Security: April 2004 Archives
Hack Your Way to Hollywood Heather Robinson, 25, sure has moxie. She turned her youthful indiscretions with a stolen credit card into a movie deal. Now she's trying to land another, this one based on her electronic snooping through AOL's customer database. Xeni Jardin reports from Los Angeles.
Flaw Puts TCP Data Transfer At Risk
"If an attacker were to send a Reset (RST) packet, for example, they could cause the TCP session between two endpoints to terminate without any further communication," the advisory said. "In the case of BGP systems, portions of the Internet community may be affected. Routing operations would recover quickly after such attacks ended."
BGP is an external routing protocol used between Autonomous systems. It utilises the TCP protocol and is vulnerable to this attack. BGP is used extensively throughout the NET and software such as looking glass allows you to view the BGP tables.
The fact that we rely on a protocol that was designed for the academic community back in the 70's and 80's does raise some concern for its robustness.
The beauty of TCP is its simplicity and adaptability e.g sliding windows etc the problem is inherent trust. The solution maybe to fix the layer 3 protocol by moving across to IPv6 and utilsing ESP extension headers. At the moment as far as I'm aware only 2 ISP's are offerring IPv6, one in Japan and the other in the netherlands. As part of the degree in Software development and Multimedia studies in Tipperary Institute study TCP and Ipv6 in their year 3 module. This is a shared class and leads to some interesting cross exchange of views of data communications.
Computer hacking 'costs billions' Three-quarters of UK companies are hit by security breaches in their computer systems, a survey finds.
Europe drags heels in war on spam Infosecurity Europe 2004
Many countries have dragged their heels on implementing EU rules. The European Commission has issued warnings to eight countries - Belgium, Germany, Greece, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland - for not implementing the directive in time.
SPAM is being taken very seriously by the IRTF (Internet Research Task Force).
A draft document has been published outlining their proposal for dealing with this problem.
In essence this solution proposes the following:
"LMAP is based on two concepts: publication of authentication data by a domain, and application of that data by a recipient MTA. The combination of these concepts permits SMTP recipients to establish more reliably whether mail putatively from a domain is actually from that domain and that there is a responsible contact in case of questions or problems with the domain's mail."
There has been some confusion as to whether the IRTF are adopting only 1 solution. They have issued a press release to state that are not however. Microsoft, Yahoo and a number of other email providers have provided the IRTF with their proposed solutions. More than likely it will be a hybrid of several proposals.
It seems that 5% of all emails last month were "phishing" for identity details. What is worrying is the amount of people who do supply details via email. This form of social engineering attack is becoming more and more common to the point where you can't even trust emails from your own domain due to domain name spoofing. It is estimated that over the past 18 months 1m stg has been scammed.
