SPACE ROGUE

iDefense just announced a bounty of $16,000 for remotely exploitable zero-day flaw in Apache, BIND, Sendmail, OpenSSH. IIS, or Exchange. This comes on the heals of the $10,000 plus a MacBook recently awarded by CanSecWest for remotely exploiting an OSX laptop.

While there are similarities between the two offers (not to mention iDefense and others standing bounty programs) both of these challenges raise the bar for spl0its. While $10K isn’t exactly chump change it is definitely worth a few days of banging away to find a hole in a system. In the case of iDefense’s latest offer of $16K many researchers are claiming that it is just not enough to motivate them to invest the work required to find such a hole in the listed software packages.

For the vast majority of researchers I suspect that this is true. The people capable of finding these holes all have jobs that pay at least five times that much if not more and if they don’t they should. $16K to them is probably chump change, at least compared to the effort and work required to find a viable exploit in these very robust packagaes.

However, I suspect that there are smart people elsewhere in the world for which 16,000 United States dollars might actually mean something. People who might be willing to put in the long hours and hard work required to find such a hole. If such a hole is found the question then becomes if it is worth only $16K or can they make more from it elsewhere? Think about it. A remote code execution vulnerability found in Sendmail, Apache or OpenSSH, what could you do with such a hole if not tied down by morals and ethics? Would you sell it for a measly $16K?

But really, sploits for dollars? Is that really the type of security model we should be promoting? Unfortunately the days of finding holes for sheer thrill, the glory, and the girliez seem to be far behind us. Is finding holes for a bounty any different than finding them for a salary?

The bigger question of course is disclosure. How holes are found isn’t as big an issue as what happens after they are discovered. Should the hole be disclosed or kept secret. If it is to be disclosed should there be a delay until a patch is available or announce immediately and leave unknowing people vulnerable? Should all holes even be patched?

Sploits for dollars. Maybe a new reality TV sports show?

Over and over people tell me that a product, service or other item is secure because someone else important uses it, and they are sooo important that they would never ever use or do anything insecure. So basically what they are saying is that “I trust them so I will do what they do.” The problem with this is they don’t really know how that other person uses a particular product. Perhaps they made a change to make it more secure or made a change and unknowingly made it even worse, or made no changes and it is just a crappy product to begin with!

Lets take for example the millions of people that run their credit cards through POS systems all over the country. Those systems must all be secure right? Banks wouldn’t let those swipe machines be easily hackable would they? Well they would if they were the brand used by Stop & Shop Supermarkets. The POS systems you normally use where secretly replaced by (Folgers Crystals!) hacked POS systems that still validated your purchase but recorded the information for later retrieval. (Pretty cool hack if you ask me.)

But, but, but thats a small company, I only trust big companies since they would never leave their data unsecured! They would if they where TJX who had people rumageing through their network for over 17 months before the breech was discovered.

But those are brick and morter shops, they always have problems. Reputable online companies don’t have those sorts of problems. Maybe not, unless you use products from Intuit whose online TurboTax filing system temporarily exposed tax returns including social security numbers and bank account numbers to anyone who asked. While the time between discovery of the hole and its closure was pretty short it is unknown if it was discovered and abused but not reported even earlier.

Hardware, I trust hardware. All that software stuff is easy to break but give me some good strong hardware anyday. You mean hardware like the Secustick, a USB flash drive that automatically encrypts its contents and supposedly self destructs if tampered with? So secure that even the French governement trusts it? Thats the kind of hardwrae you trust? Not so fast, its pretty trivial to break that as well.

So be careful who you trust, and don’t depend on others to make the decision for you. Treat your data and personal information as sacred. Trust no one.