Scan Shows Possible Heartbleed Fix Failures

Study indicates many Global 2000 firms patched, but failed to replace digital certificates.

Of more than 1,600 Global 2000 firms, only 3% of their public-facing servers have been fully and properly locked down from the Heartbleed vulnerability that was first revealed nearly three months ago, new data shows.
While fewer than 1% of the external-facing servers at these enterprises remain fully vulnerable to Heartbleed, some 97% are only partially remediated from the threat, mostly because they failed to replace the private key, or revoke the old digital certificate. By not replacing the private key, an attacker could decrypt SSL traffic from the host, and by failing to revoke the old cert, an attacker could use it in phishing attacks, according to the July 2014 status report by Venafi.
Heartbleed has been known to the world for 11 weeks now. Yet we still see evidence of thousands of systems susceptible to Heartbleed that have not even been patched yet, says Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, in an email interview. We believe this is partly due to a patch-and-move-on mentality amongst IT professionals, meaning that once the patch is addressed, they believe the security hole is plugged. This approach is something that must be changed because as attacks continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, remediation becomes more extensive requiring multiple steps aside from just patching the vulnerable system.
But Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security, says hes skeptical of the data in the report, and that it distorts the issue. He says his own scans show that 90% of externally facing sites dont use OpenSSL in the first place, so they had no reason to revoke and reissue keys.
He says the big issue is about organizations not revoking the at-risk digital certificates. The paper doesnt mention the exact breakdown, but its likely that the primary issue is lack of revocation of existing certificates. That is indeed something that many affected organizations havent done, but should do, he says.
Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist at WhiteOps, says corporations have better processes in place for patching their internal servers than for working with third parties such as certificate authorities. With an absence of evidence that keys were actually compromised, it wouldnt be surprising that the internal code was updated while the external dependency -- the new certs -- was left unaddressed, Kaminsky says.
He says its unclear in the report whether the certificates are CA-originated ones or not. Self-signed certs dont really offer much security at all, Heartbleed or not, he notes.
[Heartbleed wasnt the first security hole discovered in SSL deployments, and it wont be the last. Read
SSL After The Heartbleed
.]
Meanwhile, the risk of bad guys pilfering private keys was fairly low, says Ivan Ristic, director of Qualyss SSL Labs. That may also explain why organizations appear not to be taking the certificate issue as seriously, he notes.
The full report is available
here
(PDF) for download.

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Scan Shows Possible Heartbleed Fix Failures