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The Dangers of Second-Order Vulnerabilities
Topic Started: Sep 21 2011, 12:30 PM (67 Views)
Deleted User
Deleted User

September 19, 2011, 6:06PM
The Dangers of Second-Order Vulnerabilities
by Dennis Fisher

Less-noticed vulnerabilities are the ones that penetration testers--and more worryingly, attackers--use to dig deep into a target network once they've already gotten a foothold in the environment. And often, they're not even proper vulnerabilities, but rather misconfigurations, services left exposed or inter-organizational trust relationships that can be used and abused by attackers to move from one machine to the next until they find the data that they're after.

"These second-order vulnerabilities are the ones that lead to data loss. It's not always the traditional threats that matter. It's not always the server with a bug in it," HD Moore, CSO at Rapid7, said in a talk at the United Security Summit here Monday. "They're involved in the majority of breaches you see in the news and most of the ones I see in incident

As an example, Moore pointed to things such as password reuse, but not in the manner you might expect. Many home users will run into trouble when their email password is compromised, because they likely use that password for other sites. While most IT staffs and security managers are more careful than that, Moore said he often will be able to find a database of hashed passwords for a certain set of applications or machines, dump the database, look for a hash that appears more than once and know that a given password is being reused by someone. So without even cracking the password itself, an attacker would have key information about how passwords are used in the organization.

In one penetration test, he came across a folder of BMP files that an employee was using for background images on his desktop. One of the images was a screenshot of his saved passwords in Firefox, conveniently allowing him to just glance at his desktop when he needed to log in to a given site.

Full story here: https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/dangers-second-order-vulnerabilities-091911
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