April 2011 Critical Patch Update Released
April 20th, 2011
Already 3 months gone by? April 2011 Critical Patch Update Released (direct link to Database vulnerabilities). Mostly obscure components that aren’t in widespread use in the DB world, but who knows…
Intel’s McAfee Acquires Sentrigo To Boost Database Security Offerings. That’s not surprising, given that Sentrigo has the best product in that space. Oracle already acquired Secerno last year, so other vendors now have to build their portfolio.
Dave DeWalt, president of McAfee said of the acquisition: McAfee is continuing to broaden its security portfolio to now-secure databases, as well as endpoints, networks, email and web. He added that the company is also announcing a “complete database security platform” which includes products across the McAfee portfolio.
McAfee’s Vulnerability Manager for Databases will automatically discover all databases on the network, collect a full inventory of configuration details, and determine if the latest patches have been applied and scans for vulnerabilities. McAfee’s Database Activity Monitoring (DAM), not only tracks database changes, but also protects data from external threats and malicious insiders with real-time alerts and session termination.
Let’s see what the combined companies are going to bring.
Oracle Database Firewall
March 18th, 2011
Oracle recently released it’s Oracle Database Firewall.
[The] release of Oracle Database Firewall is the culmination of the company’s acquisition of database security vendor Secerno last year. The product creates a defensive perimeter around databases by looking at SQL statements sent to the database through the wire to determine whether to pass, log, alert, block, or substitute SQL statements based on an organization’s policies. Users can set whitelist or blacklist policies to control the product, which is designed to work not only with Oracle databases, but also other major platforms, such as DB2, SQL Server and Sybase platforms.
As usual, they claim it’s going to replace all competitor’s remotely similar products, which is now causing quite a controversy among them, nicely summarized by Pete Finnigan in Oracle Database Firewall Controversy.
January 2011 Oracle Critical Patch Update Released
January 18th, 2011
It’s that time of the year again: January 2011 Oracle Critical Patch Update Released. People using OEM Grid Control on 11g versions and people using RAC on 10g and newer are vulnerable to remote vulnerabilities not requiring authentication, so again quite a serious CPU. Go and patch!
What are the criteria used by Oracle to decide whether a vulnerability warrants a fix in the CPU?
November 25th, 2010
Oracle answer one of the most asked questions around CPUs: What are the criteria used by Oracle to decide whether a vulnerability warrants a fix in the CPU?
NoSQL and Cloud Security
November 15th, 2010
NoSQL and Cloud Security: it’s in a bad shape, says Jeff Darcy, so pretty much single-user only on firewalled machines. Make sure you know what you’re doing!
Oracle Critical Patch Update October 2010
October 13th, 2010
The Oracle Critical Patch Update October 2010 is out, see the Oracle Security Blog for commentary. Of the 9 Database related vulnerabilities, 7 do not apply if you are on the latest patchset on 10gR2 or 11gR2, a much higher than usual number, and hopefully a good sign for what’s to come. On the other hand that means you should really be on the latest patchset for these, and get off of 10gR1 and 11gR1 urgently, unless you want to keep up the patching cycles.
Project Lockdown updated for 11gR2
September 14th, 2010
Arup Nanda finally updated his Project Lockdown series of Oracle Security articles for 11gR2. Definitely worth a read (and I’m surprised I can’t find an article on my blog about the first version of Project Lockdown – must’ve happened during a low-impact-blogging phase).
Oracle CPU July 2010
July 13th, 2010
Oracle’s Critical Patch Update July 2010 is out, with two easy to exploit DoS vulnerabilities in the Database network stack (although one on Windows only), and one critical vulnerability in the OLAP component – let’s just hope that this one opens the DB for attack if OLAP is actually linked in… because I guess most people’s Oracle will not have OLAP built in.
There are three more DB vulnerabilities – check the DB matrix in the appendix for details.
As usual our lucky French Eric Maurice gives the full rundown at the Oracle Security Blog.
Oracle CPU July 2010 Pre-Release
July 12th, 2010
Oracle’s Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement – July 2010 arrived online, and the nice folks at Integrigy already published their standard CPU pre-release analysis.
I’m a bit worried about the number of highly critical Database alerts, four out of six vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without authentication. Hope that’s just on Windows (as was often the case in the past), or in obscure features or functions that aren’t enabled by default.
