Microsoft Office documents suddenly stopped being "safe to open" last week.(#1) Apple Mac users got another demonstration that they, too, are vulnerable to remote attacks.(#2) Adobe Macromedia Flash and Shockwave users can be infected just by visiting an infected web site or receiving an html email, with minimal user interaction.(#3)
Would you like to make a substantial difference in making the Web safer? If you know how to write Firefox toolbars, please email us. We are building a Firefox toolbar, that people could install to monitor what web sites they go to, and to classify "bad websites" by various categories (e.g. "adults", "exploit", "phishing"). This would complement Storm Centers "honey monkey farm" which is a set of automated systems that browse suspect websites. We will feed the user- supplies URLs to the "honey monkeys" in order to have the sites characterized by his systems. We are looking for a (paid) volunteer to write the Firefox (and maybe later Internet Explorer) toolbar to do the reporting. Email info@sans.org with subject Browser Toolbar if you can help.
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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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: Microsoft Office suite contains five memory corruption vulnerabilities in Excel program and another buffer overflow in processing "routing slips". A malicious Excel file or an Office file can exploit these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code on a client system using vulnerable Office versions. The specially crafted Excel/Office documents can be posted on a web server, file server, P2P share or attached to an email. Note that although browsers like IE and Firefox typically present a user prompt prior to opening an Office document, since these documents are generally considered "safe" as opposed to executable files, users are likely to open these documents even from untrusted sites. The technical details required to craft exploits for many of the buffer overflows have been publicly posted. Exploitation for some of the overflows is trivial as they as stack-based overflows.
Status: Microsoft confirmed. Patches referenced in the Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-012.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are planning to address these vulnerabilities in their next regularly scheduled system maintenance cycle. A few reported they will increase the urgency if exploits are seen in the wild.
Description: Apple has released another security update for Mac OS X this month. The security update 2006-002 addresses important vulnerabilities in Mail and Safari browser. Mail, an e-mail client built into Mac OS X, contains a buffer overflow on Mac OS X systems that have been patched with the Apple security update 2006-001. The overflow can be triggered by an e-mail attachment in the MIME-encapsulated Apple Double format (documented in RFC1740) with a long "Real Name" entry. When a Mail user double clicks such an attachment arbitrary code can be executed on the users system. Exploit code has been publicly posted. The security update also provides additional checks to identify malicious files downloaded via Safari browser before the files are automatically opened.
Status: Apple confirmed. Apply Apple Security Update 2006-002 on a priority basis.
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: Adobe has released a security advisory indicating that multiple Macromedia players contain a critical vulnerability in handling SWF files. According to Adobe the flaw can be exploited to execute arbitrary code. A malicious webpage or an HTML email can leverage the flaw to compromise a users system with minimal user interaction. No technical details have been released at this time. Note that several versions of Windows ship with a vulnerable version of Flash player by default; these systems should be updated on a priority basis.
Status: Adobe confirmed. Upgrade to the latest version of the players as described in the Adobe advisory.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are planning to address in their next regularly scheduled system maintenance cycle.
Description: Internet Explorer contains a memory corruption vulnerability that can be triggered by an HTML page containing a hundred or more of script action handlers such as "onclick", "onmouseover" etc. According to the discoverer, the flaw can be possibly exploited to execute arbitrary code (not confirmed). The technical details and a proof-of-concept exploit have been publicly posted.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed the vulnerability yet, no updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are waiting on additional information from Microsoft.
Description: Adobe Document and Graphics server products are designed to enable enterprises generate PDF and graphics documents on the fly. In the default configuration, the "saveContent" and the "saveOptimized" commands can be used to store any files in arbitrary directory on the servers. For instance, a graphics file containing malicious HTML code can be placed in the "Startup" folder for "All Users". This will result in compromising Windows-based Adobe servers. An attacker can access the file saving commands via AlterCast web service that runs by default on port 8109/tcp.
Status: Adobe has acknowledged the flaw in the default configuration and published steps to harden the configuration of Document and Graphics servers.
Status: Vendor has not confirmed the flaw, no patches are available.
Description: Ipswitch IMail is a Windows-based mail server used by many small and medium ISPs. IpSwitch Collaboration Suite includes the IMail server, and these products serve over 60 million users world-wide. The mail servers IMAP service contains a buffer overflow that can be triggered by specially crafted arguments to the "FETCH" command. An authenticated user can exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code on the server with Local System privileges. Note that exploits are available for previously disclosed vulnerabilities in this application.
Status: Vendor confirmed, update available. Upgrade to version 2006.03 for IMail and Collaboration Suite.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites patched their systems late last year.
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 4938 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
(c) 2006. 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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