Tag Archives: Security

Cloud in the security sky or should I see a psychologist?

The “cloud” is a buzz word that has been around for months. The marketing guys are pushing it so hard that every IT guy will hear of that at work soon or later. Taking a decision whether to use it or not requires some deep knowledge, because if its pros are clear – you can [...]

OpenID rants

After I tried to set this blog as my own OpenID provider using the OpenID WordPress plugin, I got a weired error message: “This is an OpenID Server, Nothing to See Here… Move Along” I could not find what as wrong, as all prerequisites were fulfilled, until I find this nice post. The patch there [...]

Books review

I just finished reading two electronic books I bought from O’reilly. Here is a short review on them. Hacking: the next generation The purpose of this book is to give to the readers an overview of the most common attacks nowadays. It covers all fields : social engineering, web attacks, networking, etc. It was easy [...]

Nessus 4.2

Nessus 4.2 is out. I tried it out and I must say that the new UI is great. I am not a big fan of Flash and I regret this choice. However, the design is excellent, all options are accessible in a logical way. Instead of spreading over the options like it used to be, [...]

OpenSSL : CVE-2009-3555 security fix and mod_ssl client authentication breakage

A security advisory on OpenSSL has recently been published. Details are there and there. It is vulnerable to a MiTM attack where the attacker can intercept and retrieve the credential to a trusted HTTPS website, by intercepting the session cookie sent back to the client. A proof of concept of an attack against Twitter was [...]

Nmap 5.0 is out

Nmap 5.0 has been released, with a bunch of improvments : look at the changelog.

Windows Vista memory protection : defeated ?

It seems, at least according to some researchers showed it at the Black Hat conference. Mark Dowd (IBM) and Alexander Sotirov (VMWare) found a way to bypass  the memory protection implemented in Vista to inject malicious instructions within Internet Explorer. They were able to copy any content wherever they wished on the disk. Especially, this [...]

How-to : Mod-security 2 set-up for Apache 2

Mod-security is a security proxy for Apache. It adds a frontal layer filtering unwanted clients, malformed packets and malicious requests. It is especially usefull if your website is dynamic, involving php, sql, javascript, etc. With such a complex environment, as you can never be sure that your website is not vulnerable or up-to-date enough, something [...]