full-disclosure - Re: Sony: No firewall and no patches

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Message-ID: <60CEF2A2-6C19-43EC-B467-58B7EE1E0840@arbor.net>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 00:13:51 +0000
From: "Dobbins, Roland" <rdobbins@...or.net>
To: "full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk" <full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Sony: No firewall and no patches

On May 11, 2011, at 6:51 AM, Thor (Hammer of God) wrote:

My experience is quite different, and I have personally seen too many instances to count where the use of firewalls has, without question, been what has saved a company.

I would be extremely interested to learn details of how a stateful firewall in front of a server saved a company, when stateless ACLs in hardware-based network infrastructure devices would've led to failure.  Seriously, if you don't mind outlining the scenario, I think it would be very instructive.

> So, to wrap up my input in this regard, people should use what works for them assuming they know what problems they are trying to solve and how they are solving them.

If an attacker is already in a position to issue commands and induce your box to do things, he *already has his covert channel over which he can exfiltrate data*.  So the outbound stateful checking of server response traffic is moot, and simply constitutes a stateful DDoS chokepoint which makes it trivial for an attacker to take down the server in question by filling up the state-tables of said firewall with well-formed, programatically-generated traffic.

That's my point, in a nutshell.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@...or.net> // <http://www.arbornetworks.com>

		The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

			  -- Oscar Wilde

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