External Security Monitoring

New web site monitoring station: Copenhagen, Denmark (2007-09-08)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring stations expands again, this time in Copenhagen, a another site monitoring station in Scandinavia, bringing the total number of checkpoints to 23.

The new checkpoint will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set one of the new checkpoints as the primary checkpoint in your monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse web site monitoring network can be found on the 'About' tab of the WatchMouse site.

Did you know? Hackers probe your servers for vulnerabilities between 5 and 170 times per week (2007-10-29)

Test your site now: Free 10 day / 10 external security monitoring trial

With a dramatic rise in malicious attacks, it is now critical to test your websites and servers for security vulnerabilities. Having the latest firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems will not protect your organization if they (or the services behind it) are not kept up-to-date and configured correctly.

This means that verifying the security of your systems is not something you can do just once, nor should you check this just every now-and-then. New vulnerabilities are identified every day, exploits become available soon after it, and every change in your systems' configurations, however small, may open up new vulnerabilities. Having audited last week does not imply your systems are fine today!

The WatchMouse Periodic Vulnerability Scan is an affordable way to routinely check your company’s security exposure. Utilizing the most up-to-date database of known vulnerabilities, WatchMouse’s identifies any security external security monitorings and provides you with the peace-of-mind that your web applications are being scrutinized from the perspective of a possible attacker.

Characteristics

WatchMouse offers Periodic Vulnerability Scanning with an outside - hacker's - view, with the following characteristics:

• Currently over 20,000 vulnerabilities are checked. Checks for new vulnerabilities are added on a daily basis.
• The frequency and the intensity of a external security monitoring can be tailored to your policies, and implemented immediately on our self-service website.
• Severe vulnerabilities can, depending on your preferences, initiate SMS (text) or paging alerts, giving you, or your webmasters, the opportunity to react quickly in case of new vulnerabilities.
• Extensive reporting is available for each external security monitoring, including pointers on how to fix vulnerabilities.
• WatchMouse's unique Vulnerability Scan Customer Console allows you to manage subsequent external security monitorings by inspecting differential reports and open external security monitoring, declaring vulnerabilities fixed, adding operator comments, etc.

Try now: Free 10 day trial!

Announcing two free contacts for all accounts and alerting via MSN and Jabber (2008-01-08)

WatchMouse starts the new year with a gift: we have added two contacts to all customer accounts for free.
Contacts are used for:

• alerts in case of errors as defined in your Performance Monitoring rules,
• alerts when new external security monitoring are found in your Vulnerability external security monitorings, and
• custom reports.

We also introduced two new alerting methods: Instant messaging with MSN (Windows Live Messenger) and Jabber.

If you have a Jabber or MSN instant messenger account, add it as a contact in your WatchMouse account and then use these contacts for alerting. Our favourite setup is an escalation group where at the first error an instant message is sent, then if the error persists, after 5 minutes this is followed by an email and/or SMS text message.

New release: many new features and improvements (2008-08-25)

The most recent release of our site and software brings not only many improvements, but also a number of interesting new features:

• You can now restrict the monitoring of your site to a selection of our monitoring stations.
  As we are adding ever more of these stations, this has become a recurring feature request.
  How: In the [expert mode] of your rule settings, select 'Checkpoint selection'. This allows you to choose the checkpoints that will execute this rule. In case of a 'Master' sequence rule, additional checkpoints will only be used for second opinion checks. Make sure you select at least three stations for redundancy purposes.
• New IMAP and POP3 checkers now support SSL and can send 'round trip' test messages.
  These test messages are checked in the next monitoring cycle thus implementing a full round-trip email verification functionality
  How: In your rule settings for IMAP and POP3 rules select "SSL encryption". Make sure you are in [expert mode], where there will be an email address field. When an email address is found in this field, we send a test email to it in each cycle, and check for its correct delivery in the next cycle.
• New DNS checkers with many more features.
  Test for A, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, and AAAA records and test these on our local resolvers, on your listed name servers, or on specific DNS servers. The existing dnsa and dnsns type rule will be replaced soon by this new dns type rule. How: In the [expert mode] of your rule settings type the name or IP address to be tested, select the record type, and click look-up. Now select the DNS servers that should be queried, set the other options and click save.
• In many cases, the log viewer will now also show the DNS resolve times for each check. As we move forward, we will add this for all check types.
• The web site now offers a more flexible subscription model, allowing customers to mix and match a wider range of different rule types and intervals.
• The reseller console has undergone major improvements making it easier for resellers to manage their customers' accounts.

