Darknet – The Darkside

OH MY GOD, NOT ANOTHER SENDMAIL FLAW?

What’s that? Yah number 1001010102121.

Recently, Mark Dowd of ISS discovered a signal handling vulnerability in Sendmail. We don’t see major bugs in software that’s as popular as Sendmail very often (at least, in the Unix world anyways), and that’s probably a good thing. According to sendmail.com, Sendmail still handles about 70 per cent of all email on the internet.

As far as software goes, Sendmail is ancient, dating all the way back to 1981. Sendmail 8 itself is well over 10 years-old. To put it nicely, its security track record is less than stellar. However, the last big show stoppers in Sendmail were found about three years ago & Zalewski’s prescan() bugs reported in September and March of 2003, and crackaddr(), also in March of 2003. The crackaddr() bug was also discovered by Mark Dowd.

So it’s been about 3 years since the last big sendmail bug, but well how many underground exploits are there for sendmail, it seems to have been one of the most insecure peices of software to ever grace the Internet.

The article also addresses some interesting issues, like can software have a finite amount of bugs? I don’t believe so, unless it’s very simple and is never updated, there’s no way it can have a finite amount of errors.

More code or more changes = more bugs.

Source: The Register