unixwiz

It seems that the new “thing” on the internet these days is port scanning for port 22 (aka SSH).  I was going through my firewall logs on my home router and over the last week or so, it is broken down as follows:

As a comparison, attempts that were blocked that weren’t ssh only totaled 1430. So are these bot’s or people looking for rogue iPhone’s or just trying to find new vulnerabilities in SSH? The interesting thing is it appears that each source IP tries 3 times. The second try is 3 seconds after the first and the third is 6 seconds after the second.

An interesting IP is 217.70.139.42, which has tried 303 times since the 14th. The IP is from Germany and also appears on several SSH dictionary attacks. So is it time to start running services on non-standard ports?

Security port scan, Security, ssh

Just released, another exploit to Internet Explorer 6 & 7, that allows “hackers” to install software on your machine… What do the major Antivirus people say:

“To minimize the chances of being affected by this issue, Internet Explorer users should ensure their antivirus definitions are up to date, disable JavaScript and only visit Web sites they trust until fixes are available from Microsoft,” Symantec said.

How many mom and pop’s out there even know how to disable java script, and only visit sites they trust? Let alone make sure their antivirus definitions are updated. I have seen some virus trick Symantec’s AV in to thinking the definitions were up to date, and then I go to find hundreds of virus’ on my parents computer. This is just another reason why building the web browser in to the OS is a bad thing and why it should be sandbox’d off in to its own little area.

M$ Winders, MacOSX, Random Stuff, Rant, Security IE, Rant, Security, WIndows

It seems that Apple finally released a patch for the iPhone about the security issue I wrote about back on May 1st (More Security Stuff)

From Apple’s Web Site:

WebKit

CVE-ID: CVE-2009-2797

Available for: iPhone OS 1.0 through 3.0.1, iPhone OS for iPod touch 1.1 through 3.0

Impact: User names and passwords in URLs may be disclosed to linked sites

Description: Safari includes the user name and password from the original URL in the referer header. This may lead to the disclosure of sensitive information. This update addresses the issue by not including user names and passwords in referer headers. Credit to James A. T. Rice of Jump Networks Ltd for reporting this issue.

Not sure when James reported it though. So I don’t know if I found it before him or not. Anyways, here is my suggestion, if you use an iPhone and have EVER logged in to a web site with a username and password, you need to change that password immediately and then apply the patch from Apple to your iPhone. I know there are some people who view my site that use an iPhone and are clicking on links from other websites, therefore sending your username and password to me as well.

Apple, Security Apple, CERT-US, iPhone, Security

So as if it weren’t bad enough that every message you send is logged with your username and password in the system.log… They decided to log the userid and password in clear text in the sqllite database that it stores information in. Funny all you have to do is a:

strings ~/Application Support/Nambu/Nambu.db

and the second line will contain your userid and password. They keep saying that it is because they are in beta, and when they move to production, it will go to the encrypted keychain, yadda yadda yadda. But these little things should have been done from the begining… Just wondering why people do stupid security stuff like this…

Security MacOS, Nambu, Security

Because I am in that sort of mood tonight I started looking at other log files to see what kinda crap I could find.

So it appears that the iPhone has a bug where it seems to like to send the Userid and Password for Websites that you log in to as a referring link if you click on an outside link from inside an protected place.  Say what?  Well let me explain some more:

Say I set up a password protected web site that uses an htaccess style password protection. I then go to that web site, say http://somecoolsite.com/protected. If the userid and password is stored or used in the URL, say I had the user id of unixwiz and my password was IamCool, and I went to the web site with http://unixwiz:IamCool@somecoolsite.com/protected… Once inside the protected site, I then click on a link to some external site, for example http://mycoolsite.com, the iPhone is sending the refering URL as http://unixwiz:IamCool@somecoolsite.com/protected/ .. Which you guessed it, shows up on mycoolsite.com’s access log if they have referrer logging set up, or are doing anything that captures referr data. I would be interested in seeing if it still does it if you are prompted to enter your username and password and not save it.  How cool is that, with the amount of people using iPhone’s now, wonder how many people are looking at the logs to see this sort of data….

FWIW

Security iPhone, Security