CERT/CC Blog

Hello this is Jonathan Spring. Recently, Leigh Metcalf and I uncovered some interesting results in our continuing work on properties of the Domain Name System (DNS). Our work involves an unconventional use of CNAME (canonical name) records.  Besides an IP address, CNAME records are the only other location a domain may have in the DNS. Instead of an IP address, a CNAME record is a redirection or alias service that points to another name. 

Recently George Jones, Jonathan Spring, and I attended USENIX Security '11. We hosted an evening Birds of a Feather (BoF) session where we asked a question of some significance to our CERT^® Network Situational Awareness (NetSA) group:

Is Large-Scale Network Security Monitoring Still Worth Effort?

A few years ago, I published a blog entry called Signed Java Applet Security: Worse than ActiveX? In that entry, I explained the problems that arise when a vulnerability is discovered in a signed Java applet. Let's see how the Cisco AnyConnect vulnerability is affected.

Microsoft recently released a component for Office called Office File Validation that is supposed to help protect against attacks using malformed files. Because I recently performed file fuzzing tests on Microsoft Office, I decided to test the effectiveness of Office File Validation.

Recently, Dan Kaminsky published a blog entry that compared the fuzzing resiliency of Microsoft Office and Oracle OpenOffice. This blog entry contains the results from a similar test that I performed in November 2010. Also included are some other aspects of the Office suites that can affect the software's security.

The CERT Network Situational Awareness (NetSA) team, specifically our talented and hard-working intern Matthew Heckathorn under Sid Faber's guidance, has published an SEI Technical Report on monitoring web-based threats.

Hello, folks. This post comes to you courtesy of Aaron Shelmire from the Network Situational Awareness team. Aaron writes:

Recently the Network Situational Awareness team at CERT has been researching the characteristics of malicious network touchpoints. The findings of this initial research are very telling as to the true state of security on the internet.

Hello folks.  This post comes to you courtesy of Ed Stoner and Aaron Shelmire from the Network Situational Awareness group at CERT.  They write:

Recently there have been some statistics published on botnet Command & Control (C2) channels. These statistics claim that 94.58% of botnet C2 channels are under the .com top level domain (TLD). While it's impossible to accurately comment on those statistics without knowing the methodology used to arrive at them, we at CERT have been doing research concerning malicious domain names that arrives at a different result.

Reading email messages in plain text seems like a reasonable thing to do to improve the security of your email client. Plain text takes less processing than HTML, which should help minimize your attack surface, right? As it turns out, Outlook Express (and its derivatives) is doing more than you think when it is configured with the "Read all messages in plain text" option enabled.

Past entries have addressed both securing and disabling IPv6. This entry describes ways that administrators can secure their networks and generate test cases to test those settings.