against CEOs used the pretext of a federal grand jury subpoena to lure executives to a site hosting malware. Let's face it: Most of the innovation in this industry is on the other side, the "dark" side. We are unfortunately forced to keep reacting to new ingenious attacks every few years.

Microsoft's US general manager/chief security advisor for its National Security Team thinks like a true security professional: In every bit of good news, Bret Arsenault wonders what bad news could be lurking behind it.

Code writers now occupy the front line in the battleground of software security as the defense shifts from perimeter protection to prevention function that's built in during the application development phase.