In addition, many improvements have been made and several smaller external security monitoring have been resolved, please refer to the change log for details.

All new features are available for current and new subscribers at no extra charge. And, as always: if you are missing a feature, please let us know! We will most likely add it in a future release.

WatchMouse Public Status Pages: your own public website health page in two clicks! (2009-08-19)

Today we move the WatchMouse Public Status Pages (WMPSP) out of beta, making them available for all WatchMouse customers free of charge!

What is a Public Status Page?

A public status page is a web page that informs your customers on the status of your services, inspired by similar pages from many organisations like Amazon, Apple, Google, but also ISPs, financial institutions and other organisation who deliver critical services to other companies or the general public. Well-known examples are:

• The Amazon web services Health Dashboard
• Apple MobileMe support (top right corner)
• Google Apps Dashboard
• Nationwide (a UK bank) service page
• The WatchMouse Status Page and our Monitoring stations status (yes, we eat our own dog food)

On our Public Status Pages the current status of your selection of on-line services can be displayed, and updates (public announcements) can be placed there for your customers. The pages are hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, ensuring that your status page is highly scalable. It also ensures that your status pages continue to be available even if your main site or service is not.

Should my organization have a Public Status Page?

There is a strong trend to inform customers as soon as possible when certain services become unavailable, and announce maintenance well in advance. If you would like to provide your customers a dedicated status page for the on-line services you provide to them, WMPSP is a very efficient and cost-effective solution for your organisation. You can have a Public Status Page set up in minutes by creating one or more rules in your WatchMouse account, set up a public folder, and move these rules into this folder. Using the WMPSP setting page you can post announcements, annotate current external security monitoring, and optionally set up a special host name (CNAME) so people can access the status page using your domain name, e.g. status.yourdomain.com.

How does it work?

After you have set up a public folder with monitoring rules in your account, the status of these rules will be pushed to http://status.watchmouse.com/NNN automatically (where NNN is a unique id for your status page). Make sure the settings of the rules, and especially the timers for the performance thresholds are according to your standards / SLA. You may want to have a similar set of rules with more strict thresholds for internal use so you will get notified well before your Public Status Page is update. Note that you can have your own host name as well, i.e.status.yourdomain.com instead of http://status.watchmouse.com/NNN

Whenever there is a performance or availability issue, you can annotate this in your WatchMouse account and this information (e.g. "our technicians are working on a solution, expected to be available at 16:00") will be pushed to the WMPSP as well. Similarly, you can announce maintenance or downtime in the same procedure and this will be listed in the announcement section of your Public Status Page.

All Public Status Page are hosted on the Amazon web services infrastructure, making it independent from your own servers availability and ensuring a very high availability and scalability.

Get started now!

• Login into your account and go to the standard rule settings page
• Create a new rule folder for each WMPSP you would like to set up, and create rules within those folder that are representative for the availability of your main services.
• Go to the WMPSP setting page and click the [add] button, and select a folder you created in the previous step.
• Optionally you can also add a host name within your own domain in the CNAME field. Not that you have to add a CNAME record to you DNS for this host name pointing to status.watchmouse.com.
• Click [make public] and you're done! Note that it might take a minute or two before the status page is actually available, since the data has to be transferred to the Amazon AWS platform first.
• Test your WMPSP by clicking on the Name and/or CNAME links in the public folder listing. Observe that each rule has it's own detail page which looks like this: WMPSP for the WatchMouse web site
• Note that the name and logo shown can be changed in your account details
• Next you can add announcements to your WMPSP in case you have scheduled maintenance for one of more services or when actual external security monitoring arise and you would like to update your customers about the progress fixing it.

LB Icon chooses WatchMouse for independent website monitoring (2005-01-31)

Customer websites verified from the visitors' perspective

LB Icon and WatchMouse have signed a contract for the continuous monitoring of the websites and services of LB Icons' customers. Using the WatchMouse services, LB Icon expects to raise its service level even higher.

