In 1998, L0pht claimed before Congress that in under 30 minutes their seven member group could make online porn and Trek fan sites unusable for several days. (That’s all that existed on the Internet in 1998.) In February 2002 an SNMP vulnerability threatened the very fabric of space and time (at least as it related to porn and Trek fan sites — if you still don’t believe me, consider that Google added Klingon language support the same month). More recently, a DNS vulnerability was (somewhat re-)discovered that could enable attackers to redirect traffic going to sites like google.com and wikipedia.com to sites that served porn, even though many people wouldn’t notice the difference. (Dan Kaminsky compiled a list of other apocalyptic vulnerabilities similar to the issues that plagued DNS.)
This year at the OWASP NYC AppSec 2008 Conference Jeremiah Grossman and Robert “RSnake” Hansen shared another vulnerability, clickjacking, in the Voldemort “He Who Must Not Be Named” style. In other words, yet another eschatonic vulnerability existed, but its details could not be shared. This disclosure method continued the trend from Black Hat 2008 prior to which the media and security discussion lists talked about the secretly-held, unsecretly-guessed DNS vulnerability information with the speculation usually retained for important things like when Gn’Fn’R would finally release Chinese Democracy. [If you don’t care about gory details of the disclosure drama and just want to skim the abattoir, then read this summary.]
