My Top 5 exploits of interest from the past weeks (July 29-Aug 6)
Here are my top five publicized exploits and vulnerabilities that have been in the news over the past week and a half.
Author: Jojo Maalouf
No Patch for Microsoft Shortcut Vulnerability available for XP SP2 or any other end-of-life Windows release
If your enterprise is running Microsoft XP with Service Pack 2, then I’ve got news for you: It’s now reached its end of support as of July 13, 2010.What does this actually mean? If you require a critical patch for your systems that are running XP SP2, you won’t be able to obtain one.
Analysis of the Siemens SCADA and Windows Shortcut Vulnerabilities
As you’re probably well aware, there has been a lot of news over the past month regarding a new Malware that is impacting Siemens WinCC SCADA systems. The Malware is known as Stuxnet. Looking closer at this Malware, there are really three key vulnerabilities that are exposed.
Network Security protocols: IPsec vs. TLS/SSL vs. SSH Part II
In Part I, I provided some background information on the OSI layer, some of the protocols and on security. In Part II, I’ll be discussing the different network security protocols: IPsec, TLS/SSL and SSH.
Network Security Protocols: Background Part I
As an IT security professional, one of the areas where I gained a significant amount of knowledge and experience in is network security. Working for a telecommunications company, it’s pretty much a given that if you are working in security, you are dealing with network security protocols such as IPsec, SSL/TLS and SSH. I started off primarily working with IPsec and eventually was exposed to TLS and finally, SSH. One of the real issues that I first encountered was differentiating between these network security protocols. It took me time to be able to understand and explain the following:
“What is the difference between these network security protocols?”
“Which one shall I use?”