Security researchers say they’ve developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks.

The attack, described as the first practical attack on WPA, will be discussed at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week. There, researcher Erik Tews will show how he was able to crack WPA encryption, in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop computer. The attack could also be used to send bogus information to a client connected to the router.
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See how long it would take you brute-force your password using this handy php script:
http://www.hackosis.com/projects/bfcalc/bfcalc.php
The code is open source and can be downloaded from:
http://www.hackosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/bfcalc.zip

The month’s victim comes courtesy of Yahoo, or should I say Yahoo’s HotJobs.com. On October 28^th, popular internet research and analysis company Netcraft discovered a vulnerability on the Yahoo site that was being exploited to steal user authentication cookies. These cookies contain user login credentials that can be used to access any of Yahoo’s services, including e-mail. These cookies were being sent remotely to a site in the United States under the control of the attacker.

Yahoo has since corrected the flaw and released the following statement to netcraft:

The team was made aware of this particular Cross-Site Scripting issue yesterday morning (Sunday, Oct. 26) and a fix was deployed within a matter of hours. Yahoo! appreciates Netcraft’s assistance in identifying this issue.

As a safety precaution, we recommend users change their passwords, should they still be concerned. Users should always verify via their Sign-in Seal that they are giving their passwords to Yahoo.com.

How it happened:

The attacker managed to find a flaw at hotjobs.yahoo.com that allows visitors to inject obfuscated JavaScript into the page. The script can be configured to steal authentication cookies. The authentication cookie can then be used to allow the attacker to pose as the user.  This type of attack, and loyal netleets readers already know, is called cross-site scripting. Earlier in the year netcraft found a similar flaw at ychat.help.yahoo.com.

This attack was probably executed using the CookieMonster tool that has recently affected netflix.com and bankofamerica. CookieMonster is a cookie stealing toolkit that works with both http and https sites. It siphons authentication cookies from vulnerable sites. These cookies can be used to hijack a users account.

Theregister.co.uk best describes CookieMonster as follows:

The vulnerability stems from website developers’ failure to designate authentication cookies as secure. That means web browsers are free to send them over the insecure http channel, and that’s exactly what CookieMonster causes them to do. It does this by caching all DNS responses and then monitoring hostnames that use port 443 to connect to one of the domain names stored there. CookieMonster then injects images from insecure (non-https) portions of the protected website, and – voila! – the browser sends the authentication cookie.

A CookieMonster blog listed several popular sites that were allegedly vulnerable back in September. Those sites include southwest.com, expedia.com, usairways.com, register.com, newegg.com, ebay.com, any many many more.

What can be done:

In addition to the steps outlined in this XSS tutorial, sites that contain cookies for authentication must not allow cookie values to be translated on the client side. In the early days of cookie based authentication, many sites simply stored authentication information in the cookie, which can be read in any text editor. Today, cookies merely act as a reference point for server side authentication, however if the cookie can be used from any client, it defeats the purpose of even hiding the true value.

Perhaps the easiest thing that could have been done on Yahoo’s part would have been to configure their site to use http-only or https-only cookies. If only http is allowed, malicious javascript cannot be injected.

Via: netleets.com

An Oracle DB user which has been granted CREATE ANY DIRECTORY can use that system privilege to grant themselves the SYSDBA system privilege by creating a DIRECTORY pointing to the password file location on the OS and then overwriting it with a previously prepared known binary password file using UTL_FILE.PUT_RAW from within the DB.

This paper will show how the issue can be exploited and most importantly how to secure against it. This is an original vulnerability affecting current versions of the DB and please note that Oracle Corp’s Security Department have already been informed in accordance with ethical procedures and have given their permission to publish.

Proof of concept code tested on 10.1, 10.2 and 11g on both Linux and Windows and is available below.

Here is the paper.

Here is the code.

If you haven’t been auto-updated yet make sure you do. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if an affected system received a specially crafted RPC request. On Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 systems, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability without authentication to run arbitrary code. It is possible that this vulnerability could be used in the crafting of a wormable exploit.
http://blogs.technet.com/swi/archive/2008/10/23/More-detail-about-MS08-067.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/ms08-067.mspx

A team of Swiss researchers have discovered a security vulnerability in many modern keyboards that allow keystrokes to be captured remotely by tracking electromagnetic emissions. The discovery raises concerns about entering sensitive data like banking passwords using a computer keyboard or even an ATM keypad.
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lm2ntcrack provides a simple way to crack instantly Microsoft Windows NT Hash (MD4) when the LM Password is known. lm2ntcrack is Free and Open Source software.
This software is entirely written in Perl, so its easily ported and installed.
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There are a couple of ways to get to this data, including simply using the Keychain Access utility, but probably the easiest way to get to this specific data is to go through Airport System Preferences. Go into the Airport control area of Mac OS X and you’ll find a list of all the different networks you’ve successfully joined in the past, including those with and without passwords.

Open up System Preferences –> Network –> Airport –> Configure…:

Pick the network you need and click on the little “EDIT” button and a new window pops up with specific information on this network:

Click on the “Show Password” checkbox, and ….

The password is shown in hex but dont worry it’ll still work when you paste it into your new WIFI profile if you choose to create one.

Have you forgotten a password to a website, email account, or other password? If you use Mac OS X’s Keychain, chances are that your password can be easily retrieved.

First off, open Keychain Access.app (located in /Applications/Utilities/).

Once there, scroll through the list of keys until you find the one that you’re looking for. Double click on it and check the box that says, “Show Password.” Once you authenticate with your user credentials, your forgotten password will be displayed in the text box.