Information Security Philippines

presents

Malcode Analysis and Response: Proficiency vs. Complexity

by Matt Allen and Russ McRee

Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 1:00 PM EDT (1700 UTC/GMT)

The threat landscape changes constantly, driven in part by the “bot economy” and changing malcode techniques. In response, incident handler techniques must keep pace. This presentation will cover the use of RAPIER, a security tool built to facilitate first response procedures for incident handling. It is designed to acquire commonly requested information and samples during an information security event, incident, or investigation. RAPIER automates the entire process of data collection and delivers the results directly to the hands of a skilled security analyst. From detection and discovery, capture and containment, count on a useful discussion meant to further your incident response practices.

The second part of this webcast will discuss how malicious code authors are persistently introducing new hurdles to complicate reverse engineering. At Norman, we combine observations from our labs with feedback from SandBox customers to identify complexities responsible for wearing down efficient analysis of new threats. The impact of new SandBox capabilities for addressing these complexities will be introduced, followed by a short discussion of top priorities in the SandBox product roadmap.

Matt Allen: With backgrounds in computer and information sciences as well as business, Matt Allen has worked in a number of different roles at Norman over the past 5 years, varying from incident response to web and software development. Matt is currently working with the SandBox team on various projects ranging from development to marketing.

Russ McRee: Russ McRee, GCIH, GCFA, CISSP is a security analyst working in the Seattle area. He’s the author of ISSA Journal’s monthly column Toolsmith, and has written for Information Security, Linux Pro, SysAdmin and others, including an OWASP whitepaper. Prior speaking engagements include SecureWorld Expo, ISSA Northwest Regional, WSA SIG, RAID 2005, and Linuxfest Northwest. Russ has been a board member of ISSA Puget Sound, and is a member of PACCISO, InfraGard and CCSA. Russ maintains holisticinfosec.org.

Register for this free webseminar.

Anatomy of a Breach Webcast

June 13 , 2007- 12 p.m. EDT

You harbor vast amounts of confidential information ranging from credit cards to health information to corporate plans. That proprietary data is today’s “new money” and someone is willing to pay for it. Unfortunately, the miscreants who want it may know more about technology—and your IT environment—than your own staff. The stakes are enormous: for your customers, your company, and you.

In this webcast, we examine the fundamental shift of IT risk to the insider threat and the inability of legacy protection mechanisms to stop it. We itemize and quantify the impact from containment to notification. Most importantly, we discuss eradication of the breach risk. New, targeted, caustic threats require new responses that strictly secure your critical information assets, while proving it with 100 percent surety.

Who Should Watch:
Executives responsible for audits, compliance and mitigating data breach risks and security professionals responsible for protecting critical assets on their networks
About the speakers:
William Malik
Consultant, Identity and Information Security
Malik Consulting

Bill Malik has been well-known in information security since the early 1990s when he was a founding member of Gartner’s Information Security Strategies service. He began his IT career in Boston as an applications programmer with the John Hancock Insurance Company following undergraduate work at MIT. He joined IBM’s MVS team and worked in development, testing, business planning, and strategic planning for a dozen years. He moved to Gartner in 1990 and held a series of roles as an analyst and manager through 2002. As CTO of Waveset, a start-up in identity management, he helped the firm grow through its acquisition by Sun, where Bill became Director of Marketing for Security. In 2004 Bill established his independent consulting firm, where he helps clients develop their identity management and information security programs.

Robert Ciampa
Vice President, Marketing and Business Strategy
Trusted Network Technologies

Rob Ciampa has more than 20 years of experience in IT risk management, networking and security. Rob has worked with companies around the world designing and implementing secure infrastructures. An early OS engineer for HP and a former switch and router designer for 3Com, he co-founded one of world’s largest network and security integration firms. Rob then went on to Access360, where he was instrumental in its acquisition by IBM, where he subsequently ran IBM’s worldwide channel for security and identity management. In additional to television commentary on IT and computer security issues, Rob is frequently a featured speaker at major IT venues and events internationally. He has a B.S. in computer science and an M.S. in computer engineering from the University of Massachusetts, as well as an M.B.A. from Boston University. He holds two patents in information technology management. His blog is www.knowidentity.com.

Join the Anatomy of a Breach Webcast

Hackers are developing increasingly stealthy techniques to evade detection.  The attacks place malicious code on web sites, then keep track of the IP addresses that have visited infected sites; if the same IP address attempts to view the malicious site again, benign content is offered in its stead.

