recent disclosure debates

["R. DuFresne" <dufresne () sysinfo com>]

Folks,

There's been a flurry of debate re-arising from the ISS/ISC bind
vulnerabilities disclosure fiasco.  considering the events that played out
on bugtraq and related lists, and recounted in:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,758258,00.asp

<quote>

   When Internet Security Systems Inc.'s X-Force research team last month
   released an advisory warning of three newly discovered vulnerabilities
   in BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the advisory said that
   patches for the problems were ready and provided an e-mail address at
   the Internet Software Consortium from which users could request the
   patches. However, the patches at the time of the advisory were
   available only to organizations that had paid the ISC a fee to receive
   early warning of problems with BIND. The ISC, which maintains BIND,
   established a limited-distribution, early- notification mailing list
   last year when word of another batch of vulnerabilities leaked before
   patches were available.

   Michael Brennen, president of FishNet Inc., a Plano, Texas, domain
   registrar, wrote to the ISC requesting the patches and asked why they
   had not been made available at the time of the advisory. The ISC told
   him it wanted to make sure that the right audience had the patches
   first. "As of the moment of the announcement, 'the right audience'
   should be expanded to include all those placed at risk because they
   use the software," Brennen wrote. "Failure to make the patches
   available suddenly puts many systems at rapidly increasing risk."

</quote>

I'm wondering why all the fingers are pointing so dramatically at ISS and
why ISC has received little or no heat in the issue.  It appears in other
postings through bugtraq that ISS and ISC worked together for at leat a
month on the issues ISS released their advisory on and for which patches
seem to be dated back to as ISC fixes to code.  From all the reading I've
followed there was a coordinated effort that failed when it came time to
make the patches available to the public, after members of BIND Forum were
notified and given advance patches.  so, I'm wondering why ISS gotso much
bad press on this issue and ISC remained unscathed for the most part.

Thanks,


Ron DuFresne
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        admin & senior security consultant:  sysinfo.com
                        http://sysinfo.com

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