Re:Matasano hacked. A humbling lesson, even the pros are vul...
by there on Sunday July 26, 2009 @02:31AM
(#724134)
If anyone finds an unpatched flaw and uses it to exploit some servers, then it doesn't matter who takes care of the servers. It doesn't matter if it's ptacek or a random admin. It's a new, unknown problem (if the claim about a 0day is real).
matasano isn't a firewall or antivirus company, their main business is code auditing and penetration testing. they are paid to find bugs in their customers' code before the "bad guys" do to minimize the risk of 0-day vulnerabilities.
i know it's not practical for them to audit every line of code in every piece of software that their web server runs, but this type of attack looks much worse for this type of company than it probably would for any other.
They didn't get to any sensitive information (or didn't publish it). They also didn't get into any personal system, so I doubt there was any real harm done.
in the output posted on the site, one user has a bunch of zip files in his home directory with "playbook" in the name (playbook is their firewall revision control product). some "real harm" could come from this attacker distributing the source code to their product, if that is indeed what was in those files.
matasano isn't a firewall or antivirus company, their main business is code auditing and penetration testing. they are paid to find bugs in their customers' code before the "bad guys" do to minimize the risk of 0-day vulnerabilities.
i know it's not practical for them to audit every line of code in every piece of software that their web server runs, but this type of attack looks much worse for this type of company than it probably would for any other.
They didn't get to any sensitive information (or didn't publish it). They also didn't get into any personal system, so I doubt there was any real harm done.
in the output posted on the site, one user has a bunch of zip files in his home directory with "playbook" in the name (playbook is their firewall revision control product). some "real harm" could come from this attacker distributing the source code to their product, if that is indeed what was in those files.