Monitoring for security threats

Question

I host and maintain several websites. The users pay to have their sites maintained and secured. However, with the amount of web applications like joolma, wordpress, ect... and their plugins, I need a way to monitor and stay on top of exploits and fixes as they come out.

Now one idea is to follow twitter and stream the alerts on a screen. Are there other ideas? I don't believe every place as a mailing list that alerts you of security issues.

EDIT: Also started to watch Twitter feeds but they seem very limited.

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure I understand the question, but it appears you're looking for something like secunia, possibly for a more restricted set of software? I believe that many of the big security firms also sell a client plug in that will detect misconfigurations; running that plug-in on your site will detect CWE/misconfigurations.

And you could always check with Tenable/nCircle; their security assessment tools can detect problems. It is a very competitive market and both of those companies devote a lot of $$ to research to ensure that they're aware of and can detect the latest CVE/CWE/etc.

NIST provides CVE and CWE information, which may also be of use.

Answer 2

You could start by following Bugtraq at insecure.org

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/

I recommend configuring a feed in google reader or your RSS reader of choice and following security related sites.

As an example, here is my google reader "security" bundle that I read through out the day (which includes the feed from security.stackexchange.com)

http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F03471370118315696004%2Fbundle%2FSecurity

Answer 3

So I have a friend who started a web service that sounds like exactly what you are looking for. I would like to add in that he is not making any money off of it and it is still in beta (it seems like a google beta if you catch my drift) but I think is it exactly what you are looking for.

Here is the URL Advisory Alerts

You specify keywords like "Drupal" "Wordpress" and whatever else and his website parses a bunch of Security RSS feeds and will give you alerts that contain the keyword you specify. Simple Concept.

Hope I was helpful. :D