30 Jan 2010 von Alexander Kornbrust.

I came across an interesting article in the German newspaper FAZ. Someone is offering data of 1500 Swiss bank customers (with black money) to the German government for 2.5 Million EURO. A quick check of the tax fraud investigators showed that the data is reliable.

The Return on Invest (ROI) is approx. 100 Mill EUR for the German government (4% for the data thief). Our minister of finance is still thinking if he should make this deal. This would be good for the German government (more money, less taxes for Germans) but bad for the Swiss banking industry.

Geschrieben in Allgemein | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »

25 Nov 2009 von Alexander Kornbrust.

Shaomin Wang from Oracle has posted an interesting blog entry “How Oracle controls access to security vulnerabilities“. There are 3 different access types: Default Access, Global Access and Hierarchical Access.

Depending from the role inside of Oracle (e.g. Global Product Security staff, normal employees or their managers) people have the right to view an individual security bug or all security bugs.

This is a big improvement comparing to the time when I was an Oracle employee several years ago. At that time everybody inside of Oracle had access to security bug information.

The only problem nowadays are security bugs which are not marked as security bugs because Oracle support employees are not aware of the security impact of a normal bug. These bugs are often accessible via MyOracleSupport even for Oracle customers.

Geschrieben in Allgemein | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »

17 Nov 2009 von Alexander Kornbrust.

Metasploit 3.3, the leading exploit framework is out. Here an extract from the Metasploit blog:

“Oracle exploit support has been implemented through a tag-team effort between MC and Chris Gates, with assistance from Alexander Kornbrust. Oracle modules have been developed for exploiting TNS protocol stack and Web-based Oracle services, as well as post-authentication database-level privilege escalation flaws. ”

Version 3.3. (release notes) is the largest known ruby application (375,000 lines of code) and comes with some new Oracle features

• Support for the Oracle InstantClient Ruby driver as an exploit mixin
• Extensive support for exploitation and post-exploitation tasks against Oracle databases

Have fun using Metasploit.

Geschrieben in Tools, Exploit, Oracle Security, Allgemein | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »

17 Nov 2009 von Alexander Kornbrust.

In 3 weeks Paul Wright will give an 1 day workshop for SANS (Sat. 5. Dec. in London) about Database Activity Monitoring Systems (DAMS).  Paul will use the free Hedgehog Standard Edition in the class to demonstrate solutions for common problems like user monitoring, defending against public zero days, …

Here is the table of content:

1. Defend against public and zero day attacks via free custom written IDS rules
2. Gain  Compliance
3. User activity monitoring
4. Application monitoring
5. Sensitive data access monitoring
6. Diagnostics prior to changes such as CPU installation.

A case study about using DAMS from Paul Wright is available in the UKOUG Scene magazine (Issue 39).

You should not miss the chance to join this workshop because it can help your company/organization to secure their databases …

Geschrieben in Trainings, Allgemein | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »

8 Nov 2009 von Alexander Kornbrust.

I just read that SAP is now certified with Oracle Database Vault. This is an important step to increase the security of SAP systems. Well done Oracle. Let’s see if SAP customers will use this functionality.

The Oracle whitepaper “Best Practices Installing and Configuring Oracle Database Vault in an SAP Environment” decribes the step-by-step installation of database vault in SAP.

The following screenshot from the document (July-2009) contains an information disclosure bug for the Oracle SID (reported by me, fixed by Oracle with CPU July 2007). It seems that the installation of the security component was done with unpatched security software

Geschrieben in Allgemein | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »