Another 93 vulnerabilities discovered this week. Either software writers are writing worse code or the vulnerability research community is getting larger and using more automated tools.
@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 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: Perl is widely used as a scripting language for a variety of applications including web-based software. Perl contains a vulnerability that can be triggered by passing a format specifier of the form "%INT_MAXn". The vulnerability causes an integer variable in a Perl function to wrap around (change its parity) that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code. For instance, "%2147483647n" format specifier will trigger the flaw in Perl running on 32-bit Operating Systems. Note that the flaw can be exploited only via Perl-based applications that contain a format string vulnerability. The discoverers have reportedly found several applications that are vulnerable. One of the affected applications is Webmin, a web interface to perform administrative tasks like server and user configuration. Webmin's web server miniserv.pl, which runs on port 10000/tcp by default, contains a format string vulnerability. By passing a username containing a format specifier, an attacker can exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code with possibly root privileges. Immunity, Inc. has made an exploit available to some of its customers.
Status: Some Linux vendors have released patches. The discoverers have also released an unofficial patch for version 5.9.2 that is available at: http://www.dyadsecurity.com/advisory/perl/perl-5.9.2-exp_parameter_intwrap_vulne
rability. A workaround for the Webmin flaw is to block the traffic to port 10000/tcp at the network perimeter.
Council Site Actions: Most of the council sites are responding to this item on some level and plan to install patches as they are made available. Several sites have notified their web developers. One site requested updates from the 3rd party providers that bundle Perl with applications in use at their site. Another site said that they have several Mandriva Linux systems running Webmin and plan to recommend that the affected system administrators apply the MDKSA-2005:223 update. These systems are used by a few dozen users. The remaining council sites commented they do not use Perl on and of their web servers.
Description: Ipswitch IMail, a Windows-based mail server used by many small and medium ISPs, contains format string vulnerabilities in multiple SMTP commands: EXPN, MAIL, MAIL FROM and RCPT TO. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit these flaws to execute arbitrary code on the IMail server. Note that the IMail server is also a part of the Ipswitch Collaboration Suite used by many small and medium businesses.
Status: Ipswitch has released version 8.22 for IMail and 2.0.2 for the Collaboration Suite.
Description: phpMyAdmin, a PHP-based tool to manage MySQL databases, contains a remote variable overwrite vulnerability. An attacker can overwrite the value for "$import_blacklist" variable, which was originally devised to protect other variables from being overwritten. By overwriting this variable, an attacker can further overwrite other important variables such as "$GLOBALS". This can lead to PHP local and remote file include vulnerabilities that can be exploited to execute arbitrary PHP code.
Status: phpMyAdmin confirmed, version 2.7.0p1 has been released.
Description: MediaWiki, a Wiki software page being used by a number of websites, contains a remote code execution vulnerability. The flaw arises because user input to the language option is not sanitized properly. This can be exploited to inject arbitrary PHP code.
Status: MediaWiki reported the problem and released a new version 1.5.3.
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.
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 4722 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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