On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:59:43AM -0500 or thereabouts, Robert Brockway wrote:
On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, JoeHill wrote:
Again, facts and reality fly in the face of this argument. Hackers are usually, if not always, aware of these vulnerabilities before the security "establishment", and certainly before software designers can come up with a
Years in the security arena make me disagree with this statement.
Most "Hackers" (I prefer the term Crackers but there you go) are script-kiddies. The number of Black Hats (people who are actually serious crackers in their own right) is, and has always been, very small. Far smaller than the security establishment.
Most exploits discovered these days are found by those who launch a concerted effort to detect them. By sheer number and amount of effort most of the people who discover exploits are in the security establishment and are not Black Hats.
If you had followed the news of the Debian exploit, you will erealize that it was a kernel exploit, that could only have been done, by a very experienced Black Hat. This was no script kiddie, and the Debian Project takes security very seriously. The fact that the attack was discovered within hours, lends testatment to that. I think you should probably be directing your critique to the kernel developers, whom thought that it wasn't likely someone would use the bug to exploit systems. I guess they were wrong eh? I'm just catching up on my reading, apologies if this is mentioned further down the thread. -- -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml