A quiet week for patching.
@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 *************************
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Register soon to get a seat at your choice of courses. http://www.sans.org/sansfire2004
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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: IBM's acpRunner and eGatherer ActiveX controls are designed to automate support for the IBM PCs. The ActiveX controls are digitally signed by the IBM and marked as "safe for scripting". A malicious webpage or an HTML email may exploit these controls to silently execute arbitrary code on a client system. The problems arise because the controls support methods that can be invoked to write an arbitrary file on the client system. Writing a malicious file in the startup folder, for instance, can compromise the client PC when the system is rebooted. Note that users who do not have these ActiveX controls on their systems may be tricked into installing the controls. The controls may even be silently installed if the user has previously selected an option to trust all the code from IBM. The advisories contain proof-of-concept HTML code, which can be used to leverage the vulnerabilities.
Status: IBM confirmed, patches available. References eEye Advisories http://www.eeye.com/html/research/advisories/AD20040615A.html http://www.eeye.com/html/research/advisories/AD20040615B.html IBM Patch Download http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-51860 Safe Initialization and Scripting for ActiveX Controls http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/components/activex/safety.asp SecurityFocus BIDs http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/10561 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/10562
Council Site Actions: One site is about to start the process of rolling out new IBM desktops. They plan to correct the problem as part of or prior to the rollout. A second site has a fair number of affected systems. They don't plan to take any action unless there are further reports of an active exploitation.
Description: RealPlayer, a popularly used media player, contains a heap memory corruption vulnerability. The flaw can be triggered by a malformed ".RA", ".RM", ".RV" or ".RMJ" files, and exploited to execute arbitrary code with the player's privileges. A malicious webpage or an email attachment may exploit this vulnerability to compromise a client system. No technical details regarding how to trigger the flaw have been posted. The discoverer(s) of the vulnerability have developed working exploits that have not been publicly posted.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available. Note that the cumulative patch, which fixes the RealPlayer vulnerabilities reported in the last week's @RISK newsletter, also fixes this one.
Council Site Actions: All of the reporting council sites are using the affected software. However, most sites do not officially support the software. Several sites plan to roll out the patches during their normal system upgrade process. Another site is investigating whether they can provide the users the patch. The remaining sites will rely on the users to install the patch.
Description: The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), typically used by the ISPs and large organizations, exchanges routing information for the Internet over port 179/tcp. Multiple vendor implementations of the protocol are vulnerable to a denial-of-service that can be triggered by malformed BGP "OPEN" and "UPDATE" messages. These vulnerabilities were discovered by the BGP "protocol fuzzing", a technique also employed by the well known PROTOS suites. Most BGP routers accept BGP messages only with their explicitly configured peers. Hence, in order to exploit the flaw, an attacker has spoof the identity of the TCP packets (to appear to be a valid BGP peer). Causing a DoS to a BGP router can in turn lead to cutting access to certain portions of the Internet. The technical details required to exploit the flaws have been posted.
Status: Cisco has released patches for the IOS. For the status of other vendors, please refer to the CERT advisory. A workaround is to implement BGP MD5 Signature Option. This option may already have been implemented to mitigate the "TCP Reset Vulnerability" reported earlier this year.
Council Site Actions: Most of the reporting council sites plan to roll out the patches during their next regularly scheduled system update process. One site is still awaiting word from their network support team on whether they are vulnerable or not.
Description: This vulnerability in Internet Explorer reportedly allows an attacker to conduct "phishing" attacks. The flaw can be exploited by crafting a malicious URL of the form: " http://[trusted site]%2F%20%20%20..[malicious site]". IE's status bar displays the trusted site, and hence such a URL can be exploited to extract sensitive information from an unsuspecting user. The flaw can also be exploited to display the malicious website's content in the security context of the trusted sites. This may lead to running scripts or ActiveX controls, as the trusted sites are typically configured with more relaxed security settings. The technical details and proof-of-concept exploits have been posted.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed, no patches available. Users should be advised to type the URLs of the websites where they are likely to enter sensitive personal or financial information.
Council Site Actions: Most of the reporting council sites are treating this as a low priority and will roll out the patch when time allows or is convenient. One site is encouraging users to switch to an alternative to IE.
Description: Subversion is an open-source version control system similar to the CVS. A subversion repository can be accessed by using the "svn" protocol, if the repository is running "svnserve". The svn server, which runs on port 3690/tcp by default, is vulnerable to a heap-based buffer overflow that can be triggered by specially crafted strings. The flaw may be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on the svn server. This may lead to compromising the source code control system. The technical details required to exploit the flaw have been posted. Note that multiple exploits for another flaw in the svn protocol that was reported a month back have been recently posted. Hence, an exploit for this flaw is likely to be developed in the near future.
Status: Vendor confirmed, upgrade to version 1.0.5. A workaround is to disable svnserve and access the Subversion repositories via HTTP.
Council Site Actions: Only one site is running the affected software and only on a small number of systems. They believe the updates have already occurred or will take place later this month.
Description: Chora is a PHP-based web viewer for CVS and SVN source code repositories. The viewer contains a remote command execution vulnerability. The flaw exists in the module responsible for displaying the "diffs" (differences) between versions of a file. The problem occurs because the parameter used to indicate the number of lines with differences (possibly "num") is not properly sanitized. Hence, a remote attacker can inject an arbitrary command in this parameter's value. In addition, the default installation of PHP may also allow a remote attacker to upload arbitrary files to the server's "/tmp" directory. Hence, an attacker may execute arbitrary code on the server by uploading a malicious executable in the "/tmp" directory. The technical details required to exploit the vulnerability have been posted.
Status: Vendor confirmed, 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: An exploit has been released for the flaw in the Squid proxy's NTLM authentication scheme. Council Site Actions: No update in action since last week. Response from last week is below: 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: Multiple exploits have been released for the stack-based buffer overflow in the date parsing function of the Subversion source code control software.
Council Site Actions: Only one site is running the affected software. They report that the affected servers have already been patched.
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 3493 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.
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