Cisco... Asleap at the wheel?

I was pointed to this interesting sourceforge project by another Rory... asleap home page
It's a piece of software which exposes the weaknesses in Cisco's LEAP protocol.... This is the second thing I've seen recently regarding lack of security in Ciscos products recently... odd for a vendor with a relatively good reputation for security...

UK companies... some way to go on security

UK firms failing security challenge - ZDNet UK News
This is one of the stories that always emerge when the large consultancy companies do their annual security surveys. In amongst alot of stats there are some meaningful pieces of information. This story focuses on the state of wireless security (poor).
I'm not at all suprised that 50+% of companies haven't deployed security on their wireless LANS, however it is very worrying as they are essentially allowing the man on the street (literrally) to wander into their corporate LAN without any restriction.
Given that most companies practice the "warm smarty" method of network security (crunchy on the outside, soft and squishy on the inside), this is especially worrying.

MS April Security Vulns... how many are there?

Well the April Microsoft patches came out today, and depending what article you read about it there are either 4 [securityfocus.com] or 20 [nwfusion.com] .
The cynic in me would say that this was Microsoft trying to keep the apparent number of vulnerabilities in Windows down and I reckon that for certain industry analysts and studies it might well work, as if you don't go into the technical detail of the vulnerability it's not apparent that more than one flaw is getting fixed by each patch.
What I actually find more concerning is that several of the vulns appear to affect Windows 2003/Windows XP. I think that this shows that Microsoft has a very long road ahead of it to improve the security of its products. As whilst it may be ensuring the quality of all new code that is produced, there is obviously a lot of legacy code that will be causing problems for some time to come.....

Interesting e-mail attack

Over at the New Scientist there's an interesting note for an attack on a mail server.
I always find attacke like this interesting asa they're essentially a case of mis-use of a protocol. Also given that tthe return of undeliverable e-mail is usually taken as a given on the Internet and it becomes unlikely that this kind of DoS attack will be going away anytime soon.

Exploits for real...

The Metasploit Project is a collection of exploits with an interface to allow them to be easily executed.
Whilst I can see the value of this kind of project from the point of view of going one step beyond a vulnerability scanner and actually demonstrating an exploit getting, for example, remote root access on a system, the other uses of this kind of work will lower the knowledge barrier for a range of cracking activities....

Default passwords in Cisco Wireless kit

Cisco Security Advisory: A Default Username and Password in WLSE and HSE Devices
This is a pretty nasty vulnerability for someone like Cisco to have, as you'd have thought that their development process would have noticed this kind of mistake. Also given that WLSE is a piece of security software, in that it monitors for rogue AP's amongst other things it is suprising that this got through.
I think that the only saving grace of this is that the kind of equipment it occured in, will probably be managed by networking professionals who will check for security advisories....

Test Virus Sender

TESTVIRUS.org lets you send EICAR test strings to any e-mail address using a variety of obfuscations, to see if your mail server will catch them all...

Online Browser Security Test

There's a Browser Security Test over here that allows you to check you're browser configuration to see if it's vulnerable.
could be handy if you're unsure of whether patches have taken correctly, or if you're looking to demo how insecure unpatched versions of major browsers can be

New Internal Network Monitoring Tools

Security tools target inside jobs
This article is talking about some new products which are focusing on business/application level analysis of a companies traffic. I'm a little cynical about this kind of thing, as I would expect that the same kind of "data flood" problem which affects network level IDS systems to affect this kind of solution.
also working at an application level is far harder as it is relatively easy for an automated system to recognise things like HTTP traffic, however an automated system looking at that and saying "thats confidential information from the payroll system" would be very very difficult to set up....