Re: Vulnerabilities on an RFC-1918 masqueraded Linux box.

On 11:11 Mon 21 Mar     , Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> I'm putting this in a separate thread because IMHO it has nothing to do
> with any problems I'm having, but with desktop security in general.
> 
> On Mon, 2011-03-21 at 09:57 +0100, Roman Zilka wrote:
> > The third suggestion is probably the most important one: being NAT'd
> > and being behind any iptables configuration (that allows for operations
> > such as sending mail and browsing the web) doesn't make your PC
> > invulnerable or anything near that. In other words, active break-in
> > attempts via open ports is by far not the only option hackers have.
> 
> So give me an example, Roman, assuming one's firewall is intact and
> functioning as designed.  The only such class of possible exploits I can
> think of is the possibility of importing a virus, trojan, worm, etc. via
> email, or possibly via a web script.  Linux viruses propagated via email
> are scarcer than hen's teeth, and an exploit imported thusly which would
> leverage a vulnerability in a specific problem kernel is almost
> certainly rare enough to be considered nonexistent in the wild as a
> practical matter.  Please cite specific viruses/trojans, and if you can,
> reported cases of such exploits.  In other words, don't blow smoke at me
> or throw out generalized assertions without citing evidence to support
> them.

Web-based vulnerabilities in Firefox or apps it uses for filetype 
support (e.g. Evince for PDF has had vulnerabilities lately) would be 
the most common, assuming you can convince people to visit a web server 
that's rooted or compromised by XSRF/XSS.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Desktop project lead
Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.com

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