Re: Is Marty Lying?

[Jeffrey.Stebelton () bisys com]

"if you can set an IDS signature for something, then
you shouldn't be vulnerable to it.....  Useless."

I don't know what kind of company you do security for, but mine has these
prevalent security holes, also known as users. My IDS not only looks for
the external attacks, the guy banging away at my FTP servers with Grims or
running Whisker against my Web servers, but it also looks for the
BackOrfice'd PC inside calling home. You know, the one caused when the guy
on the second floor went to www.freesexfor everyone.com and downloaded what
he thought was a screensaver of the tootsie flavor of the month. IDS is
noisy, and it requires analysis, and yes, you see a lot of attempts against
things that are already patched. But it also shows you who's doing recon,
and the stealthy ones are the dangerous ones. That'll be the guy finding
the FTP server some developer reloaded and forgot to tell you about, which
now has a nice selection of first-run BiTTorrent movies available for
download. It'll also detect the hack in North Korea looking for a
misconfigured firewall object with NetBIOS ports enabled. And if you're
telling me your environment is 100% patched all the time, then I'd say you
don't have a whole lot servers you're responsible for. Useless? Not here.

Jeff S




|---------+-------------------------------------->
|         |           security snot              |
|         |           <booger () unixclan net>      |
|         |           Sent by:                   |
|         |           full-disclosure-admin@lists|
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|         |           09/22/2003 05:13 PM        |
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|---------+-------------------------------------->
  >---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                                                                                                               |
  |       To:       "Gregory A. Gilliss" <ggilliss () netpublishing com>                                             |
  |       cc:       Peter Busser <peter () trusteddebian org>, full-disclosure () lists netsys com                      
|
  |       Subject:  Re: [Full-disclosure] Is Marty Lying?                                                         |
  >---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|




"Detect intrusions" - if you can set an IDS signature for something, then
you shouldn't be vulnerable to it.  So the functionality of IDS is to tell
you when you've been compromised by six-month old public vulnerabilities
that dvdman has finally gotten his hands on an exploit for, that you never
bothered to patch for?

Useless.

-----------------------------------------------------------
"Whitehat by day, booger at night - I'm the security snot."
- CISSP / CCNA / A+ Certified - www.unixclan.net/~booger/ -
-----------------------------------------------------------

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Gregory A. Gilliss wrote:

> Peter:
>
> Intrusion Detection systems are designed to detect intrusions. Period.
> No one AFAIK has yet developed the Intrusion Prediction system. If you
> have an alpha version lying around, pls respond with a link. I'm sure
> that you will quickly be deluged with download requests =;^)
>
> Reactive is the nature of the beast, a point that has been rehashed many
> many times here and elsewhere. No finite state machine can anticipate or
> detect the virus that I am right now writing, unless I foolishly make
part
> of the binary match an existing sig. there will *always* be a latency
> between action and response. One of the things that people on this list
> do is attempt to assist each other in minimizing that latency.
>
> Now, if we could only get some of the vendors onboard >-)
>
> G
>
> On or about 2003.09.22 21:23:52 +0000, Peter Busser
(peter () trusteddebian org) said:
> > Hi!
> >
> > > > 3) Why the fuck do people still thing signature-based IDS is
worthwhile?
> > > Give us another solution. Are you saying anomoly based ids signatures
are
> > > _worthwhile_?
> >
> > The problem with IDS systems is the same problem that currently
available
> > virus scanners have: They work reactive and not proactive.
> >
> > Making machines harder to break into and improve ways to enforce a
security
> > policy (e.g. by using Mandatory Access Control (MAC)) would be one way
to
> > proactively deal with security.
>
> --
> Gregory A. Gilliss, CISSP                             Telephone: 1 650
872 2420
> Computer Engineering                                   E-mail:
greg () gilliss com
> Computer Security                                                ICQ:
123710561
> Software Development                          WWW:
http://www.gilliss.com/greg/
> PGP Key fingerprint 2F 0B 70 AE 5F 8E 71 7A 2D 86 52 BA B7 83 D9 B4 14 0E
8C A3
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