A rather troubling vulnerability in Internet Explorer (Number 1 below) is already being exploited while users wait for Microsoft to find a way to fix it.
Also, today is the deadline for special hotel rates in Monterey - Don't forget to book your hotel reservation for SANSFire (July 5-13) to receive the special SANS rate. Wednesday is also the deadline before the $150 late fee kicks in so make sure to register for the conference and your hotel room at http://www.sans.org/sansfire2004/
@RISK is the SANS community's consensus bulletin summarizing the most important vulnerabilities and exploits identified during the past week and providing guidance on appropriate actions to protect your systems (PART I). It also includes a comprehensive list of all new vulnerabilities discovered in the past week (PART II).
******************** Security Training Update *************************
This Week's Featured Security Training Program: SANSFIRE 2004 Monterey, CA, July 5-13,2004 SANSFIRE offers you 14 immersion training tracks in one of the most beautiful and romantic places in America. Phenomenal training for auditors who want to master the challenges of security auditors, for managers who want to build a great security program, for security beginners who want to get a fast start, and, of course, the only place to go for technologists who want to master the most current methods for protecting systems and networks. SANSFIRE also offers lots of evening programs, extra one-day classes ranging from security business law to cyberwarrior training, and vendor exhibits, too.
Register soon to get a seat at your choice of courses. http://www.sans.org/sansfire2004
***********************************************************************
************************** SPONSORED LINK ***************************
Note: this link takes you to a non-SANS site.
(1) Discover, audit, remediate and report vulnerabilities - increasing the efficiency of your overall threat reduction strategy. Free Trial: http://www.sans.org/click.php?id=474
***********************************************************************
Part I is compiled by the security team at TippingPoint (www.tippingpoint.com) as a by-product of that company's continuous effort to ensure that its intrusion prevention products effectively block exploits using known vulnerabilities. TippingPoint's analysis is complemented by input from a council of security managers from twelve large organizations who confidentially share with SANS the specific actions they have taken to protect their systems. A detailed description of the process may be found at http://www.sans.org/newsletters/cva/#process
Description: Fully patched versions of Internet Explorer reportedly contain the following vulnerabilities that are being exploited in the wild to compromise client systems. (a) Internet Explorer successfully processes a webserver response that redirects the location of a resource to a file on the client system. Note that this file can be accessed in the security context of the "Local Computer Zone". (b) Internet Explorer contains a cross-domain vulnerability that can be triggered when handling a frame, and a "modal dialog box" that is invoked from the frame. These vulnerabilities can be exploited by a malicious website to execute arbitrary code on a client system. The technical details and the exploits have been publicly posted.
Status: Microsoft not confirmed, no patches available.
Council Site Actions: Most of the reporting council sites are awaiting the vendor patches. Some sites plan to roll out the patch during the normal system update cycle and others plan to expedite the rollout. Several sites have already notified their desktop support teams to be aware of the problem.
Description: Oracle E-Business suite offers a set of applications to automate business processes such as marketing, customer services, supply-chain management etc. The pertinent business information is typically stored in a single database, and accessed via the web front-end offered by the E-Business suite applications. This suite contains multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities. These flaws can be exploited via malicious HTTP requests to execute arbitrary SQL statements and procedures against the back-end database, possibly resulting in the compromise of the entire database. Note that the Internet facing web servers hosting the E-Business suite applications face the maximum risk. Very limited technical details regarding how to exploit the flaws have been posted.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the reporting council sites is using the affected software; however their Oracle servers are internal facing only. They plan to install the patches after regression testing.
Description: CVS, the most popular source code control and versioning system, contains multiple vulnerabilities. These flaws were found after an inspection of the CVS source code. Many of the vulnerabilities found can cause only a DoS, or require CVS commit access for further exploitation. However, the following vulnerabilities can be exploited to execute arbitrary code, and require only authentication to the CVS server: (a) A vulnerability in the implementation of "Argumentx" command can be exploited by an authenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the CVS server. The Argumentx command adds more data to the current "argument" being saved. The problem arises because the server fails to check the existence of a previously declared argument. This results in freeing the same memory twice (double free bug). (b) A vulnerability in the implementation of "serve_notify" function can be exploited by an authenticated user to execute arbitrary code. The problem arises because this function does not properly handle empty data lines. Note that a CVS repository configured for "anonymous read-only" access also faces the risk of getting compromised. The technical details required to leverage the flaws have been posted. Further information can be obtained by examining the fixed and the vulnerable version of the software.
Status: Vendor confirmed, fixes available. Upgrade to version 1.12.9 or 1.11.17.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the reporting council sites is using the affected software on a very small number of systems. Given that users with CVS write privileges also have login access to their CVS server machines, they consider this vulnerability to be unimportant.
