Dear IT Security Industry…

… You are full of shit.

I don’t know how effective your scare-mongering cash-extortion tactics are, but they don’t really help neither your users, nor vendors, nor anyone else.

It all starts when major vulnerability databases start authoritatively spouting out crap like this:

A vulnerability has been reported in MySQL, which can be exploited to compromise a vulnerable system.
The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error and can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow. (Secunia)

Or crap like this:

MySQL is prone to a buffer-overflow vulnerability because if fails to perform adequate boundary checks on user-supplied data.
An attacker can leverage this issue to execute arbitrary code within the context of the vulnerable application. Failed exploit attempts will result in a denial-of-service condition. (Securityfocus)

Continue reading “Dear IT Security Industry…”

Packing for MySQL Conference 2009

Yay, coming to Santa Clara again (4th conference in a row!:). I can’t imagine my year without MySQL Conference trip anymore. To get a free ticket I’ll present on two topics, MySQL Security (lately I have related role, and have prepared bunch of information already) and deep-inspecting MySQL with DTrace (a voodoo session for all happy Solaris and MacOSX users :). See you there?

Tim is now vocal

Tim at the datacenter
Tim is one of most humble and intelligent developers I’ve ever met – and we’re extremely happy having him at Wikimedia. Now he has a blog, where the first entry is already epic by any standards. I mentioned the IE bug, and Tim has done thorough analysis on this one, and similar problems.

I hope he continues to disclose the complexity of real web applications – and that will always be a worthy read.

IE finds JS in Images (old xss bug!)

Well, this fix was done more than three years ago, but this is one of most evil IE bugs in existence. Even better, it seems to have never been fixed, exists in IE7, and is being discussed in various places lately.

The problem is very simple – valid PNG files can be uploaded to various sites, and then shown to users. The problem is that IE does autodetection, and if it suspects that the file may be HTML, it executes it as HTML, with all Javascript inside. The images can be properly normal images, that show your kitten or wife or whatever. Still, IE will execute any exploit code that is included in them. Exploit code can actually load the actual image, so nobody will even realize they’re looking at image and not at an attack that hijacks their sessions, steals cookies and does all other sorts of evil things.

So, whenever anyone says IE is secure, just tell them to look at this problem.

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