Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I was browsing http://www.orablogs.com - (broken link) Orablogs and noticed Ed Stanglers post about Tom and direct dictionary editing so I took a look. The post is titled "Why You Don't Update The Dictionary". The post is quite short and mentions Tom's blog entry and also talks briefly about an incident that Ed witnessed himself on the same subject. The interesting part for me was the link to one of Tom's comments about a " http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/04/birth-of-asktom.html#c111451706208538112 - (broken link) war story, so I went and took a look.

This has nothing directly to do with security but it got me thinking about how information is often leaked via newsgroup, forum or mailing list posts. I mean detailed information about such things as internal IP addresses, hotsnames, server names, database service names, usernames .... the list goes on. I talked about the same issue here in the past in a post titled "An interesting example of information leakage posted to my blog entry". I was then thinking about how the same issue can occur during presentations, user group meetings and similar. The leakage may not this time occur due to postings on the Net but could occur due to word of mouth. Imagine a group of techies all gathered together because their employers all use the same software. They discuss bugs, issues, war stories and the like. I can think of examples where very detailed exchanges have occurred and data that should not go outside the company is passed freely, if verbally around a group of techies. These friendly situations should not be used to disclose data and details that you would not disclose in mailing lists etc. If your company has a policy for not posting these sorts of information on newsgroups or mailing list etc, then ensure it is extended to situations such as user group meetings face to face gatherings.