Our first Spark::red ATG Newsletter was sent on Tuesday morning! We’re pleased and proud to have delivered the first of many monthly ATG Newsletters.

In this newsletter we talk about the importance of improving your site performance, especially now that Google is using site performance as a search result ranking factor. We talk about Why, and provide several helpful links to help with How. I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug the fantastic ATG Hosting that Spark::red can provide, including extensive performance tuning at every level, web, app and database, using knowledge gained from 12 years of ATG experience.

We also reveal our PCI Compliant ATG Encryption Module which is the first PCI complaint credit card encryption option for the ATG eCommerce Platform. It handles strong encryption, key management, importing plain text and encrypted data, periodic re-keying/re-encryption, and more. It’s the fastest and most affordable path to being able to pass a PCI audit for your ATG eCommerce application. Contact us for more info: sales@sparkred.com.

You can see the whole newsletter here: Spark::red ATG Newsletter #1, and if you haven’t already, I recommend signing up so you don’t miss the next one: Sign Up for the Sparkred ATG Newsletter!

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I got contacted today with a non-form e-mail from a person offering a partnership which would “highly increase your context advertisement block (adsense) earnings” on 10MinuteMail. Essentially saying that they could increase my ad revenue, and would do that for a share of the increased revenue.

Which sounds good as I was wondering if there was stuff I could be doing with layout or ad types to help increase clicks, except this was from a random guy at a gmx.com address, with no company name. Googling his name and e-mail address turned up nothing. So I replied asking for his company info or references, etc…

Sorry, but our company has no web
site.
You will easteablish our credibility during partnership with us.
Lets just try it first, ok?
Put this code between the body tags on your 10minutemail.com
main page only:
<img src=”some russian site” />
It is an 1*1px transparent image.

Supposedly after I do that I’ll see the result in a couple of days.

So wow, little warning bells are now big warning bells. Adding a web bug can’t impact your Google adsense revenue. Adding a web bug to your site from a domain name with no website that’s registered by someone in Russia seems like a TERRIBLE idea! So of course I said no.

What do you think? Some sort of XSS attack, or cookie attack? I’m just not sure what the end game would be on this…

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You may have noticed 10MinuteMail was unavailable for a few minutes over the last couple of days. 10MinuteMail recently came under a DDOS attack which locked up the site a few times. Most of the malicious traffic came from the Netherlands, Germany, and to a lesser extend other European countries and the USA. Initially I dealt with it by generating a list of the malicious IPs and adding them to my block list. However, the DDOS kept spreading (botnet?) so I finally did what I should have done ages ago, and tuned my CSF/IPTables firewall to block DDOS patterns. So far so good:)

I have NO IDEA why anyone would be attacking 10MinuteMail. It’s very odd.

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The Monster.com job board database was illegally accessed and large amounts of user data were stolen.

As is the case with many companies that maintain large databases of information, Monster is the target of illegal attempts to access and extract information from its database. We recently learned our database was illegally accessed and certain contact and account data were taken, including Monster user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data. The information accessed does not include resumes. Monster does not generally collect – and the accessed information does not include – sensitive data such as social security numbers or personal financial data.

The fact that the database was accessed illegally (no word on if it was an internal or external access) is a huge deal. However the fact that they stored passwords in either plaintext, or in a weak enough hash that they feel all the user passwords are compromised, is the most disturbing part of this news in my opinion.

There is no excuse for either of those security failures. Especially after the highly public loss of 1.3 million users’ data in 2007.

Assume that your database will be accessed at some point by someone with nefarious intent. If it can happen to Monster.com it can happen to you. Therefore you should not store passwords in plaintext or weakly hashed.

Use a salted SHA-256 or bcrypt hashing algorithm to protect your users’ accounts.

If you use ATG please check out the open source SecurePassword ATG module. It replaces the default insecure password hashing algorithm with a salted SHA-256 hashing mechanism. (as a side note I will develop a bcrypt version shortly, but SSHA-256 is very secure).

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Recently there has been a lot of press about AT&T DNS servers being hit with a DNS Cache Poisoning attack.

Some new easier exploits were recently published, and many DNS servers are still vulnerable. And up until the new exploits were published publicly, the majority of DNS servers were vulnerable. This situation is worse once you realize that “safe” DNS servers can be poisoned second hand by transitive trust relationships, allowing one compromised DNS server to effectually poison the caches of other un-compromised DNS servers.

DNS Cache Poisoning has been a serious issue for years. The recent flurry of press regarding the compromised AT&T DNS servers is just the tip of the iceberg. It is only reasonable to assume that over the past several years a large number of DNS server have been serving compromised results at some point, either by direct poisoning or indirect poisoning. It is also reasonable to assume that this will continue for the foreseeable future.

In light of this, please re-read my post on 3rd party Javascript.

If I were a malicious hacker, let’s say working for the Russian Mob, or for myself, here is the easiest way to make some money:

1. Create javascript files designed to mask Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Doubleclick Ads, Overture Ads, and maybe a couple others. These scripts would have their cache related response headers set to be cached on the browser for 1 year. These scripts would call back to the real versions of themselves (so that ads show up, etc…). They would also intercept any form submission events and would look for form fields with names like “creditcard” or “ssn” or “password” or “accountnumber”, etc… If any are found, it would essentially clone the form and send the form data, the site hostname and page, the client’s IP address and cookies, etc… to a server I control.

2. Start cache poisoning as many DNS servers as I could find that are vulnerable to point the REAL domains for those scripts to my malicious copies.

3. Sit back and watch the Credit Card numbers roll in.

The best part is that by getting the browser to cache the script locally, I only have to have a computer hit the poisoned cache once to control it for a whole year. On most IE6 installations it’s also easy to actually install a javascript application on the user’s computer.

Personally I use Google javascripts on my site. However I don’t capture credit card numbers here, so the risk is low. If you run an e-commerce site, please do not underestimate the risks involved here.

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