Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:22:47 +0100
From: Cal Leeming <cal@...whisper.co.uk>
To: bk <chort0@...il.com>
Cc: Tõnu Samuel <tonu@....ee>,
	Full Disclosure <full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Barracuda backdoor

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 4:13 PM, bk <chort0@...il.com> wrote:

> On Apr 29, 2011, at 6:11 AM, Cal Leeming wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 3:30 AM, bk <chort0@...il.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 3:17 AM, bk <chort0@...il.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Apr 28, 2011, at 3:09 AM, Tõnu Samuel wrote:
>>>
>>> > One day their Barracuda product stopped working.
>>> >
>>> > After investigating problem it came out that Barracuda reseller and
>>> > Barracuda itself have some misunderstandings and because of this
>>> > Barracuda not only disabled all kind of subscription services
>>>
>>> You're unsubstantiated claims don't bare repeating.  I will however point
>>> out that many vendors disable some portion of functionality when
>>> subscription or support payments lapse.  This is widely done in the industry
>>> and a surprise to no one.
>>>
>>> --
>>> chort
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>
>> On Apr 28, 2011, at 7:20 PM, Cal Leeming wrote:
>>
>> Name ten.
>>
>>
>> For starters, every anti-spam company ever.  I should know, I've worked
>> for half of them.  At the very least you cannot get upgrades or patches of
>> any kind.  Most of them disable anti-spam updates, all of them disable
>> anti-virus updates, and some even disable anti-spam scanning entirely.  The
>> anti-spam SaaS vendors I know of will disable accepting your mail after a
>> grace period if you haven't moved your MX records.
>>
>> Hmm, let's see.  Firewall vendors won't let you apply updates, some of
>> them cripple VPN functionality when your license has expired... really, do
>> we need to go on?  There's a long precedent for products going into a
>> degraded mode if your subscription or license expires.
>>
>> --
>> chort
>>
>>
>> Everything you have mentioned there are when you have 'leased' a product,
> so if the license runs out, of course it's going to terminate those 'leased'
> services.
>
>
> Actually, no.  I'm really starting to doubt you have any experience what so
> ever with enterprise products.  Every appliance I've ever heard of or sold
> personally is sold, as in ownership is transferred.  The physical unit
> belongs to the party who purchased it.  The continuing fees or subscriptions
> cover:
> 1.  Support
> 2.  Product updates and patches
> 3.  Updates to anti-spam and anti-virus definitions
> 4.  Other product features that either require infrastructure on the
> vendor's part, or capabilities that are OEM'd from another vendor and
> require recurring royalty fees.
>

Are you referring to hardware or virtual appliances? Almost everything I
have used in an enterprise deployment, has been where the unit was owned
outright by the customer, with the license simply being for support.

Take Zeus products (ZXTM) for example.


>
> In all those cases the hardware unit doesn't just stop working, but certain
> aspects of the software functionality that require money & effort from the
> vendor to support do cease to operate.
>


>
> I believe OP is wildly exaggerating the extent to which functionality was
> impaired.  I also really doubt that Barracuda, with thousands of units
> deployed in the field, would assign a human being to individually login
> remotely and disable them.  They probably do it like most other vendors,
> where the units do periodic phone-home functions to a set of license
> servers.  If there isn't an updated license present for the unit to
> download, functionality automatically turns off when the original license on
> the box expires.
>
> Lastly, to touch on the other "shocking" subject, yes security appliance
> vendors have ssh access to the units in the field, either directly or via
> reverse tunnel.  Every vendor I have experience with calls this out in their
> documentation and the custom either has to allow it explicitly through their
> firewall, or they're given the option to block it (in the case of reverse
> tunnel).
>

I can understand why this feature would be in there, but I am strongly
against the practise of it being on an opt-out basis, not opt-in.


>
> Anyone with a reasonable level of technical competence who has ever
> implemented one of these appliances from any vendor in this space would
> already be well aware of these facts.  You'd probably all be stunned to
> learn that your phones, which can position you with accuracy of a few
> hundred feet, are storing information about locations of beaconing objects
> around them.  Yes, I'll give you a few minutes to get over that shock.
>

You can stop with the smart ass comments.


>
> --
> chort
>
>

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