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@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: An exploit for the Internet Explorer flaw discussed in last week's issue of @RISK, has been publicly posted. The flaw was rated "LOW" last week because the discoverer reported that Microsoft team could not reproduce the flaw at that time. Microsoft has now issued an advisory for this vulnerability. The advisory also lists workarounds on how to disable the javaprxy.dll COM object and how to prevent this object from running in Internet Explorer. Note that even if javaprxy.dll is not installed on a user's machine, an attacker can force its download via the "codebase" attribute while instantiating this object.
Council Site Actions: Several of the council sites are still reviewing the workarounds from Microsoft and waiting to see if a specific patch for this problem is released next Tuesday. One site commented that their default configuration for IE included the recommended patches and workarounds. Another site has a large number of vulnerable systems, about 12,000. In some cases, the end users are manually visiting the Microsoft Download Center to obtain the registry update that disables javaprxy.dll. They have not yet made an attempt to roll out this registry update on a widespread basis, and have not yet sent a general announcement to Windows users about the vulnerability. At a minimum, the great majority of their systems will obtain an update through the public Windows Update site, or through their local SUS server, whenever Microsoft happens to release a patch for this.
Description: Adobe Acrobat Reader for UNIX systems contains an overflow in the UnixAppOpenFilePErform function. This stack-based overflow can be triggered by a malicious PDF document containing an overlong "FileSpec" tag. A specially crafted PDF document on a webpage or in an email may exploit this overflow to execute arbitrary code on a client system with the privileges of the logged-on user. The technical details have been posted.
Status: Adobe advises the Linux and Solaris users to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0. Adobe has also released version 5.0.11 for HP-UX and IBM-AIX users.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the council sites is running the affected software. They have approximately 800 workstations that are affected. They plan to obtain version 7.0 for Solaris later this month. For some Linux systems, they will allow user to choose to run either version 5.0.10 or version 7.0. They plan to discontinue support of 5.0.10 for Linux shortly.
Description: Cacti is a popularly used network graphics software package on UNIX. Remote command execution and SQL injection vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed and reportedly fixed during last month in this package. However, the fixes(user input filtering) are not working as designed. A researcher has posted how to bypass these fixes and still exploit the remote command execution and SQL injection vulnerabilities.
Status: Cacti has released a new version 0.8.6f.
Description: Exploits for the PHP XML-RPC and Pear XML-RPC remote command execution flaw discussed in the last week's newsletter have been posted. Other software packages that uses these libraries have also been identified: phpAdsNew, phpPgAds, Nucleus, eGroupware, phpGroupware, phpWiki and BLOG: CMS. Council Site Update: The affected software is not in production or widespread use.
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 4402 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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