The attacks are also capable of identifying “the IP addresses of web crawlers used by URL filtering, reputation services and search engines,” and serve legitimate content to avoid being identified as malicious.

Recent findings reveal that hackers have created a new class of highly evasive attacks which represent a quantum leap in terms of technological sophistication, going far beyond drive-by downloads and code obfuscation.

The combination of these evasive attacks with code obfuscation techniques significantly enhances the capability of sophisticated hackers to go undetected.

A follow-up study conducted by Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Centre warns of the growing presence of malicious code in online advertising.

More info at: VNUNet

Microsoft has released a free tool called Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment, or MOICE, to help protect users from malware placed in Office files, a vector of attack that has recently gained popularity. 

MOICE converts Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs to their OpenXML counterparts and opens them in a quarantined environment to protect users’ computers from embedded malicious payloads designed to exploit holes in Microsoft Office. 

MOICE works in tandem with the File Block, a tool that allows administrators to establish group policies regarding users’ permissions to open certain file types.  Both tools work out of the box with Microsoft ffice 2007. 

Microsoft Office 2003 users need to install the Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 Office File Formats first. 

There currently is no protection offered for users running versions prior to Microsof Office 2003.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935865

This just in from Wordpress awhile ago…

We have a security update release now available for both the 2.1 and 2.0 branches of WordPress now available for immediate download. This update is highly recommend for all users of both branches.

These releases include fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue, and a proactive full sweep of the WordPress codebase to protect against future problems.

It isn’t April 1 anymore so this probably is the real thing. Make sure you guys update to this new version since it provides some important security fixes which if left unpatched will surely be easy to exploit.

Don’t forget to backup and test your backups first Good luck!

The Microsoft Threat Analysis & Modeling tool allows non-security subject matter experts to enter already known information including business requirements and application architecture which is then used to produce a feature-rich threat model. Along with automatically identifying threats, the tool can produce valuable security artifacts such as:

- Data access control matrix
- Component access control matrix
- Subject-object matrix
- Data Flow
- Call Flow
- Trust Flow
- Attack Surface
- Focused reports

Download from Microsoft

National Cyber Alert System
Technical Cyber Security Alert TA07-089A
Microsoft Windows ANI header stack buffer overflow

Original release date: March 30, 2007
Last revised: –
Source: US-CERT

Systems Affected

Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, and Vista are affected. Applications that provide attack vectors include:

* Microsoft Internet Explorer
* Microsoft Outlook
* Microsoft Outlook Express
* Microsoft Windows Mail
* Microsoft Windows Explorer (more…)

The National Security Agency (NSA) has published version 2 of its security guidelines for Mac OS X. The security documents are available in PDF format on their OS Guides page  for Mac OS X.

These documents for Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server represent best practices for securing the OS and are widely used by the industry as internal standards for configuring Mac OS X. The document is actually written by experts at Apple and endorsed by the NSA which says on its Website,” It is our belief that these guides establish the latest best practices for securing the products and recommend that traditional customers of our security recommendations use the Apple guides when securing Macintosh OS X 10.4.x and Macintosh OS X Server 10.4.x.”

Practices such as setting up admin accounts, generating passwords, the proper way to remove Classic, which can be a serious security problem for Mac OS X, managing the root account, and the use of Access Control Lists (ACLs) is covered.

Out of the box, Mac OS X is fairly secure, especially with respect to closed ports. However, for those in the enterprise who want to take advantage of every feature of Mac OS X to lock down and secure the OS against not only network but local intrusions, this is a must read.

http://www.nsa.gov/snac/downloads_macOSX10_4Server.cfm?MenuID=scg10.3.1.1

Microsoft on Thursday released an upgrade to its Windows Defender application, raising the version number from 1.1 to 7.0. The reason behind the version change is not clear, although the release does bring a redesigned user interface and new malware detection engine.

Windows Defender supports 64-bit operating systems, but no longer runs on Windows 2000, because Microsoft says the aging operating system has left mainstream support. WGA checking will also be enforced, meaning that Windows Defender will only remove “Severe” threats from computers that do not pass validation.

System Requirements:
- Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1; Windows XP Service Pack 2
- Windows Defender no longer supports Windows 2000 as it went out of mainstream support in June 2005.

********************************************************************

Title: Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for March 2007

Issued: March 13, 2007 Version Number: 1.0 Bulletin Summary: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=85543 ********************************************************************

Summary:

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Microsoft has not released any security bulletins on March 13, 2007.