Fyoder (the author of nmap if you've been sleeping under a rock) has posted a write up on the recent TCP Dos flaw. UPDATE: According to a post by Robert Lee this isn't the issue. "Robert Lee and Jack Louis recently went public claiming to have discovered a new and devastating...
Researchers from Princeton University Publish vulnerabilities in unpatched sites
Yesterday a couple of 'researchers' published that a couple of major sites were vulnerable to CSRF. A general rule of thumb is that unless you are explicitly protecting against CSRF, or are accidentally protected, then you're vulnerable. CSRF in 2008 is what XSS was in 2002, somewhat understood and rarely protected...
The Palin Hack: Why most question recovery systems suck
Motley fool wrote an article blaming Yahoo! for the Palin Hack. Computerworld has pointed out Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail as being vulnerable as well. To be clear any site supporting answering of common questions as a way to restore account access is vulnerable. The issue is not that these sites are...
Affiliate Programs Vulnerable to Cross-site Request Forgery Fraud
Intro The following describes a long-standing and common implementation flaw in online affiliate programs allowing for fraud. For those unfamiliar with affiliate programs, they provide a way for companies to allow 3rd parties/website owners to direct traffic to their site in exchange for a share of the profits of user purchases....
Utilization of the same credentials across various sites
For years people have been getting their online accounts compromised due to phishing as well as via brute force attacks due to poorly chosen passwords. We also know that people tend to share the same credentials across multiple sites however I haven't seen any concrete research/metrics on how commonplace this is...
My current stance on Web Application Firewalls
Andre Gironda has posted an interesting take on 'what web application security really is'. I agree with some of his points however one in particular I'm going to have to disagree with and that related to using Web application firewalls. For many years I've been anti Web application firewall and as...
Bots Use SQL Injection Tool in Web Attack and Rant
"The Asprox botnet, a relatively small botnet known mainly for sending phishing emails, has been spotted in the last few days installing an SQL injection attack tool on its bots. The bots then Google for .asp pages with specific terms -- and then hit the sites found in the search return...
Browser Security: I Want A Website Active Content Policy File Standard!
UPDATE Before reading on any further I want to prefix that the purpose of this post is to begin a discussion on the ways a website can communicate to a browser to instruct it of what its behavior should be on that site. The example below is a "sample implementation" and...
Cenzic Patents the obvious: Fault Injection!
I monitor google news for anything application security related and found the following announced today by Cenzic. "the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has issued the company U.S. Patent No. 7,185,232, focused on fault injection technology, which is commonly used by most security assessment scanners." - Cenzic Cenzic is not...
A black market for search terms and user interests?
<thinking-out-loud>Google has recently added search history and this got me thinking about how this information could be useful. Currently gmail is linked to all of google and if you search for something while logged into google and have search history turned on, it gets recorded. Now you have data on what...

