A Hole Lotta Trouble Ahead

For those in the computer security industry, 2004 promises to be another busy year, which is not necessarily a good thing, according to a panel of leading corporate security executives and security researchers.

Chief security officers from eBay and Siebel, among others, were part of December’s Infosecurity 2003 Conference panel discussion on security vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits.

The CSOs at this New York City event predict that 2004 is unlikely to bring relief to network administrators, who have had to fend off serial Internet worm attacks, mountains of spam and the increasing threats posed by Trojan horse programs and spyware.

Attacks that take advantage of holes in the remote procedure call, or RPC, interface will continue to attack networks next year, according to Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO of network security company Qualys. RPC vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s products were behind recent worms such as Blaster and Welchia, which spread worldwide in August 2003.

While many of these attacks will target Microsoft operating systems, hackers may also look for new ways to exploit RPC security holes in Unix and Linux. Hackers are also looking to exploit memory heapsareas of computer memory that are created dynamically when programs run. Such attacks would attempt to sidestep protections that Microsoft is building into XP in order to prevent stack overflows, which Blaster exploited.

So remember to keep in mind the exploits of years passed, because the challenges of 2004 may look awfully familiar.