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Re: [Full-Disclosure] Re: Re: <to various comments>EEYE: Microsoft ASN.1 ...

Drew Copley wrote:

Without replying to each troll, individually, I thought maybe some
people would like to see some answers to some notes.


Most of these are from me, so I will personally respond to those that apply. And believe it or not, this is not a troll, I really wanted to see people's viewpoints on this subject. Thats the neat part about us not all working at the same company or striving for the same goals, we have different viewpoints. Asking for enumeration of those CAN be for purposes other than trolling, if I wanted to troll I would just reload the slashdot main page till a new story came out and mention something about hot grits and first post.

These are my own comments, I speak for myself.

Question: "Why release all of the details"


This statement is not an accurate paraphrase, I didn't say why release them all. I said why release them all on day 0 of the patch release.

Answer: Polls show this is what administrators what. This is one reason
we do this. Another reason we do this is simple, we use the details
ourselves. We use the details to create signatures for our vulnerability
assessment tool and firewall. Security administrators then download
these signatures and use them to check for patches or to protect systems
which can not yet be patched.


Administrators don't need this crap to fix their boxes, they simply need the exploit vectors, the possible mitigation steps, and the potential severity of the vulnerability. No sysadmin should have time, nor care about the call made to localalloc, the decoder functions it effects, etc... The pieces that are needed to make a threat assessment and develop a mitigation strategy, IMHO, are all in your bulletin, and contained in these sections: Systems Affected, Services Affected, Software Affected, Description, Severity. From that it's pretty obvious how bad this one can be, knowing that we can't make people stop using Outlook in a corporate environment, or stop using Internet Explorer to go to several popular sites, or any of the other numerous 3rd party apps that are affected by this. The strategy is simple, patch, patch, patch.

That is something that takes time in a large enterprise where you have to worry about the effects it will have on day to day business. You can't just flip a switch and deploy vendor patches the day they come out, I think we all know that Microsoft patches do have bugs from time to time and knowing how these will affect your "officially supported" corporate applications is important. Reducing the safe margin of time that one has to do that IS a problem in my eyes.

It does not matter if it is eEye you are talking about in this scenario,
or one of our competitors. This is the "behind the scenes" picture of
what happens when a patch is released.

Show me one competitor that releases such detail at day 0 of patch release.


When we - or our competitors - do not have full details on a
vulnerability, we have to reverse engineer the patch to do so. And, we
all do this.

I am sorry that you have to do what you get paid to do. Would it be an unreasonable thing to consider a gentlemans agreement between assessment vendors to share network behavioral fingerprints for vulns such as these? The finder still gets credit, the vendor still gets to help his clients, and next time he isn't the one to find it he still gets to help his clients. Seems like a decent deal to me...

So, people complaining about us releasing all of the details... They
simply are ignorant of what must be done in this process. They like to
scream and shout about how a worm will be coming and such, nevermind
that they don't even understand our advisories in the first place.



Don't hold yourself in such high reguard to believe that people the likes of me cannot comprehend your bulletins, you would be wrong.

And if this does not make it all incredibly clear, let's spell it out
for them: we can reverse engineer the patches and have to... If virus
writers want to, they can, too, as well.


Tell me that you have seen complex worms recently? Most if not all of them are cobbled together from exploit code the author found on some leet mad phat message board and added in some visual basic or visual c to tie the whole thing together to get their spam gateway up and running. The average worm writer is not competent enough to reverse engineer a ms patch to find the changed code and produce a working exploit from it.

[ .. snip .. ]

Question/Comment: "What is this thing with rapping?"

Answer: We have had these kinds of things in our advisories since we
started releasing them way back when.

Derek, at times, feels the need to bust a rhyme.

You are not going to stop him.


Don't plan to, but perception is reality, if you look like a script kiddy, it's going to be really really hard for a large company to write you a fat check. I don't know if you noticed but the day of cutsie titles are playful antics are a thing of the past, most people have gotten back to real business by now.

And, I have tried. Knives, ropes, pits, strangulation. He is quite wily.

[ .. snip .. ]

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