NSS Solutions

The tech sector seems to be doing a lot of consolidating lately.  McAfee’s purchase of SecureComputing, and Symantec’s purchase of PGP and Fishnet’s Managed Security offering.  Let’s hope that they can put it all together into a usable package.  That’s the key that’s been missing from a lot of other mergers.

PGP will give Symantec the ability to provide more integrated and widely deployed key management and better policy controls over key management.
Nick Selby,
managing director, Trident Risk Management

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1511112,00.html

An in depth analysis is here.  http://bit.ly/8ZLwAX

It appears that the same Ukrainian “attack” server that broke into them before has broke into them again.

I’ve recently been testing what Infoworld has just come out with.  While Infoworld has focused on the lower end of the market, I’ve been testing the Enterprise firewall.  I will be posting my results up here next week, but if you want to get a preview of the low end check out the article below.

http://infoworld.com/d/security-central/malware-fighting-firewalls-miss-mark-751

For the second time in two weeks, bad networking information spreading from China has disrupted the Internet.

On Thursday morning, bad routing data from a small Chinese ISP called IDC China Telecommunication was re-transmitted by China’s state-owned China Telecommunications, and then spread around the Internet, affecting Internet service providers such as AT&T, Level3, Deutsche Telekom, Qwest Communications and Telefonica.

“There are a large number of ISPs who accepted these routes all over the world,” said Martin A. Brown, technical lead at Internet monitoring firm Renesys.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175081/A_Chinese_ISP_momentarily_hijacks_the_Internet_again_

Since this has come up numerous times lately.  I thought it would be good to address what the thoughts are out there in regards to ASA versus Check Point.

The camp fighting for ASA says I don’t have to retrain my network staff to be able to make firewall changes.  I get a bigger discount if I purchase all my networking gear from one vendor (Cisco).

I understand these points, and for certain people it may make sense.

My point is that if you believe in security, you cannot have the same vendor that does your networking as the vendor that does your security.  One IOS flaw comes out and it affects routers, switches, and ASA’s.  From the way my phone has been going off in regards to Cisco flaws lately you are taking a huge chance.

I personally like a vendor that says their primary mission is Security.  That is why my recommendation has been Check Point.  Outside what I believe there are plenty of other good vendors to choose from.

Juniper, Palo Alto, and Mcafee are a few that come to mind.

The point of that I’m getting to is this, you can save the small amount of money now.  Or you can end up paying the bigger amount of money in the settlement later.  Defense in Depth is a tried and proven method of securing your network.

After upgrading to R70, you cannot edit the max_subnet_for_range parameter in $FWDIR/conf/user.def.NGX_R60

Check Point SK40886

I won’t go into the Google story now, because I have a much more detailed piece I’m working on.

Hopefully we can all get this Microsoft patch shortly.

Microsoft Corp. raced to release a fix for a security hole in its Internet Explorer Web browser as the company sought to contain the fallout from governments urging users to switch to competing software.

The Redmond, Wash., company said it plans to issue a software update for Internet Explorer on Thursday to patch a security vulnerability first reported last week that could allow hackers to take over a computer that visits Web sites loaded with malicious code. While Internet Explorer has suffered numerous security vulnerabilities over the years, the latest flaw is especially high-profile because it is believed to have been used in attacks on Google Inc. and other companies that Google linked to China.

Time to get your Juniper routers patched.

Juniper Networks yesterday issued a patch for a serious and exploitable flaw in its router operating system that could cause a router to crash altogether.

The critical security alert issued to Juniper customers and partners set off a rare flurry of router-patching last night, security experts say. “It’s not atypical to not apply low-criticality patches to core routers. Now that this has been classified as ‘critical,’ people seem to be reacting,” says Daniel Kennedy, a partner with Praetorian Security Group, which has been studying the vulnerability and says it heard many ISPs were already applying the patches last night.

Organizations don’t routinely patch routers; they typically don’t have the resources to do so, nor is patching a router as high a priority as patching a server, for instance. Some avoid patching because a major breach is less likely than the possibility of an unintentional outage from applying a router update.

And many organizations incorrectly assume their customized router configurations aren’t as big of a target. But security experts — such as Felix “FX” Lindner, who has conducted groundbreaking research on Cisco router vulnerabilities — have demonstrated that exploiting routers isn’t as hard as was once thought.

Dan Kaminksy, director of penetration testing for IOActive, says this Juniper vulnerability should be patched–and fast: “A remote kernel panic on most versions of the second most popular routing platform on the Internet is significant. IT admins should take this threat to their infrastructure seriously, and patch immediately,” Kaminsky says.

There has been no sign of an active exploit for the Juniper router vulnerability yet, but the attack works like this: When the router receives a TCP header with a crafted options field, JUNOS, Juniper’s router operating system kernel, crashes and the OS reboots. JUNOS’ firewall filter is unable to filter the packet, either. Juniper’s JUNOS versions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 series routers are all affected by the flaw, which basically results in a denial-of-service attack.

“So JUNOS versions released after January are reported to crash upon receiving a TCP packet that ACL filtering will not stop. Per Juniper, there is no real effective workaround, just application of the provided patch,” Kennedy says.

Juniper had fixed the problem about a year ago, he says, but apparently discovered recently that the flaw was exploitable while working on an interoperability issue.

The advisory, which was among seven posted and available only to Juniper customers and partners, included a patch and workarounds, according to Barry Greene, director of Juniper’s security incident response team. “These are all scheduled security advisories as part of a monthly schedule (similar to Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday). All have fixed code available and feasible workarounds which can be used and deployed immediately by our customers,” Greene said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Praetorian today tested all 256 instances of the TCP option field in the header, Kennedy says, and found the one that causes the router to crash. “The exploit is thus confirmed,” he says.