This week's biggest and most critical new vulnerability is one that affects VOIP and AOL Triton and other important internet services (#1 below). The software's largely unknown name, SipXtapi, belies the breadth of its use, and the vulnerability can be exploited very simply. Also at risk this week are users of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Excel and Windows Explorer. (#2, #5, and #6 below)
You should now have received your program for Network Security 2006 in Las Vegas, October 1-9. It is by far the largest fall computer security conference. If you didn't get a copy, you can see it at http://www.sans.org/ns2006/
Invitations will be going out this week for the SCADA/Process Control Security Summit in Las Vegas September 28-30. This one will unveil the new security standards to be written into all SCADA and process control systems and provide in depth information about the changing threat and how the new standard procurement specs can help block attacks. To get an invitation, email scada@sans.org.
Alan
PS At the end of this issue is a bonus section by SPI Dynamics describing the recent PayPal attack that coupled phishing with web vulnerabilities to cause a lot of pain.
@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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Over the next two months, you may attend one or more of 50 SANS courses in 20 cities on four continents. And if you cannot make those events, because of travel restrictions, you may attend live SANS courses with the best teachers in the world, without leaving your home. You can even take SANS courses online at your own schedule. Attendance at SANS educational events is experiencing the largest growth spurt in half a decade. Pick your class and register early to get a seat.
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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/#process
Status: SIPfoundry confirmed, updates available. Updates from PingTel and AOL are also available.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed, no updates available. A workaround is to set the killbit for the hhctrl.ocx ActiveX control with the following UUID: 41B23C28-488E-4E5C-ACE2-BB0BBABE99E8. Note that Windows Help and Support Center may not function properly if this kill bit is set.
Council Site Actions: All responding council sites are waiting on additional information from the vendor.
Description: Hosting Controller is a popular set of hosting automation tools for Microsoft Windows-based servers. This package contains multiple remotely exploitable vulnerabilities: (a) A flaw in properly validating user-supplied input in the "Admin/Check_Password.asp" script allows any user with reseller privileges to become a site administrator. (b) Failure to properly validate user-supplied input in the "hosting/addreseller.asp" script allows authenticated users to give themselves reseller privileges, thus allowing further privilege escalation via flaw (a). (c) A failure to properly validate user-supplied input in the "Accounts/AccountActions.asp" script allows authenticated users to change the passwords of any reseller account, as well as increase the billing credit for any reseller account. All of these flaws arise because the software passes parameters from the HTTP forms without any further validation. Technical details for all of these flaws have been publicly posted.
Status: Hosting Controller confirmed, updates available.
Status: WebEx confirmed, updates available. Note that users are automatically upgraded to a non-vulnerable version upon watching a WebEx-hosted presentation.
Council Site Actions: Most of the council sites are using the affected software, but it is not supported by their central IT departments. Several sites plan to use SMS to remove the control from the desktops and then ask the users to reinstall if they are using WebEx. Other sites plan to take no action.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed, no updates available.
Council Site Actions: responding council sites are waiting on additional information from the vendor.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed, no updates available.
Council Site Actions: responding council sites are waiting on additional information from the vendor.
Description: The following popular software packages reportedly contain PHP remote file include vulnerabilities: vBulletin, Mambo Galleria, WebDesignHQ, Stud.IP, BLOG:CMS, Plume-CMS, and TWiki. These flaws can be exploited by a remote attacker to run arbitrary PHP code on the webserver hosting the vulnerable software packages. The postings show how to craft the malicious HTTP requests to exploit the flaws. Status: vBulletin has not confirmed, no updates available. Mambo has not confirmed, no updates available. SiteBuilder has not confirmed, no updates available. Stud.IP has not confirmed, no updates available. BLOG:CMS has not confirmed, no updates available. Plume-CMS has not confirmed, no updates available. TWiki confirmed, updates available. Note that, with the exception of the TWiki vulnerability, all of these vulnerabilities require that the PHP "register_globals" option be enabled. The "register_globals" option is disabled by default in PHP version 4.2.0 and later. However, many sites enable this option, and at least the Stud.IP package requires that this option be enabled. Users are advised to disable the "register_globals" option if possible, and run web server software under a low-privilege account.
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.
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.
Status: IMBC confirmed, updates available.
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. One site commented that they have new ActiveX code installs controlled at network perimeter.
Status: AdPlug has not confirmed, no updates available.
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: The Microsoft Windows HLINK.DLL vulnerability described in a previous @RISK newsletter posting has a new exploit available that used Word as an attack vector. The previously posted exploits used Microsoft Excel as an attack vector. Note that user interaction is still required to leverage the flaw. Users are advised to not open documents from untrusted sources.
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 5057 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
Bonus Section: Lessons Learned The Hard Way in Web Application Vulnerabilities (a special section by SPI Dynamics).
XSS Plus Phishing Comes of Age Last month, Paypal was hit with an emerging trend in phishing scams. An attacker used a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in paypal.com to inject their own HTML into web pages served from Paypal. By coupling phishing techniques with a web application vulnerability, the attacker created a phishing scenario that appeared legitimate and circumvented traditional anti-phishing defenses.
The attack started by a mass email telling people they needed to update their Paypal account information. The email contained a link to paypal.com, with a XSS attack embedded in the URL. Unlike traditional phishing attacks which link to a fake website and attempt to hide the URL, this email did in fact link to the actual paypal.com host. When the user clicked on the link they visited SSL encrypted page on Paypal's site. Checking the hostname, the SSL certificate, or other common anti-phishing techniques all lead a victim to believe they were safe. By injecting their own HTML into the web page through the XSS vulnerability, the attacker was able to present anything they wanted to a victim and make them believe it was from Paypal. In this case, the injected HTML simply informed the user their account was deactivated and used JavaScript to redirect them to a 3rd party website where the actual information theft occurred.
Paypal was extremely lucky that the XSS vulnerability wasn't properly exploited. The phisher could have injected a fake login form, added a keylogger, or completely rewritten the entire page with anything they wanted. XSS vulnerabilities can even been used to launch self propagating worms like the Yamanner worm or the MySpace.com worm. Instead the phisher merely redirected the victim to a 3rd party website just like a classic phishing attack.
SPI Labs has been researching how XSS can amplify phishing attacks for quite some time. One of our researchers, Billy Hoffman, gave a well received presentation entitled ThePhuture of Phishing at the Toorcon Security conference in September 2005. This presentation includes an extensive guide on how to properly secure applications against XSS. SPI Labs has also created and released LineBreaker a proxy that detects and stop XSS+Phishing attacks. The both the presentation and program are available at http://www.spidynamics.com/spilabs/education/presentations/phishing.html
What should you take away from all of this? Simple. XSS can greatly amplify the damage of a phishing attack by circumventing traditional defenses. XSS can have a number of very dangerous payloads, any one of which can steal personal information. Fortunately, XSS is also 100% preventable if developers perform proper input validation.
(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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