Security

Symantec reports that most of their av products have a security issue in conjunction with prepared archive files. These could bypass the virus scanner because the file format is not correct but the operating system is still able to etract the files. Also Frisk (F-Prot), Norman and Ikarus published updates to similar problems in their products. Kaspersky silently deployed updates to a parsing bug that prevented to identify pdf files if the magic string %PDF was missing.

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Secunia, well known for their vulnerability research and vuln announcements, has released the Secunia 2008 Report as pdf. The report shows that they release more advisories per year and 0-day vulnerabilities felt back to the 2006-level for decreasing about 40 percent. Also very interesting was the comparison of browser security. While Firefox has more vulnerabilities than IE, Safari and Opera together, those security holes are closed way faster than the ones from IE.

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The danish computer security service provider has released Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector) version 1.0 after a 17 month beta test period. With this software you can identify unpatched and old software that makes your Windows system vulnerable to attacks. Though this is not a complete indicator, Secunia can identify currently about 5.500 applications. This is quite a lot and the list continues to grow. I also tested and still use Secunia PSI.

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There’s a small series about insecure C programming on the informIT website. David Chisnall shows the pitfalls involved in writing insecure code in C. 1. Error Checking2. Integer Issues3. Buffers and Strings

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PHPIDS is an opensource Intrusion Detection System written in and for PHP. It’s licensed under the GPLv2 license. References: PHPIDS Website PHPIDS Demo

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