Re: [Full-disclosure] Facebook Attach EXE Vulnerability

["Mikhail A. Utin" <mutin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Face Book is trying to save its face. It's typical.
I got the same answer from SonicWALL one year ago when discovered that simple 
internal network scanning (Nessus, Nmap, etc.) brings down entire network. The 
firewall internal TCP connections stack was overloaded within a few seconds 
(IPS is not enabled, thus was not accepting new connections.

Mikhail A. Utin, CISSP
Information Security Analyst

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Facebook Attach EXE Vulnerability (Charles Morris)

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:40:24 -0400
From: Charles Morris <cmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Facebook Attach EXE Vulnerability
To: Nathan Power <np@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Full Disclosure <full-disclosure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID:
        <CABgawuYGTu1=eG2NEsD9g_n_aaPWE1myQzrZNc0TDZ5sqsb2VQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Nathan, It IS an issue, don't let their foolishness harsh your mellow.

Although it's a completely ridiculous, backwards, and standards-relaxing 
"security" mechanism, the fact is they implemented it, and you subverted it.

In my book that's Pentester 1 :: Fail Vendor 0

I've had large vendors (read:Microsoft) reply to issues with the same kind of 
garbage, where they take a situation where there wasn't a threat, create a 
"security" mechanism to counter the nonexistent threat, then implement it 
incorrectly, thus creating either a vulnerability in the system itself or a 
false sense of security for the user.

Fail: "Hello user, you can add attachments now! Look at our amazing
1997 web technology!!"

User: "Oh neat, I can't wait to send my friend this random file (read:
give up your rights and control of your random file to facebook) your through 
your excessive, unnecessary, inefficient, insecure, closed-source tool"

Fail: "I am blocking exe attachments 'for your security' so feel free to just 
run attachments without a second thought, don't even bother to waste 100ns of 
your time to practice normal security"

User: "Wait, what about .bat, .cmd, .vbs, .ws, .pif, .inx, .lnk etc etc? What 
about the extensions that I set up? Can I really just spam clicks all over the 
place?"

Fail: "Oh those, well you shouldn't be clicking those. What, we can't be held 
responsible if you don't practice normal security!! P.S. You know when we said 
we were blocking .exe files? Well--- we aren't.
Enjoy."

</rant>


On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Nathan Power <np@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I was?basically?told that Facebook didn't see it as an issue and I was 
> puzzled by that. Ends up the Facebook security team had issues 
> reproducing my work and?that's?why they?initially?disgarded it. After 
> publishing, the Facebook security team re-examined the issue and by 
> working with me they seem to have been able to reproduce the bug.
>



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