Is anyone else getting tired of hearing excuses from customers — and worse yet, the security community itself — about how hard it is to fix cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities? Oh, come on. Fixing XSS is like squashing ants, but some would have you believe it’s more like slaying dragons. I haven’t felt inspired to write a blog post in a while, but every once in a while, 140 characters just isn’t enough. Grab your cup of coffee, because I may get a little rambly.

Easy to Fix vs. Easy to Eradicate

Let’s start with some terminology to …

When the Stuxnet worm that attacks Siemens SIMATIC systems was first discovered and made public, one of the first vulnerabilities in the software that was found was a hard coded password. This allowed Stuxnet to steal project information from databases used by Siemens SIMATIC systems. Symantec researchers have found another vulnerability which allows Stuxnet to spread via project files used by the SIMATIC system known as STEP7 projects. Stuxnet uses a variation of Insecure Library Loading or “Binary Planting” which became news in late August but has been known about for a long time.

What …

A little over a week ago it was the 9th anniversary of the 9-11 attack against the US. The following day, September 12th, 2001, I was scheduled to testify before the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs for a hearing titled, “How Secure is Our Critical Infrastructure?” The hearing went on but no one outside of DC was able to get there in time.

The following is the written testimony we submitted. We talked about:

the security of commercial software
one of the first botnets
the threat of consumer devices entering corporate environments
applications security

All are still major problems today. …