Scott Sanchez has posted a very interesting message on the CISSP forum that you should all read about. It is a tool called firethru that allow user to proxy requests through the firethru.com servers and by doing so bypass your security filetering. Click on Read More below to get the full message from Scott.
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Sanchez [mailto:scott@gungadin.com]
Sent: 25 avril, 2001 19:20
Subject: firethru.com (second alert)
Importance: High
Ladies & Gents,
I posted about this last week, and I hope that by now you've all evaluated it and blocked it at the router/proxy/firewall level if necessary for your organizations.
If you haven't seen it yet, it's basically a port redirector that a user can
install on their workstation and bind a port to a remote host by forwarding packets through the firethru.com web site. So, you say that (for example) whenever I telnet to 127.0.0.1:4500 it should open a connection to some.host.on.the.internet.com:23. Now, most firewall and proxy servers wont stop this (unless you've blocked firethru specifically) because the firethru client will forward the packets through www.firethru.com:80/cgi-bin/proxy rather than any special ports. Pretty sneaky. It does AIM, Telnet, FTP, POP3, SMTP, WWW, HTTPS, etc..etc..
To make it even better, we were able (through spoofing) to pass packets from an arbitrary host on the Internet, back THROUGH the "firethru" http tunnel and into the original host (which, if you haven't blocked it would be on your corporate networks). This is NOT an intended feature of the product. (Granted, for this attack to work you'd need to know the end-point host that the firethru user is connected to, and what ports are involved in that connection. But that's why they invented sniffers, isn't it?
Anyway, not sounding the alarms but IMHO it's definitely worth adding to the block list. There is no purpose that we have found yet for this product other than to bypass security policies & their subsequent filter rules.
It's blocked on my networks.
-Scott
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Scott C. Sanchez, CISSP
scott@gungadin.com
PGP Key: http://www.gungadin.com/pgp-scott-c-sanchez.asc
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