The Application Management & Hosting Services (AM&HS) group of LB Icon maintains the administration and management of servers and applications of a large number of (international) clients. This makes AM&HS responsible for the performance and availability of the websites and Internet applications.

Using the WatchMouse services, AM&HS will instantly be aware of upcoming and/or acute incidents related to the websites of its clients, and can, as a result, resolve problems in a short time frame.
The websites and their functionality are checked for accessibility, speed and conformance from different locations around the world. Because the websites are checked in the same way that visitors are experiencing them, incidents will be detected at an early stage. Also, using WatchMouse's objective periodical reports, it is possible to see if the performance is in accordance with the agreed service levels (SLAs).

Eveline Aendekerk, MD a.i.: "The door of a shop should never be jammed, websites and the functionality on those sites should simply be accessible and available. Our clients should be able to rely on this completely, so they can focus on their primary business processes, such as communication, interaction and sales.
We chose WatchMouse because of their expertise, and also because of the simplicity and user-friendliness of their system and services".

Stan P. van de Burgt, one of the founders of WatchMouse: "I find it a powerful gesture that LB Icon doesn't just monitor the websites of their clients, but that they selected an external party for this, and on top of that give their clients access to the results. Many companies where the website plays an essential role in business, don't have any awareness of this. They have no idea of the external security monitoring and the resulting damage, until the day comes that things actually go wrong"

About Lost Boys

For 11 years Lost Boys has been a major service provider in the area of (mobile) Internet. Lost Boys offers a combination of strategy, design, technical development, implementation, application management and hosting of Internet- and mobile solutions. The Amsterdam based corporation is part of the Lost Boys/IconMedialab Group and is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and Euronext Amsterdam. Lost Boys operates with 600 employees in 7 countries, both in Europe and the United States.

http://www.lostboys.nl/
http://iconmedialab.com/

About WatchMouse

WatchMouse is a service of RoundZero. Since 2001, WatchMouse has been checking Internet sites and e-commerce applications of major companies all over the world. The WatchMouse services are available in 8 languages and analysis is performed through its worldwide monitoring network at different locations and networks. WatchMouse has thousands of users in more than 70 countries.

http://www.watchmouse.com/

WatchMouse and Domeny.pl join forces in the Polish market (2005-11-24)

Polish websites verified from the visitors' perspective

Kraków, Poland, 2005-11-08 -- WatchMouse and Domeny signed a reseller and marketing agreement today, joining forces in bringing site monitoring services to the Polish market.

Using the WatchMouse services, companies will instantly be aware of upcoming and/or acute incidents related to its web sites of their clients, and can, as a result, resolve problems in a short time frame.

The websites and their functionality are checked for availability, speed, and conformance from different locations around the world, now including Poland. Because the websites are checked in the same way that visitors are experiencing them, incidents will be detected at an early stage. Also, using WatchMouse's objective periodical reports, it is possible for companies to see if the performance is in accordance with the agreed service levels (SLAs).

WatchMouse extends its network of monitoring stations with a checkpoint in Kraków, hosted by Domeny.pl. The total number of checkpoints is now 17. Domeny.pl also provides the Polish language version of the WatchMouse site and local customer care.

Stan P. van de Burgt, CEO of WatchMouse: "I'm very happy with this deal. The Polish e-service industry is obviously booming, and this results in higher awareness of the issues involved with running web applications that should be available around the clock."

Arkadiusz Szczurowski, CEO of Domeny.pl "We know that WatchMouse products are one of the best in the World. So we decided to co-operate with the company, and we take pride in it. We expect this co-operation to bring both WatchMouse and our business a lot of advantages and satisfaction. Domeny.pl wants to lead WatchMouse monitoring service on Polish market and offer it for business leaders. This will be a great innovation in Poland and also success. In our view, site monitoring is important, because stability, performance, and high availability of the web sites is one of the basic value in all branches of business, both e-business and other business."

"There are about 4 million companies in Poland. We want to direct the offer to the most important on Polish market. We think that the WatchMouse service is a must-have for about 5-10 percent of all business owners."

About Domeny.pl

Domeny.pl was founded in 1997 and is now providing Internet services to about 10.000 business customers with products ranging from Internet domains and hosting services (virtual and dedicated servers), SSL external security monitoringificates and other products dealing with internet security. The company's slogan is: We're Trusted by the Best. Among its clients are the biggest and the best known Polish and international companies.

