<div>Internet-wide Problem to Be Revealed at Conference
<p><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/162696/internetwide_problem_to_be_revealed_at_conference.html" target="_blank">http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/162696/internetwide_problem_to_be_revealed_at_conference.html</a></p>
<p>Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service</p>
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<div>Tuesday, April 07, 2009 6:00 AM PDT</div>
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<p>Organizers of next week's Black Hat Europe conference are promising
a security presentation that could impact anyone who uses the Internet,
but no details have been released yet.</p><p>They say the presentation,
due to take place April 16, will be as important as the one from
security researcher Dan Kaminsky at a Black Hat's conference last July
about a widespread flaw in the DNS (Domain Name System). </p><p>Kaminsky's
research prompted a massive, industry-wide effort to patch DNS servers
vulnerable to a dangerous attack that could redirect Web surfers to
fraudulent Web sites even if the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) was
typed in correctly, among other attack scenarios.</p><p>Black Hat's
Europe conference, in Amsterdam, will also feature cutting-edge
presentations on security problems in Apple's OS X operating system,
the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and SAP software. Also, six new
vulnerabilities will be revealed, along with 12 tools for security pros.</p><p><a href="http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-europe-09/bh-eu-09-speakers.html#Marlinspike" target="_blank">Details</a> of some of the presentations are available on Black Hat's Web site along with recent audio <a href="https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=137991&sessionid=1&key=ED7856B67DCFAA2C6F18F92DC73ACBA9&sourcepage=register" target="_blank">interviews</a> with some of the presenters.</p>
<p>Here's a preview of some of the presentations:</p><p>--
Tactical fingerprinting using metadata: Chema Alonso and Enrique Rando
will show how it is possible to gather lots of information about a
company's internal network by analyzing documents on a Web site. It's
possible to figure out the network structure, match IP (Internet
Protocol) addresses with internal server names, printer and folders.
Alonso and Rando are both computer engineers. </p><p>-- Eric Filiol,
head scientist at the French Army Signals Academy, will argue that
OpenOffice.org, the open-source office productivity suite, hasn't kept
its security up-to-date. It's far easier to develop malicious
OpenOffice.org documents than it is for Microsoft's Office suite, which
is frequently abused. Filiol will say there are conceptual weaknesses
with OpenOffice.org and that it should be redesigned.</p><p>-- So you
want to put a keylogger on an Apple computer but don't want to leave a
trace? Charlie Miller and Vincenzo Iozzo will give a presentation that
shows how, once a machine has been exploited, other code can be put
onto the machine with a minimal trace. "You don't have to call the
kernel to execute your binary," Iozzo said in the Black Hat audio
preview. "You leave less traces for forensic investigation and if
you're an attacker, it's a pretty cool thing." </p><p>They'll also
cover the iPhone, which runs a modified version of OS X. Miller, who
recently won CanSecWest's PWN2OWN contest for hacking a Mac, is a
principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators. Iozzo is a
student at the Politecnico di Milano.</p><p>-- SAP systems are tough to
troubleshoot due to their complexity. Mariano Nunez Di Croce, senior
security researcher at CYBSEC, will show how to do an SAP penetration
test, as well as show the latest version of sapyto, an open-source SAP
penetration test framework. He will also will give tips on how to
secure an SAProuter, which is a component of every SAP implementation
that can pose a security risk if not configured correctly.</p><p>--
Some of the protocols that underpin the Internet have design flaws that
could be exploited by an attacker. Luckily, most of the systems that
use the protocols aren't Internet facing and are secured by the
carriers and operators that use them. But if someone got access to a
carrier's network, the attacks could be disastrous, according to
researchers Enno Rey and Daniel Mende. Their talk will address BGP
(Border Gateway Protocol) and MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching).</p><p>Black Hat Europe will hold training sessions on Tuesday, April 14, and Wednesday, April 15, followed by two days of briefings.</p></div>
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