The Microsoft Word vulnerability is extremely critical, and there are three others of similar impact this week.
@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 Rob King and 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/index.php#process
Description: A critical vulnerability exists in Microsoft Word 2000 and later versions. This vulnerability was not reported publicly. It was discovered when a virus exploiting this vulnerability was seen in the wild. Analysis of the virus has revealed that specially-crafted Microsoft Word documents can result in code execution when opened on a vulnerable system. The currently spreading virus installs a trojan on vulnerable systems. There is no patch available; users of the vulnerable software should not open Word documents from untrusted sources. Users are advised to keep their antivirus signatures updated, and be prepared to deploy a patch from Microsoft. Users should also keep watch for signs of a targeted attack on their systems. Some known behavior of the virus includes HTTP access to the hostname "localhosts.3322.org". Users should monitor DNS queries and investigate any attempts to resolve this address. Note that the owner of this domain has changed the IP address for which this resolves several times.
Status: Microsoft confirmed. Update expected to be released as part of the next update cycle.
Description: A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Novell's iMonitor software, that is included in their eDirectory product. iMonitor allows for centralized monitoring of the servers registered in an eDirectory tree. iMonitor fails to properly validate user-supplied input in HTTP requests, leading to a remotely-exploitable buffer overflow. Successful exploitation of this buffer overflow could result in remote code execution.
Status: Novell confirmed, patch released.
Description: AWStats is a popular log-analysis tool for web servers. AWStats can be configured to generate static reports at intervals, or can be called interactively via a CGI interface. When configured to run as a CGI script, AWStats suffers from a remote code execution vulnerability by failing to properly validate certain parameters. A simple workaround would be to block access to AWStats pages from the Internet. Vulnerabilities in AWStats have been used in the past to facilitate worms such as the Linux Lupper worm.
Status: AWStats confirmed, update available.
Description: Cyrus imapd is a popular IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) mail server maintained by Project Cyrus at Carnegie Mellon University. Recent versions of the software suffer from a remote buffer overflow vulnerability. A specially-crafted IMAP request can trigger this buffer overflow and can result in malicious code injection. Note that the imapd "popsubfolders" option must be enabled for a server to be vulnerable. This option is not enabled by default, but is commonly enabled after installation to allow POP users subfolder access (normally only available via IMAP). Technical details and a proof-of-concept exploit are known to be in the wild. Note that the attacker need not be authenticated to exploit this vulnerability.
Status: Project Cyrus has not confirmed, no updates are available.
Description: The libspf library is an implementation of the Sender Policy Framework. The Sender Policy Framework is a DNS-based system to reduce unsolicited email ("spam") by verifying the servers authorized to send email for a given DNS domain. This library is widely deployed on many email servers. Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in this library, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable server by specifying a specially-crafted email address or domain name. Note that only servers running with debugging enabled are vulnerable.
Status: libspf confirmed, patch released.
Description: Nagios is a popular Open Source network and host monitoring system. Nagios uses CGI scripts to provide a web-based interface for monitoring information. These scripts are the primary way to access Nagios's reports and monitoring information. These scripts are commonly configured with a minimum of access control. Several scripts fail to properly validate HTTP "Content-Length" headers, allowing attackers to exploit an integer overflow vulnerability and execute code with the privileges of the webserver user. Please note that this is a different vulnerability from the one disclosed in @RISK Volume 5, Number 18.
Status: Nagios confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Only two of the reporting council sites are using the affected software, but on a very small number of systems. Both plan to update their systems during the next regularly scheduled system update process.
Description: The libextractor library is used to extract file-specific metadata from a variety of file formats. It is used in several popular open source and free software systems, including the Doodle file-indexing system and the GNUnet file-sharing program. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities have been discovered in the "asfextractor" and "qtextractor" plugins, used to analyze Microsoft ASF and Apple QuickTime media files, respectively. By tricking a user into accessing a specially-crafted ASF or QuickTime file, an attacker could execute arbitrary code on the victim's system. Technical details of this vulnerability have been posted. Note that, depending on configuration, no user interaction beyond simply downloading the file may be necessary.
Status: Vendor confirmed, patch released.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the reporting council sites is using the affected software and only on a few dozen systems which are not supported by their central IT department. Most of these systems already have the appropriate update.
PART II - Weekly Comprehensive List of Newly-Discovered Vulnerabilities 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 5016 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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