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. 

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.

Hi, it's Will. As previously mentioned, we have been investigating and discovering ActiveX vulnerabilities over the past few years. Today we released the Dranzer tool that we have developed to test ActiveX controls.

Hello, Sid Faber from the Network Situational Awareness group at CERT. Like just about everyone else, we've been following the Conficker worm for a while and thought some updated stats on the Conficker.C variant might be useful.

Hi, it's Will again. Recently, I was investigating the effectiveness of the workarounds for the Adobe Reader JBIG2 vulnerability, and I encountered an unexpected situation. In certain situations, the application resiliency feature of Windows Installer can actually undo some of the steps taken to mitigate a vulnerability.