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Re: On classifying attacks



Daniel Weber wrote:
Crispin Cowan wrote:

I participated in that Lincoln Labs study, and my recollection is
that the remote/local distinction was already popular on bugtraq at
the time.

I've seen a lot of classification schemes proposed on Bugtraq in the
intervening years, some of them quite good.  (Search the archives for
"taxonomy" or "classification".)  But unless they are -very- simple to
use, they won't be taken up by the community.  If you can come up with
a single word that imputes the concept of "malicious data that I can
easily get onto the victim's machine and in front of the victim's
eyes but requires him to run it," that would be a great step forward.

Simplicity is key. (Unlike this posting, which I did not have time to make shorter and simpler.)

What made my life a little confusing of late was not Trojan horse attacks, as I got used to the idea of treating them with a different terminology all-together. Once on the system, it is compromised and how the attack happens is irrelevant but *can* be quantified. How it got on the system is the question here.
I.e., remote connection exploiting a service, etc.

The issue that bothers me is how we treat browser or generally client side vulnerabilities.

I often see advisories on bugtraq such as this:
Remote exploit while using a browser to gain local access
After reading, I find out it's an SQL injection.

Another example is, if a user has to browse to a remote site to get exploited, it is true the attack code was on a remote site, but the processing, the exception and the exploitation happened locally.

The difference with other client attacks triggered from remote location is the attacker. If he/she connects to you and tries to exploit, the service is running and then runs into say, an exception. With a browser you go to a remote site, download code, run it locally and get exploited.

I am not sure what these should be called, but an SQL injection is not a remote vulnerability as we term it, despite some similarities.

Many of us still argue on what a worm vs. Trojan vs. virus, etc. are. Let's not get to the stage where we have that with vulnerabilities.

        Gadi.