McAfee’s Web site full of security holes, researcher says

The McAfee.com (NYSE: MFE) Web site is full of security mistakes that could lead to cross-site scripting and other attacks, researchers said in a post on the Full Disclosure site on Monday. The holes with the site were found by the YGN Ethical Hacker Group, and reported to McAfee on Feb. 10, YGN says, before they were publicly disclosed to the security/hacking mailing list.

In addition to cross-site scripting, YGN discovered numerous information disclosure holes with the site including seeing an internal hostname and finding 18 source code disclosures. The portion of the site that could be used for XC scripting attack hosts some of McAfee’s files for downloading software, YGN says on its Full Disclosure post.

This isn’t just embarrassing, but also somewhat discrediting for McAfee, which markets a McAfee Secure service to enterprises for their customer-facing Web sites. McAfee Secure scans a Web site daily for “thousands of hacker vulnerabilities,” the company advertises. If the site is found to “be certified” to McAfee’s “high standard of security,” then users of McAfee anti-malware products see a “McAfee Secure” label in their browsers. McAfee Secure claims to test for personal information access, links to dangerous sites, phishing, and other embedded malicious dangers that a Web site might unknowingly be hosting.

“In other words, the presence of this label means that the Web site is not vulnerable to the exact same vulnerabilities [McAfee.com] currently has,” writes security researcher Pablo Ximenes, from the Information Security Research Team of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, in his blog. “Don’t get me wrong, I have no interest in damaging McAfee’s image, I even own a company that sells McAfee products, but this is a serious lack of diligence with customers and resellers that must not go unnoticed,” he writes.

According to YGN, after reporting the flaws on the McAfee Web site to the vendor on Feb. 10, McAfee responded to the report on Feb. 12, saying, “We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” When, as of March 27, YGN found the flaws “to be unfixed completely,” YGN publicly disclosed them. YGN offered two tongue-in-cheek recommendations to McAfee for addressing the issues: that the company should make better use of its own internal Web site security experts from Foundstone, a Web security services company McAfee acquired in 2004, and that the company should “use outbound monitoring of traffic to detect potential information leakage.”

This is not the first time that McAfee’s Web site was found to be lacking security. In 2008, Web sites from McAfee, Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) and VeriSign were all found to have cross-site scripting (XSS) errors, according to security watchdog at the time XSSed.

Additionally, in 2009, white-hat hacker Methodman, a member of the Team Elite, published proof-of-concept attacks against Web sites kc.mcafee.com and mcafeerebates.com. In April 2010, the McAfee.com community forums were defaced via an XC scripting attack.

McAfee told Network World that it is investigating the Full Disclosure vulnerabilities report.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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