On 4/8/07, Orr Dunkelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

You will also need to install everything from scratch (and I suggest you
init. your bios as well).


Flashing your BIOS for no real need (and the attack you're talking about is
purely theoretical) is calling for trouble. While it's fun to play the "how
can you totally 0wn a server?" mental game, let's stick to what's really
done in real life attacks.

Try running them (including the web server itself) in chroot.

Alternatively, at least consider limiting Apache a bit:
1) Run it with an SELinux policy (FC3 and upwards supports SELinux; not sure
about FC2)
2) Limit, with iptables uid-owner/gid-owner rules, the network sites which
Apache can initiate a connection to. While this will add a maintenance
overhead for web apps which pull data from remote servers, it'll also break
many common attacks, e.g.:
- some pre-made attack scripts rely on making, say, your broken PHP webapp,
download the full-fledged backdoor program from a remote server owned by the
attacker
- one reason to attack might be to set up a spam zombie; By refusing
outgoing traffic, it couldn't contact port 25 on other machines.

Depending on your web apps, those limitations might be an unacceptable
overhead. Or you might flex them a bit, e.g. chose to always allow port 80
but not other ports. Also, they don't aim to give hermetic security, just to
cripple your environment just enough to frustrate an attacker or make your
machine useless for his needs.

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