I posted a blog in May thatspoke about the potential for remote code execution on Windows CEdevices and the problems involved with patching. I also alluded to someresearch Symantec had been doing at the time. Well, at DefCon this pastweekend, Collin Mulliner demonstrated a remote code execution flaw viaMMS on Windows CE.

Collin's slides showhow he used a malformed MMS message to achieve arbitrary code executionon a device, simply by having a user view the message. This isobviously of great concern; Windows Mobile devices are becoming moreand more prevalent and the substantial challenges with patchingcontinue to exist.

At the end of 2005, the Symantec Advanced Threat Research teamperformed a detailed attack surface...

While most of the threats we see today are average infostealers or IRC bots, we still regularly receive malware that sits on the fringes of the malware landscape. The fringes don’t only involve threats that run on uncommon platforms; they also include threats that use old school techniques (such as simple file infectors), or threats that are well before their time.

Recently, a virus magazine (it, in itself, an endangered species) was released that had a collection of more than 30 pieces of malware. These different types of malware fell all along the spectrum, but most of them definitely leaned towards the fringes. Some examples of the malware included were:
- a worm that spreads by modifying all the links on a Wiki to point to itself
- a MatLab scripting virus
- a 64bit infector
- a CHM (Compiled HTML) file infector
- a virus for FreeBSD
- more than one threat written in C#
- a virus that infects Microsoft InfoPath files...

The continued development of insecure code was a topic at Black Hat 2006 that was explored by speaker Paul Böhm. Paul questioned why we see these same types of manifest coding issues year after year, despite over ten years of widely documented research into the matter. This pattern is not necessarily attributed to ignorance, as these mistakes are made by novice and veteran coders alike. In fact, it is not unheard of for individuals or organizations that specialize explicitly in security to eventually make a coding mistake that compromises the security of their software. One notable example of this was a vulnerability found in the grsecurity patch for the Linux kernel, which caused a product designed to harden the operating system to actually introduce a hole that would allow a full...

One server controlling thousands of client computers. Sound familiar? This statement is often used to describe a botnet. But, as Tom Ptacek and Dave Goldsmith of Matasano Security pointed out in their Black Hat presentation titled “Do Enterprise Management Applications Dream of Electric Sheep?”, the same statement can be used to describe enterprise management applications. These applications are developed to help network and system administrators with the tasks of configuring and managing hundreds or even thousands of client computers from a single server. This is also known as distributed systems management. Unfortunately, many of these enterprise management applications contain common vulnerabilities and weaknesses that were fixed in most other applications long ago.

Due to...