Vulnerability Analysis Blog

Slowloris is a denial-of-service (DoS) tool that targets web servers. We have some suggestions about mitigation techniques and workarounds to protect your server. However, use caution if you implement any of these suggestions because they will likely have some unintended side effects.

Two recent US-CERT Vulnerability Notes describe similar issues in the Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader PDF viewing applications. The vulnerabilities, that both applications failed to properly handle JPEG2000 (JPX) data streams, were discovered as part of our Vulnerability Discovery initiative. The two vulnerability notes are quite similar, except for one aspect: attack surface.

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, it's Ryan. We've talked about IPv6 in blog entries and vulnerability notes before. But instead of focusing on IPv6 vulnerabilities, this blog entry will show how functional IPv6 tunneling protocols can be used to bypass IPv4-only firewalls and ACLs. If you'd like a demonstration, watch this video that we created.

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.

Hey, it's Will. I noticed that several blogs, including Trend Micro and McAfee, have been talking about the recent attacks on the Internet Explorer 7 vulnerability that was fixed in MS09-002. An interesting thing about these exploits is the attack vector. The technique used in these attacks has several security impacts that may not be immediately obvious.

It's Will again, with the first blog entry of 2009. Our Securing Your Web Browser document describes how to make your web browser more secure, but applying all of the necessary changes can be a bit tedious. To make the process easier, we developed reference implementations of the guidelines for both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Hi, this is Chad Dougherty of the Vulnerability Analysis team. One of the important roles that our team plays is coordinating vulnerability information among a broad range of vendors. Over the years, we have gained a considerable amount of experience communicating with vendors of all shapes and sizes. Based on this experience, we can offer some guidance to vendors about communicating product security issues.

Hey, it's Ryan. This blog entry contains some quick recommendations about filtering certain ICMPv6 types using two host-based firewalls—Linux ip6tables and Microsoft Vista's advfirewall. If you have suggestions or other ideas, let me know.