http://www.attrition.org/security/rant/z/jericho.007.html Cashing in on Vaporware Thu Apr 19 09:17:21 MDT 2001 Jericho "The CERT Coordination Center is a center of Internet security expertise", and they have a new product to sell you. Only it isn't really new - and it was never a stellar product to begin with. For years, CERT has been a federally funded group handling incident response, vulnerability analysis and published security alerts. They are perhaps the most well known for their advisories which enjoy a wide distribution. The Product: Advisories Many in the security community dismiss the CERT advisories as either old news or too vague to be of any practical use. The two major faults continually seen in their work are tardiness and complete lack of detail. CERT advisories often come weeks or months after the information has been made public in other forums such as Bugtraq or mainstream news outlets. For those in the security field who keep an eye on both sides of the fence, the notion that CERT provides useful information is a bigger joke. There have been many cases where vulnerabilities with working exploit code circulated in both underground and public security circles for months (in a few cases, years) before CERT responded with an advisory. This was seen with various Solaris RPC exploits, multivendor POP/IMAP exploits, and more recently with WU-FTP exploits. While some hackers are abusing these vulnerabiltiies and compromising a wide variety of hosts, CERT is often not aware of the vulnerability until they begin to correlate incident reports. [...] ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email LISTSERVat_private with a message body of "SIGNOFF ISN".
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Apr 23 2001 - 01:00:50 PDT