RE: Bug in Norton FireWall 2003

From: Michael Wojcik (Michael.Wojcikat_private)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 15:38:33 PDT

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    > From: nowak.aat_private [mailto:nowak.aat_private] 
    > Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 5:15 PM
    > 
    > 
    > > I suppose a simple defense for "personal firewall" vendors 
    > > against this sort of thing would be to use hard-to-guess window
    > > titles for their popups...
    > 
    > This simple defense may not be enough, as there are ways to 
    > find out the names of all "child" windows belonging to specific
    > process.
    
    Agreed.  "simple" wasn't really the adjective I wanted; something more like
    "preliminary" or "first-cut" was what I meant.  Another possibility would be
    to require that the window be visible when the event is received, and have
    been visible for some minimum time (even on the order of a few seconds),
    which would allow an alert user to see the trojan in action, anyway.
    
    Some firewall products of this type allow a "reject without prompting"
    configuration, which is safer, albeit potentially frustrating.  (I'm
    familiar with the Symantec products, and getting log information out of them
    is not a pleasant process.  Their UIs in general are not well-designed.)
    
    Is there a reliable mechanism in Windows for distinguishing between real and
    spoofed events?  I've never looked into the subject, as I avoid GUI-mode
    programming like the plague (which is an apt description, in my book).
    
    Of course, the popup window shouldn't be owned by a process running with
    elevated privileges anyway.
    
    -- 
    Michael Wojcik
    Principal Software Systems Developer, Micro Focus
    



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