Josh Wieder

Four days ago I received an email from Dawid Golunski through the list illustrating one of the more brutal pair of security vulnerabilities I have seen recently. Here's how it works.     The exploit uses a vulnerability within MariaDB, PerconaDB (and/or XtraDB Cluster) and MySQL to, first, gain access to the 'mysql' system user using any mysql user that has CREATE / INSERT / UPDATE permissions. The first part revolves around a race condition when sql generates temporary files as part of the `REPAIR table` command. Then using the mysql system user the second vulnerability grants the attacker root access to the server using a clever hack that takes advantage of mysql_safe's approach to writing to file based error logs. Below I've provided a list of vulnerable server versions. Just about any server using the more recent (unpatched) stable releases of MySQL or MariaDB through CentOS is vulnerable (Percona isn't part of the st

Several days ago a document from the corporation Zerofox was leaked on the internet. Zerofox is a domestic spying organization there is no other word for them. They are paid obscene amounts of money to monitor people's Twitter and Facebook accounts, and provide the results of their stalking to police departments and other people who are in theory bound to respect the autonomy of free political speech. In the document that was leaked, Zerofox claimed to have "mitigated" 19 "threats" and "monitored" hundreds of others. The document is available here . What constitutes a threat? Political speech that is critical of the police. At the top of the list of "physical threats" are #blacklivesmatter activists Deeray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie , neither of whom have ever been convicted of a violent crime AFAICT. The report recommends that police engage in "continuous monitoring" of the pair and justify this absurd response because they ha

Several months ago I identified malicious software contained within a torrent available for download from Wikileaks . The torrent was the most recent and most complete copy of what Wikileaks titled the "Global Intelligence Files" - a large trove of emails and attachments from defense contractor Stratfor. The story as it is widely understood is that former Lulzsec member and hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was involved in the acquisition of these files from Stratfor and provided them to Wikileaks. Among the many files included in the leak I have identified 18 that have malicious software; most of those are embedded within PDF and DOC files. Some of the attacks I discovered are old, others are less old. Only two of the 18 files are blocked from downloading using Google Chrome's malware protection service, for example. In a second post, I decompile one of these two (older) files using PE Explorer and Hex-Rays IDA to demonstrate how the file corrupts the Microsoft Connection Manage

The Florida Local Government Investment Trust manages money for counties and clerks throughout the state of Florida. They handle bonds that are AAA rated by S&P; pooling assets for municipalities throughout the state to increase their buying power. The Trust was created in 1991. The Florida Local Government Investment Trust maintains a website based on Wordpress, floridatrustonline.com (I highly recommend that readers do not visit the website from an unsecured browser/computer - preferably using a platform like TAILS ). The website contains a description of the Trust, the legislation under which it carries its mandate (Florida Statute 218.415 (16) (a) and 163.01), a list of employees and trustees as well as a series of financial reports covering the last year. The floridatrustonline.com domain is registered to  Earl Donaldson , an employee of the Florida Association of Court Clerks. Donaldson's LinkedIn page lists him as a Network Engineer. The website is hosted on a shared h

Some time ago I wrote a post about the dismaying history of US government attempts to regulate encryption out of existence . I had to omit quite a bit; it was a post and not a book after all. One of the details left out of the story was the DHE_EXPORT cipher suites. During the 90's, developers were forced by the US government to us deliberately insecure ciphers when communicating with entities in foreign countries (readers will remember from the last post that law makers were convinced that encryption should fall under the same rules as weapons technology, and thus could not be shared with anyone outside the Father Land). These insecure ciphers became DHE_EXPORT. The DH stands for Diffie-Hellman; the key exchange system that bears their name was first published in 1976. Along with the cipher suite was a mechanism to force a normal encrypted transaction to downshift to a lower-bit DHE_EXPORT cipher. As so many short-sighted technology regulations have done in the past, this silly

Oracle has released a Critical Security Patch for a long list of Oracle products. For MySQL specifically, the patch purports to resolve a multitude of vulnerabilities that allow remote execution without authentication, and impact nearly all versions of the database software. Oracle provided the following Risk Matrix to their MySQL customers, which outlines the CVE numbers of stated vulnerabilities, the component used by the vulnerability and a number of other details. I've included a copy of that Matrix for readers to review below. As the reader can clearly see, the risk for unpatched MySQL users is huge. A total of 154 vulnerabilities are addressed with this update. Some of these vulnerabilities reach a forehead-slapping CVSS score of 9.0 (just one point beneath the score for  the recent Shellshock bash vulnerability ). 24 of the patches are for MySQL. I highly advise anyone using MySQL or any Oracle product, including Java, to  update their software immediately.