Re: ICMP Vulnerabilities

On Thursday, 7 July 2005 J. Oquendo wrote:
> This isn't news news, I've been tinkering with something along
> these lines since 1999

Well you may have known about the problem, but you didn't fix it.
The news isn't the problem, it's the FIX. The fix which people haven't
applied to their OS distributions yet.

To reiterate:

On Wednesday, 6 July 2005 Theo de Raadt wrote:
> Please read the article.

People saw the presentation at CanSecWest and had the same reaction.
Oh that... it's an old problem. Well, it's not really if you look carefully.
It's an important problem and it needs to be fixed. Maybe the right
solution is to just release the kiddy-exploit-code and melt down a 
few big ISPs for a couple of days so people stop parroting "It's an old 
problem" and get down to fixing it.

It seems to me that this perception problem is caused by skirting the issue
and being oblique about how to explicitly use this attack to cause harm.
People are ignoring the fix because they can't immediately see how to 
do the attack (it's somewhat subtle). Maybe what is needed is the 
Internet-Wide-Scale-DoS-HOWTO and people will finally apply 
the fix logic (which isn't that complicated as far as I can see).

But echoing "this is an old problem" isn't helping to propagate the fix.
So let's stop saying that.

Vendors, please fix your broken OSes.

cheers,
--dr

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