Tool Time: Secunia Online Software Inspector (OSI) | hakin9.org

Mervyn Heng, CISSP – May 2013

The beauty of running Ubuntu Linux is the ease of maintaining your Operating System (OS) and software using the apt command or Update Manager. Both tools offer a single mechanism of keeping your system patched and up to date. The same cannot be said of Windows because the built-in update program only caters to Microsoft proprietary software such as the OS and Microsoft Office for examples.

Microsoft has enterprise tools like System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to install patches and upgrades to servers as well as endpoints but there are still standalone systems that require manual patching.

Besides Microsoft components, there are a host of other software (eg. Reader, Flash, Java) that are require to support business operations but highly susceptible to compromise. Maintaining them can be tedious, time consuming and insecure as an administrator may not apply a patch or upgrade in a timely manner.

There is a simple solution to this predicament. Secunia hosts a free tool called Online Software Inspector (OSI). Click Start Scanner to initiate a check on your system.

Kali Linux Tutorial - Websploit Framework | eHacking.net

Websploit is an automatic vulnerability assessment, web crawler and exploiter tool. It is an open source command line utility that composed on modular structure. At the time of writing, there are 16 modules are available on Websploit, it can be downloaded from sourceforge project website but it is available on Kali Linux by default.

Websploit can be synchronize with Metasploit WMAP project for web vulnerability scanning, there are four categories of modular are available and they are:

Web Modules
Network Modules
Exploit Modules
Wireless Modules

Read more @ http://www.ehacking.net/2013/05/kali-linux-tutorial-websploit-framework.html

Microsoft Security Toolkit delivers new defensive technology | Microsoft

Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group today released the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 3.5 Technology Preview, which includes new Return Oriented Programming (ROP) defenses inspired by BlueHat Prize contest finalist Ivan Fratric.

The EMET 3.5 Technology Preview is a freely available security tool that makes it more difficult for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities and gain system access.

The BlueHat Prize competition, a program aimed at nurturing innovation in exploit mitigations through awarding more than $250,000 in cash and prizes, was launched by Microsoft one year ago at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

"In less than three months, we successfully integrated one of the BlueHat Prize finalists' technologies with EMET 3.5 Technology Preview to help make software significantly more resistant to exploitation," said Mike Reavey, senior director of the Microsoft Security Response Center at Microsoft.

Wireshark updates fix DoS vulnerabilities | H-Online

The developers at the Wireshark project have releasedversions 1.6.9 and 1.8.1 to close important security holes in their open source network protocol analyser. The updates to the cross-platform tool address two vulnerabilities that could be exploited by remote attackers to cause a denial of service (DoS).

The vulnerabilities are a problem in the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) dissector that leads to a crash and a bug in the Network File System (NFS) dissector that could result in excessive consumption of CPU resources; to take advantage of the holes, an attacker must inject a malformed packet onto the wire or convince a victim to read a malformed packet trace file. Versions 1.4.0 to 1.4.13, 1.6.0 to 1.6.8 and 1.8.0 are affected; upgrading to the new 1.6.9 and 1.8.1 releases fixes the problems. According to the project's security advisories, version 1.4.14 should correct these issues on the 1.4.x branch of Wireshark. However, at the time of writing, Wireshark 1.4.14 is not available on the site and release notes for that version have yet to be published.

More details about these updates, including a full list of known issues and changes, can be found in the 1.6.9 and 1.8.1 release notes. Wireshark 1.6.9 and 1.8.1 are available todownload from the project's site and are licensed under the GPLv2.

Article source : http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Wireshark-updates-fix-DoS-vulnerabilities-1652207.html

VirusTotal online scanner adds behaviour analysis | H-Online

The developers of the VirusTotal online virus scanner service are currently testing a new sandbox feature to provide users with more meaningful scan results. In a post on the company's blog, software architect and developer Emiliano Martinez says that, for this purpose, samples uploaded to the service are executed in a controlled sandbox environment where their actions can be "recorded in order to give the analyst a high level overview of what the sample is doing".

An analysis of the uploaded file's behaviour is then displayed in a new "Behavioural information" tab as part of the scan results. VirusTotal logs file and registry activities as well as new processes and code injections. The scanner also issues a notification when a file directly sends commands to certain device drivers.