Software vendors add tips to flaws database
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The National Vulnerability Database expands its information to include comments from software vendors on reported flaws.
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The firm that makes hardware for much of the net's backbone releases patches for security holes in its products.
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A flaw in numerous versions of Microsoft Excel is the vulnerability responsible for a number of ongoing attacks, the company confirmed Tuesday -- and the solution recommended is apt to raise hackles with those relying on files in older formats.
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Open source vendor OpenLogic is today kicking off a new industry initiative meant to help both users and software companies find out precisely what kinds of open source software is being used -- and who is using it.
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The rise of customized malware is forcing security software vendors to change their tactics quickly and begin using customers' machines as their initial line of threat detection intelligence, according to a new report from Yankee Group.Echoing recent comments made by industry leaders like Symantec -- which is considering white-listing techniques, among many other emerging plans, to thwart the trend toward so-called server-side polymorphism -- Yankee Group Analyst Andrew Jaquith writes in a new research note that "herd intelligence" will be one of the most effective ways for vendors to detect and address increasingly customized threats.By turning their customers' endpoint devices into malware collectors that can funnel information about new attacks back into their global networks of threat sensors and scanning technologies, Jaquith said, security applications vendors may make faster progress in stemming the tide of lower profile, smaller volume threats.As malware authors have begun enlisting more malware toolkits and other technological means to create a greater number of attack variants than can be found and processed by honeypots and signature-based security software tools, the analyst said, it will become vital for vendors to aggregate threat data using customers' computers.Some smaller vendors, including ESET, Panda Security, Prevx, and Sana Security, have already begun working in such a fashion, turning their deployed endpoints into collectors.Larger vendors looking to add that type of technology to their pallets could seek to acquire one of those vendors, Sana in particular, to advance their plans more rapidly, Jaquith contends.The idea is simple, according to the analyst. If attackers are going to attempt to create different attacks for nearly every individual user, then security software vendors must use their customers' machines as their eyes and ears for discovering and addressing those variants.On the flip side, as the vendors amass information about new attacks, they can simultaneously help other customers determine whether new applications or Web sites are dangerous or safe to use, the analyst said."When an unknown binary attempts to execute, the client-side agent sends detailed telemetry information to a remote centralized server and asks whether it is good, bad, or unknown," said Jaquith. "The server makes a disposition decision based on all the collective history accumulated by the herd. By pooling information about all executing programs across its installed base, the herd makes smarter decisions and can confer immunity faster to new variants."As part of the effort, security vendors may also need to begin sharing more of that information with their rivals to create a larger network effect for thwarting malware on a global basis, according to the expert.It may be hard to convince rival vendors to work together because of the perception that it could lessen differentiation between their respective products and services, but if the process clearly aids on the process of quelling the rising tide of new malware strains, the software makers may have little choice other than to partner, he said."By turning every endpoint into a malware collector, the herd network effectively turns into a giant honeypot that can see more than existing monitoring networks," said Jaquith. "Scale enables the herd to counter malware authors' strategy of spraying huge volumes of unique malware samples with, in essence, an Internet-sized sensor network."Herd intelligence is not without its downsides However, despite the advantages of moving to a herd mentality model, the expert recognizes that there might be significant obstacles for vendors to overcome in making such a transition -- including the cost of shifting away form their existing malware signature creation and distribution methodology.Among the biggest issues for anti-malware vendors to consider is the issue of false positives as many legitimate or nefarious programs may be misclassified by one vendor or the other, and behavior detection-based tools will still be needed to keep an eye out for sites and applications that have been compromised.Customers may represent another hurdle, Jaquith said, as not all companies will initially be comfortable with sharing the necessary level of access with vendors, and some may fear that such a system could offer new opportunities for data loss. Prevx, for one, is already dealing with the issue of privacy by guaranteeing that the only information being sent over its pipelines from customer PCs is related to executable files.An even larger problem could be the "data glut" generated by the herd anti-malware networks."Telemetric data provided by herd endpoints will be substantial," said Jaquith. "Anti-malware vendors will need to spend significant millions of dollars of capital to create scalable infrastructures to collect, process, and store data furnished by endpoints."The white lists of legitimate applications maintained by anti-virus vendors will also need to be updated frequently to address the release of approved programs and patches, a process that will require even additional levels of cooperation between many different types of software makers, he said.Along similar lines, Symantec researchers recently detailed a new program through which they are gathering detailed information about software applications installed onto the computers of customers using its desktop anti-malware suite.Using an opt-out participation model, the experiment studies the behavior and distribution details of individual programs to help make recommendations to users about which programs they decide to install or avoid."Right now, this is just a long-term research project, but we hope that as we get more users involved in the system, we can truly get a better idea of what is on people's computers so that we can identify malicious software based on the demographics of who is using it versus what it does," said Carey Nachenberg, a senior member of Symantec's Security Research team."We're hoping to get more clarity through the large base of users we have," he said. "By collecting this data, we should be able to get the most comprehensive view of the usage patterns to derive reputation information for everything they use."
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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Latest patch for the company's database and Web applications closes almost two dozen security holes.
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Blog: The most serious involves poisoned PDF files. The update also includes patches for Bind, Fetchmail, and GNU Screen.
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This paper will cover the challenge of identifying a reliable source of information to populate and maintain accurate configuration information from the distributed application and server environment for use in the CMDB.
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Government-backed Red Hat is leading an initiative allowing software companies to brief users of a US government-backed security database on how far vulnerabilities affect their products.â¦
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Microsoft has issued a patch to fix the security flaw, and urges its customers to use a new utility to locate the computer applications that are vulnerable.
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A flaw in Microsoft&#39;s security server software could allow an attacker to fool business users into thinking that malicious content can be trusted, the software giant warned on Tuesday.
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Ten security flaws found in Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail client.
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Companies are starting to work on improving the often-overlooked security capabilities of spreadsheets and BI tools -- especially after sensitive data was carried on spreadsheets running on several recently stolen computers.
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This article discusses the discovery of compromised machines in large enterprise environments, and offers some suggestions on correlating NIDS and HIPS logs to avoid false positives.
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A security expert has found programming errors in Oracle 11g that left security vulnerabilities.
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eEye site, launched Tuesday, tracks publicly released unpatched security bugs and offers suggestions for protecting against them.