Our survey on the value of @RISK had a surprisingly huge response. Thanks to all of you. The surprising finding was that you valued @RISK most for its notification of critical vulnerabilities in less widely known tools. You already knew about the Windows vulnerabilities. So we'll try to highlight the less well known ones to save you time. This week we found critical vulnerabilities in Firefox, Mozilla, Mac OS (Apple), RealPlayer, and Twiki. Alan
@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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Information: http://www.sans.org/ns2005/
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Part I is compiled by Rohit Dhamankar 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: Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape browsers contain the following vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a malicious webpage to compromise a user's system. (a) The function that processes XBM (X-Bitmap) images contains a heap-based overflow that can be triggered by an XBM image ending with a "space" character rather than the end tag. According to the discoverer, the flaw can be exploited to execute arbitrary code. (b) Unicode processing of certain sequences leads to a stack-based overflow that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code. (c) The JavaScript Engine contains an integer overflow that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code. (d) The unprivileged "about:" page can load a privileged "chrome:" page under certain conditions. This flaw combined with another cross-zone flaw could result in the execution of arbitrary code. The Mozilla bugzilla contains technical details required to leverage these flaws.
Status: Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0.7 for Firefox and 1.7.12 for Mozilla browsers. In addition to the above mentioned high severity bugs, the newer versions also fix certain spoofing bugs. No updates are available for Netscape.
Council Site Actions: Most of the council sites responded that they do not officially support these browsers however they are in use at their sites. Most of these sites feel their users are clue-full enough to keep up-to-date with the patches or they have notified the known users. One of the reporting council sites updated most of their systems earlier this week and will rely on the remaining systems to be updated by the users. Another council site has posted the updated versions on its software mirror.
Description: A zero-day vulnerability has been reported in RealPlayer and Helix Player, the popular media players on UNIX systems. The players reportedly contain a format string vulnerability in processing realtext (".rt") and relapix (".rp") files. The flaw is triggered by providing a format string to the "image handle" parameter in a ".rp" file. A malicious realpix or realtxt file in a webpage or an email can exploit this issue to execute arbitrary code on the client system. If Real Player or Helix Player is configured as the default media player, no user interaction is required to leverage the flaw. The discoverer has posted an exploit that works on Debian Linux.
Status: No patches are available from the vendor at this time. Users should be advised not to automatically open realpix or realtext files.
Council Site Actions: Most of the council sites do not officially support this software for their user base; thus, no action was taken. Several sites will advise their users to patch the systems when a patch is available. One site has a large user base of these products and plans to monitor the product site for any upcoming patches. If there is an exploit released they plan to notify there users not to automatically invoke these programs from a browser or mail agent. Another site commented the use of these products is discouraged at their site. They do plan to notify the users when a patch is available.
Description: Apple has released a security update for Mac OS X client and server products that fixes buffer overflow, information disclosure, cross-site scripting and local privilege escalation vulnerabilities. The important issues fixed by this update are (a) the buffer overflow vulnerabilities in components that handle GIF and PICT images. The vulnerable components are also used by Safari. Hence, a malicious webpage or email may exploit these flaws to compromise a Mac OS X system. (b) QuickTime Java extensions contain a vulnerability that can be exploited by a malicious applet to issue arbitrary function calls from the system libraries. This can lead to a complete compromise of the client system. The technical details about the flaws have not been posted yet.
Status: Apply the security patch 2005-008.
Council Site Actions: Only two of the reporting council sites are responding to this item. One site has scheduled the update push to their Mac users. The other site said their Mac OS X systems are regularly patched through the Software Update facility. The remaining sites are not affected by this problem as they don't have any Mac systems or they don't officially support them.
Description: Webmin provides a web interface to perform administrative tasks such as configuring users, servers etc. for UNIX-based systems. Usermin is similar to Webmin, and is available to users to set up their environment. Webmin as well as Usermin run "miniserv.pl" script that contains a user-id spoofing vulnerability. The problem arises because the script does not check for metacharacters like carriage return in the user-supplied input during the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) authentication. This flaw can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary command on the Webmin/Usermin server with "root" privileges. Successful exploitation, however, requires that "Full PAM conversations" options be enabled on the "Authentication" page (not a default setting and according to Webmin advisory the setting is rarely used). Note that Webmin/Usermin are widely used and have been ported to most UNIX flavors.
Status: Fixes available. Upgrade to Webmin version 1.230 and Usermin version 1.160.
Council Site Actions: Only two of the reporting sites are running the affected software. Both sites are using the auto-update feature from the Linux vendors and plan to allow updates to occur via that feature.
Description: TWiki, a popular intranet content management tool, is reported to contain another remote command execution vulnerability this week. The problem occurs because the "INCLUDE" function does not check for shell metacharacters in the "rev" parameter. An attacker may exploit this flaw to execute arbitrary commands on the TWiki server. The advisory shows how to craft a malicious HTTP request.
Status: Vendor confirmed, patches available. Note that TWikiRelease 01September2004 patched with Florian Weimer's patch ( http://www.enyo.de/fw/security/notes/twiki-robustness.html) is not vulnerable.
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 4545 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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