I find CERT most useful to use as a stick against management. Basically if CERT has come out with a warning before they have acted on the vulnerability, they know that they have been too slow in reacting. A CERT release means that this vulnerability is real, extensive and dangerous and should already have been fixed on every system that it applies to. So the value of CERT is to act as a last warning summary. The very fact that they are slow and complete means any one not fixing their system after a CERT advisory is posted is truly showing negligence and lack of due diligence in maintaining their system. Because they are well researched, it might be useful to use CERT advisories as basis for a lawsuit against a system owner if a system hacked by an exploit in a CERT advisory attacks your systems.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: December 16, 2003 11:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] A funny (but real) story for XMAS On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 05:03:58 PST, Christopher Parker said: > CERT sucks? Humm... In my UNIX & Security college course, we're being told CERT is a great > resource for security-related information. Can anybody else make a comment on this? Agree? > Disagree? What they teach you in college about the way the world works is almost never applicable to reality. The biggest problem with CERT is that their advisories often take 3 weeks short of forever to come out, especially for a bug that applies across multiple vendors. This is because CERT doesn't announce till the vendors have patches ready to roll. This of course sucks if there's an exploit on the loose. This of course sucks if you're a vendor who gets a patch ready quickly and ends up having to coordinate with a vendor who takes 3 years to get one out the door. Other than the fact that sometimes their policies and criteria sometimes work against their goals, there's nothing wrong with CERT. You can be sure that anything they actually publish is solid and researched and an actual report of an actual hole, with actual fixes. This doesn't help if you got 0wned by the hole 4 months before. _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
