Handling critical security vulnerabilities: Three incidents

Going Critical

Article from Issue 149/2013
Author(s):

We look at what makes a security issue critical and how upstream developers and vendors respond by examining three incidents: CVE-2013-0156, CVE-2013-0333, and rubygems.org. Moreover, we look at improvements that can make security better in the future – specifically, incident response handling.

January 2013 was a bit of a rough month for users of Ruby on Rails and rubygems.org. Two critical security flaws were found in Ruby on Rails, and rubygems.org was broken into (luckily, not by a malicious hacker). In this article, I will look at exactly what caused these security vulnerabilities and the break-in to earn "critical" ratings, what the vendors did when a critical issue came up, and what users can do to help keep their software secure.

Critical Issues

One of the most important criteria in judging whether a security issue is critical or not is the severity of exploitation (see the "CVSS2 Scores" box). An attack that allows remote code execution as a privileged user or root is a whole lot worse than a simple denial of service condition. On the other hand, a denial of service that can be triggered remotely with a single network packet and make it through the Internet (e.g., not just on the same local subnet) might also be rated "critical."

Also, you need to look at how many systems are affected. If an attack requires a non-standard configuration, that's not as bad as one that affects the default configuration, which would mean almost all systems are affected – which leads the next main question: How easy is the exploit?

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

  • Critical Security Vulnerabilities

    We look at what makes a security issue critical and how upstream developers and vendors respond by examining three incidents: CVE-2013-0156, CVE-2013-0333, and rubygems.org. incident response handling.

    more »
  • Security Lessons

    When it comes to security, public disclosure of vulnerabilities and working exploit code is now common. We look at why this can be both harmful and helpful to securing your systems.

    more »
  • Security Lessons – Ruby Tools

    Great tools and resources are available to help you write secure Ruby on Rails code. Kurt examines some tools and offers some tips.

    more »
  • Mozilla Developers Remove Critical Bugs

    The Mozilla Foundation has removed at least ten vulnerabilities from its browser, three of which were classified as critical by the developers.

    more »
  • Mozilla Closes Down Critical Security Holes

    The Mozilla Foundation has just released Firefox version 2.0.0.10 which resolves three critical vulnerabilities – but new issues have already reared their ugly heads.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source