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in nine languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

In October 2005, WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the Fast 50 awards the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.

Flu Jab Your Website Against The Pandemic: 6,000 Infected Webpages Per Day! (2008-02-18)

The respected IT news website, The Register reports that every 14 seconds a web page is infected, which amounts to 6,000 infected web pages per day. Four out of five of these infections come from innocent companies and individuals who are oblivious to their site being hacked and subsequently used for hosting the malware of virus writers. The Register further reports that in the past viruses were spread using infected e-mail. Nowadays, however, the favoured virus distribution methods are downloads from compromised sites. As a result of these booby-trapped sites malware is present on at least one in every ten web pages.

WatchMouse's Periodic Vulnerability Scanning offers your website the flu jab against this virus pandemic. WatchMouse's Periodic Vulnerability Scanning is an affordable way to routinely check you company's security external security monitoring and eliminate the external security monitoring of manual audits. Utilizing the most up-to-date database of known vulnerabilities, WatchMouse identifies any security external security monitoring and provides you with peace of mind that your software applications are being scanned from the perspective of a hacker, external to your organization.
To ensure your website and servers are checked for the latest issues WatchMouse's Periodic Vulnerability Scanning performs over 20,000 checks for known vulnerability and security external security monitorings; using a database which is updated daily by multiple accredited organizations including CVE (funded by the US government) and Bugtraq. Following the detection of any severe issues, automated, real-time email, SMS and pager alerts give your business the chance to react quickly. Scans can be scheduled during low usage or maintenance hours and set at an intensity and frequency suited to your business needs and budget.

To obtain a free Periodic Vulnerability Scanning trial visit: www.watchmouse.com/vulnerability_scan_trial.php

The Register's article was published on 23.01.08 can be viewed at: www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/23/booby_trapped_web_botnet_menace/

phpDirectorySource SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities (2009-07-24)

phpDirectorySource is prone to an SQL-injection external security monitoring and a cross-site scripting external security monitoring because it fails to sufficiently sanitize user-supplied data.

Exploiting these issues could allow an attacker to steal cookie-based authentication credentials, compromise the application, access or modify data, or exploit latent vulnerabilities in the underlying database.

Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird Double Frame Construction Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities (2009-07-24)

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are prone to multiple remote memory-corruption vulnerabilities.

An attacker can exploit these issues to corrupt memory on the external security monitoring computer and run arbitrary code in the context of the user running the external security monitoring application. Failed exploit attempts will cause denial-of-service conditions.

These vulnerabilities were previously covered in BID 35758 (Mozilla Firefox MFSA 2009-34, -35, -36, -37, -39, -40 Multiple Vulnerabilities) but have been assigned this record to better document them.

IBM Tivoli Identity Manager Session Fixation Vulnerability (2009-07-24)

IBM Tivoli Identity Manager is prone to a session-fixation external security monitoring.

Attackers can exploit this issue to hijack a user's session and gain unauthorized access to the external security monitoring application.

Tivoli Identity Manager 5.0 is external security monitoring.

Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird JavaScript Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities (2009-07-24)

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are prone to multiple remote memory-corruption vulnerabilities that affect the JavaScript engine.

An attacker can exploit these issues to corrupt memory on the external security monitoring computer and run arbitrary code in the context of the user running the external security monitoring application. Failed exploit attempts will cause denial-of-service conditions.

These vulnerabilities were previously covered in BID 35758 (Mozilla Firefox MFSA 2009-34, -35, -36, -37, -39, -40 Multiple Vulnerabilities) but have been assigned this record to better document the issues.

RaidenHTTPD Cross Site Scripting and Local File Include Vulnerabilities (2009-07-24)

RaidenHTTPD is prone to local file-include and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities because the application fails to properly sanitize user-supplied input. These issues affect the WebAdmin component.

An attacker may leverage the cross-site scripting issue to execute arbitrary script code in the browser of an unsuspecting user in the context of the external security monitoring site. This may allow the attacker to steal cookie-based authentication credentials and to launch other attacks.

Exploiting the local file-include issue allows remote attackers to view and subsequently execute local files within the context of the webserver process.

RaidenHTTPD 2.0 build 26 and prior versions are external security monitoring.