Description: RealPlayer is one of the popular internet media players that has a reported user base of over 200 million. The player contains following vulnerabilities: (a) The "embd3260.dll" is responsible for handling error messages for the player. This dll contains a heap-based overflow that can be triggered by a malformed movie embedded in a webpage. (b) The player contains another overflow that can be triggered by URLs containing a large number of "." characters. Both these flaws can be exploited by a malicious webpage to execute arbitrary code on a client system with the privileges of the media player. The technical details required to leverage the vulnerabilities have been posted.
Status: Vendor confirmed, patches available.
Council Site Actions: All of the reporting council sites are using the affected software. However, most sites do not officially support the software. One site does plan to roll out the patches during their normal system upgrade process. Another site is investigating if they can provide the users the patch. The remaining sites will rely on the users to install the patch if necessary.
Description: PHP, a widely used web scripting language, contains a vulnerability in its implementation of "escapeshellcmd()" and "escapeshellarg()" functions. These functions perform sanitization of the user-supplied input before it is passed to any command execution PHP functions such as "system()". However, the functions fail to perform proper checking for some shell metacharacters on Windows platform. Hence, the flaws can be possibly exploited to execute arbitrary commands on a web server. Note that only PHP scripts that invoke command execution functions with the user-supplied arguments are vulnerable. The technical details and proof-of-concept exploits have been posted.
Status: Vendor confirmed, upgrade to version 4.3.7.
Council Site Actions: Only three of the reporting council sites are using the affected software and they have notified their UNIX support teams to be aware of the problem. Two of the sites will roll out the patch during their normal system update process. The third site does not believe their users would run commands with arguments from an untrusted site; thus they do not plan any action at this time.
Description: Squid is a popularly used open-source web proxy server on UNIX systems. The Squid proxy can be configured to use NTLM authentication scheme for user authentication, if compiled with the NTLM helper. In such a configuration, the squid proxy contains a stack-based buffer overflow in the "ntlm_check_auth" function. The flaw can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the server. The posted advisory contains the technical details required to leverage the vulnerability.
Status: Vendor confirmed, patch available.
Council Site Actions: Three of the reporting council sites are using the affected software. However two of them are not using NTLM authentication; thus no action is necessary. The third site was using NTLM authentication but has reverted to other means until the patches can be installed. They plan to roll out the patches during their normal system update process.
Description: Invision Power Board, a forum software, reportedly contains a SQL injection vulnerability. The problem exists because the "ssi.php" module does not perform proper sanitization for the user-supplied values to the HTTP parameters. An attacker can exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary SQL statements against the forum's database server, and possibly compromise the forum application. The posting shows how to craft a malicious HTTP request to leverage the flaw.
Status: Vendor not confirmed, no patches available.
Council Site Actions: The affected software is not in production or widespread use at any of the council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
Description: The Apache "mod_proxy" module implements forward and reverse proxy functionality for FTP, SSL and HTTP protocols. This module contains a heap-based buffer overflow in its "ap_bread" function. The flaw can be triggered when a malicious web server sends an HTTP response with a negative content-length to the Apache proxy. For example, an attacker can entice a client, whose HTTP requests are being handled by the Apache proxy, to connect to a malicious web server. The buffer overflow can be possibly exploited to execute arbitrary code with the Apache server's privileges (not confirmed). The posted advisory contains the technical details and a proof-of-concept exploit.
Status: Vendor confirmed, upgrade to the Apache version 1.3.32-dev. An unofficial fix is also included in the posted advisory.
Council Site Actions: Two of the reporting council sites are using the mod_proxy module. One site will address the issue when Apache 1.3.32 is available for the proxies they have built. They will also start requesting vendors to include mod_proxy in the proxy appliances they sell. They other site has a small number of Apache web servers that support mod_proxy. They are investigating if any of them are unpatched and if so, will notify the system administrators to upgrade.
Description: An exploit has been released that targets Borland Interbase database. This vulnerability was discussed in the last week's @RISK newsletter.
Council Site Actions: The affected software is not in production or widespread use at any of the council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
This list is compiled by Qualys ( www.qualys.com ) as part of that company's ongoing effort to ensure its vulnerability management web service tests for all known vulnerabilities that can be scanned. As of this week Qualys scans for 3474 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
(c) 2004. All rights reserved. The information contained in this newsletter, including any external links, is provided "AS IS," with no express or implied warranty, for informational purposes only. In some cases, copyright for material in this newsletter may be held by a party other than Qualys (as indicated herein) and permission to use such material must be requested from the copyright owner.
==end==
Subscriptions: @RISK is distributed free of charge to people responsible for managing and securing information systems and networks. You may forward this newsletter to others with such responsibility inside or outside your organization.
To subscribe, at no cost, go to https://portal.sans.org where you may also request subscriptions to any of SANS other free newsletters.
To change your subscription, address, or other information, visit http://portal.sans.org
Copyright 2004. All rights reserved. No posting or reuse allowed, other than listed above, without prior written permission.