Caching best practices & max-age gotchas

Getting caching right yields huge performance benefits, saves bandwidth, and reduces server costs, but many sites half-arse their caching, creating race conditions resulting in interdependent resources getting out of sync. The vast majority of best-practice caching falls into one of two patterns:...

Unauthenticated Command Injection in Management Web Interface

Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS implements an API to enable programmatic device configuration and administration of the device. An issue was identified where the management API incorrectly parses input to a specific API call, leading to execution of arbitrary OS commands without authentication via the...

Unauthenticated Command Injection in Management Web Interface

Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS implements an API to enable programmatic device configuration and administration of the device. An issue was identified where the management API incorrectly parses input to a specific API call, leading to execution of arbitrary OS commands without authentication via the...

IRS Email Tax Scams Up 400 Percent

A 400 percent surge in tax-related phishing and malware incidents is making this tax season the most treacherous yet for taxpayers. According to an Internal Revenue Service bulletin, this year’s attacks include the tried-and-true email phishing, but also newer forms of attacks that include bogus...

Hackers Backdooring Cisco WebVPN To Steal Customers’ Passwords

Virtual Private Networks VPNs, which is widely used by many businesses and organisations to provide secure access to their workers, are being abused to pilfer corporate user credentials. Researchers from security firm Volexity discovered a new attack campaign that targets a widely used VPN produc...

RFPs and Needs Assessments for Higher Education

In this blog post, I will be discussing RFP best practices for Higher Education Institutions. Having worked with higher education organizations for a number of years, Ive noticed some trends that could be useful as you and your department or institution head into another year of projects that may...

Core Infrastructure Initiative Open Source Security Badge Program

The Core Infrastructure Initiative CII, a consortium of technology companies guided by The Linux Foundation, has thrown good money at solving the security woes of open source software. Since its inception last year, it has provided funding for the OpenSSL project allowing it to hire full-time hel...

Best Practices to Protect You, Your Network, and Your Information

The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center NCCIC and its partners responded to a series of data breaches in the public and private sector over the last year, helping organizations through incident response actions, conducting damage assessments, and implementing restoration...

Lynis 2.1.1 - Security Auditing Tool for Unix/Linux Systems

Lynis is an open source security auditing tool. Commonly used by system administrators, security professionals and auditors, to evaluate the security defenses of their Linux/Unix based systems. It runs on the host itself, so it can perform very extensive security scans. Supported operating system...

600TB MongoDB Database 'accidentally' exposed on the Internet

System administrators have reportedly exposed almost 600 Terabytes TB of MongoDB database due to running outdated and unpatched versions of the NoSQL MongoDB database. The open source MongoDB is the most popular NoSQL database used by companies of all sizes, from eBay and Sourceforge to The New...

U.S. Government Wades Into Vulnerability Disclosure

Security researchers and software vendors have spent decades trying to work out the process of vulnerability disclosure, with limited success. Now the federal government is joining the fray in hopes of getting the two sides to play nice. The National Telecommunications and Information...

Major Carriers AT&T, Comcast Continue to Lag in EFF Privacy Report

While many companies have made strides when it comes to how they handle transparency and government requests post-Snowden, major telecoms such as AT&T and Verizon continue to lag behind. Despite publishing transparency reports within the last year, the two companies scored the lowest on the...

The Internet Scanner: ZMap

The Internet Scanner: ZMap ZMap is an open-source network scanner that enables researchers to easily perform Internet-wide network studies. With a single machine and a well provisioned network uplink, ZMap is capable of performing a complete scan of the IPv4 address space in under 45 minutes,...

XML External Entity (XXE) Vulnerability

An XML parsing vulnerability exists in PAN-OS allowing a malicious user within PAN-OS to inject malicious XML data into the web-based device management front-end allowing the user to retrieve arbitrary content from the device. The user must be an authenticated user issuing the request. Ref 71273...

Dyre Wolf Banking Malware Stole More Than $1 Million

Security researchers have uncovered an active cyber attack campaign that has successfully stolen more than $1 Million from a variety of targeted enterprise organizations using spear phishing emails, malware and social engineering tricks. The campaign, dubbed "The Dyre Wolf" by researchers from...

Microsoft Publishes Information Sharing Framework

Microsoft earlier this week published a 25-page framework offering guidance on how to effectively share information and what kinds of information need to be shared in order to reduce overall risk. Information sharing has been an oft-repeated refrain in security and policy-making circles for the...

Symantec Web Gateway OS Authenticated Command Injection

SUMMARY Symantec's Web Gateway SWG Appliance management console is susceptible to operating system command injection by an authenticated but less-privileged user. AFFECTED PRODUCTS Product | Version | Solution ---|---|--- Symantec Web Gateway Appliance | 5.2.1 and prior | Symantec Web Gateway 5.2...

BMC Track-It! - Multiple Vulnerabilities

No description provided by source. Multiple critical vulnerabilities in BMC Track-It! Discovered by Pedro Ribeiro [email protected], Agile Information Security ================================================================================= The application exposes several .NET remoting services o...

AlienVault Releases Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) Best Practices

Network security practitioners rely heavily on intrusion detection systems IDS to identify malicious activity on their networks by examining network traffic in real time. IDS are available in Network NIDS and Host HIDS forms, as well as for Wireless WIDS. Host IDS is installed via an agent on the...

Symantec Endpoint Protection Local Client Application Device Control Buffer Overflow

SUMMARY Symantec is aware of a local access Symantec Endpoint Protection SEP client buffer overflow exploit that has been released publicly which could potentially cause a BSOD on the client or possibly allow unauthorized local privilege elevation on Symantec Endpoint Protection SEP clients...