Security training news: Early registration is now open for SANS Network Security 2005 in New Orleans, October 24-30: 17 great tracks and the nicest weather in New Orleans. Details: http://www.sans.org/ns2005 West Coasters can look to SANS Silicon Valley in San Jose, Sept 24-30, for 12 immersion tracks and a vendor expo. Details: http://www.sans.org/siliconvalley2005/
@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).
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Part I is compiled by Rohit Dhamankar (rohitd_at_tippingpoint.com) at TippingPoint, a division of 3Com, 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: phpBB is a widely used bulletin board software. The software is reportedly downloaded between 2000 and 4000 times everyday. phpBB's "viewtopic.php" script contains a vulnerability that can be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code on the server. The flaw exists because the input passed to the "highlight" parameter is not sanitized for escaping database delimiters such as single and double quotes. This can be leveraged to construct a specially crafted value for the "hightlight" parameter (enables a subsequent string to be interpreted as a PHP command). Exploit code has been publicly posted.
Status: phpBB has released version 2.0.16. Note that another flaw in the same script was exploited by Santy worm to deface thousands of websites in November 2004.
Council Site Actions: The affected software and/or configuration are not in production or widespread use, or are not officially supported at any of the council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
Description: Internet Explorer reportedly contains a heap corruption problem in handling certain COM object (javaprxy.dll). The discoverers state that during their testing they could successfully control the contents of a register when a specially crafted webpage instantiating the javaprxy.dll COM object was loaded in Internet Explorer. Hence, there is a possibility that the heap corruption can be exploited to execute arbitrary code. A proof-of-concept has been included in the public posting.
Status: Microsoft has been contacted. Note that javaprxy.dll is not installed by default on all Windows systems.
Council Site Actions: Most of the council sites are waiting on a formal response from the vendor and suggested remediation steps. One site commented they are planning to search-and-destroy this file using MS-SMS. They are treating this as very low vulnerability since it appears to only apply to on Win2K and WinME systems by default. They do not have WinME in their environment, and Win2K systems are not used for web-browsing.
Description: PHP XML-RPC library is designed for writing client and servers in PHP that can make remote procedure calls via XML using HTTP as the transport protocol. This library is used by a number of projects including TikiWiki, Drupal, b2evolution, phpmyfaq, PostNuke, phpgroupware. The library contains a remote PHP code execution vulnerability. The flaw arises because the user XML is not sanitized for a single quote. Hence, a specially crafted XML file can pass arbitrary data to the PHP "eval()" function. Exploit code has been publicly posted.
Status: The vendors as well as projects have supplied updates.
Description: The critical flaw in the Veritas Backup Software described in the last week's @RISK newsletter has been getting widely exploited. The exploit targeting the Backup service running on port 10000/tcp has also been incorporated into other "bot" programs.
Council Site Updates: No change in current remediation plan as stated in Risk for June 23rd.
Description: Exploit code for the overflow in Microsoft Message Queuing Service has been publicly posted. Note that even though the service is not installed by default on Windows systems, the MSMQ service is used in many e-commerce environments.
Council Site Updates: The reporting council sites have already patched their systems.
Council Site Updates: No change in remediation plan. Some council sites have already patched their systems and other will be pushing the patches soon.
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 4396 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
(c) 2005. 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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