full-disclosure - A funny (but real) story for XMAS

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From: broyds at rogers.com (Bill Royds)
Subject: A funny (but real) story for XMAS 

I find CERT most useful to use as a stick against management.
Basically if CERT has come out with a warning before they have acted on the
vulnerability, they know that they have been too slow in reacting.
A CERT release means that this vulnerability is real, extensive and
dangerous and should already have been fixed on every system that it applies
to.
 So the value of CERT is to act as a last warning summary.  The very fact
that they are slow and complete means any one not fixing their system after
a CERT advisory is posted is truly showing negligence and lack of due
diligence in maintaining their system. Because they are well researched, it
might be useful to use CERT advisories as basis for a lawsuit against a
system owner if a system hacked by an exploit in a CERT advisory attacks
your systems.

-----Original Message-----
From: full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com
[mailto:full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com] On Behalf Of
Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
Sent: December 16, 2003 11:31 AM
To: cparker@...ber.fsf.org
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.netsys.com; vnsec@...tryunion.com;
incidents@...urityfocus.com
Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] A funny (but real) story for XMAS 

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 05:03:58 PST, Christopher Parker said:

> CERT sucks? Humm... In my UNIX & Security college course, we're being told
CERT is a great
> resource for security-related information. Can anybody else make a comment
on this? Agree?
> Disagree?

What they teach you in college about the way the world works is almost never
applicable to reality.

The biggest problem with CERT is that their advisories often take 3 weeks
short
of forever to come out, especially for a bug that applies across multiple
vendors.  This is because CERT doesn't announce till the vendors have
patches
ready to roll.

This of course sucks if there's an exploit on the loose.

This of course sucks if you're a vendor who gets a patch ready quickly and
ends
up having to coordinate with a vendor who takes 3 years to get one out the
door.

Other than the fact that sometimes their policies and criteria sometimes
work
against their goals, there's nothing wrong with CERT.  You can be sure that
anything they actually publish is solid and researched and an actual report
of
an actual hole, with actual fixes.

This doesn't help if you got 0wned by the hole 4 months before.