CERT/CC Blog

The WebReady and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features in Microsoft Exchange greatly increase the attack surface of an Exchange server. Specifically, Exchange running on Windows Server 2003 is particularly easy to exploit.

Hello, this is Leigh Metcalf of the CERT Network Situational Awareness (NetSA) Team. Timur Snoke and I have discovered some interesting results in our continuing examination of the public Domain Name System (DNS). Our work has been focusing on domains that change their name servers frequently.

While researching how to successfully mitigate the recent Java 7 vulnerability (VU#636312, CVE-2012-4681), we (and by "we" I mean "Will Dormann") found quite a mess. In the midst of discussion about exploit activity and the out-of-cycle update from Oracle, I'd like to call attention to a couple other important points.

Hi, this is Austin Whisnant of the CERT Network Situational Awareness Team (NetSA). After a long time in the making, NetSA has published an SEI technical report on how to inventory assets on a network using network flow data. Knowing what assets are on your network, especially those visible to outsiders, is an important step in gaining network situational awareness.

Last Sunday, another major Java vulnerability (VU#636312) was reported. Until an official update is available, we strongly recommend disabling the Java 7 plug-in for web browsers.

As part of the vulnerability discovery work at CERT, we have developed a GNU Debugger (GDB) extension called "exploitable" that classifies Linux application bugs by severity. Version 1.0 of the extension is available for public download here. This blog post contains an overview of the extension and how it works.

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.