Two more Internet Explorer vulnerabilities this week; one of them (#1) was created by a Microsoft Hotfix; the second (#2) is like others that have been widely exploited. Also of note are the more than 60 new web application vulnerabilities found this week; that's a rate of more than 2,500 web application vulnerabilities per year.
Call for Vulnerability and Assurance Experts If you are an administrator/CSO/vulnerability researcher (or have a similar role) and are interested contributing to this years the Top-20 Internet Security Vulnerabilities project, contact the project manager, Rohit Dhamankar (dhamankar@sans.org), with your name, the organization you represent, email and phone, and a brief description of your security specialty. At the end of this issue, you'll find a description of the Top20 project.
@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/#process
Description: Microsoft Internet Explorer contains a remotely-exploitable buffer overflow. A specially-crafted compressed web page could exploit this buffer overflow and execute code with the privileges of the current user. This flaw was introduced along with the MS06-042 hotfix. Systems without this hotfix are not vulnerable. Technical details for this vulnerability are believed to be available. Note that Windows XP SP2 is not vulnerable.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council site are responding. One site has already pushed the patch and the other sites plan to deploy during their next maintenance window.
Description: Microsoft Internet Explorer reportedly contains heap-memory corruption vulnerabilities while instantiating certain COM objects as ActiveX controls. A specially-crafted web page that instantiates these COM objects could trigger the memory corruption, and potentially execute arbitrary code on a client system. Note that re-usable exploit code to leverage these flaws is publicly available. Flaws similar to these have been widely exploited in the past.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed, no updates available. Users may be able to mitigate the impact of these vulnerabilities by disabling the components via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism for the following CLSIDs: "{3BC4F3A3-652A-11D1-B4D4-00C04FC2DB8D}", "{4682C82A-B2FF-11D0-95A8-00A0C92B77A9}", "{8E71888A-423F-11D2-876E-00A0C9082467}", "{606EF130-9852-11D3-97C6-0060084856D4}", "{F849164D-9863-11D3-97C6-0060084856D4}".
Council Site Actions: All council sites are waiting on additional information form the vendor. Several sites commented that they plan to deploy the patch during their next maintenance window.
Description: Asterisk, a popular open source Voice-over-IP (VoIP) server, contains multiple remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities. The first vulnerability results from a failure to properly process "AUEP" (Audit Endpoint) MGCP response messages, and can result in remote code execution with the privileges of the Asterisk process. The second vulnerability results from the failure to validate the length of user-supplied variables when constructing a filename for the "Record()" function. If no user-controlled variables are used to construct the paths passed to this function, exploitation is not possible. The technical details for these vulnerabilities are publicly available.
Status: Asterisk 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.
Description: FreeBSD and NetBSD, two popular Unix-like operating systems based on the 4.4BSD-Lite code released by the University of California at Berkeley, contain a remotely-exploitable buffer overflow in their implementations of the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP). By sending a specially-crafted Link Control Protocol packet to a vulnerable system, an attacker can cause an in-kernel buffer overflow and crash the target system. It is believed that arbitrary code execution with kernel privileges may be possible. As both FreeBSD and NetBSD are open source, technical details for this vulnerability are easily available by analyzing the fixed code. Note that systems must actively use PPP to be vulnerable.
Status: FreeBSD confirmed, updates available. NetBSD 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.
Description: This issue was outlined in @RISK volume 5, number 33. It was unknown at that time whether the issue was a new 0-day vulnerability or related to the Microsoft issue patched on August 10th in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-012. According to new information from Microsoft, this issue has been patched by the Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-012. Users who install the MS06-012 patch are not vulnerable to this exploit.
Description: Alt-N MDaemon, a popular mail server solution for Microsoft Windows, contains a remotely-exploitable heap overflow. By sending a specially-crafted "USER" or "APOP" command to a vulnerable server, an attacker could exploit this heap overflow and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the MDaemon process (possibly "SYSTEM"). Attackers would not need to be authenticated to exploit this vulnerability.
Status: Alt-N 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.
Description: Novell Identity Manager, a comprehensive enterprise identity management solution, contains a remotely-exploitable command injection vulnerability. Failure to properly sanitize user profile information could allow an attacker to inject arbitrary Unix commands into shell scripts run by the Identity Manager. By default, the Identity Manager runs with root privileges. Attackers would need to have authenticated access and the ability to modify their profile information. Technical details and a simple proof of concept for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: Novell 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.
Description: Apple's Xsan, a popular enterprise-level storage and storage management solution, contains a remotely-exploitable buffer overflow. By sending a specially crafted request to an Xsan system, an authenticated attacker with write privileges could trigger this buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code with root privileges.
Status: Apple 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.
Description: WFTPD, a popular FTP server application for Microsoft Windows, contains a remotely-exploitable buffer overflow. By sending an overlong SIZE command, an authenticated attacker could execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the WFTPD process. Note that many WFTPD servers are configured to allow anonymous access. A proof-of-concept exploit for this vulnerability has been publicly posted.
Status: WFTPD has not confirmed, no updates available.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the council site responded and they are investigating to see if any one is using the software at their site.
Description: Wireshark, the continuation of the Ethereal network protocol analyzer line, contains multiple vulnerabilities in its protocol dissector modules. These modules are used to decode captured protocol information for presentation to the user. Several modules contain exploitable buffer overflows. By sending specially-crafted traffic to a network with an active Wireshark listener, or by sending a packet-capture file to be loaded into Wireshark, an attacker could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user (often root). Note that, because Wireshark is open source, technical details for these vulnerabilities can easily be obtained by analyzing the fixed code.
Status: Wireshark 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.
Description: Zend, a popular PHP application platform, contains multiple remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities. The first vulnerability is due to a failure to properly validate user-supplied session data. By sending specially-crafted session data to a vulnerable server, an attacker can crash the server process. It is believed that remote code execution may be possible with the privileges of the Zend process. The second vulnerability is due to a failure to properly sanitize user-supplied input to the Zend disk storage module. By performing a standard directory-traversal attack against this module, an attacker can write session data anywhere in the server's filesystem. The technical details for these vulnerabilities have been publicly posted.
Status: Zend 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.
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 5144 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
SANS CRITICAL INTERNET THREATS 2006 =====================================
SANS Critical Internet Threats research is undertaken annually and provides the basis for the SANS "Top-20" report. The "Top-20" report describes the most serious internet security threats in detail, and provides the steps to identify and mitigate these threats.
The "Top-20" began its life as a research study undertaken jointly between the SANS Institute and the National Infrastructure Protection Centre (NIPC) at the FBI. Today thousands of organizations from all spheres of industry are using the "Top-20" as a definitive list to prioritize their security efforts.
The 2006 Top-20 will once again create the experts' consensus on threats - - the result of a process that brings together security experts, leaders, researchers and visionaries from the most security-conscious federal agencies in the US, UK and around the world; the leading security software vendors and consulting firms; the university-based security programs; many other user organizations; and the SANS Institute.
For reference a copy of the 2005 paper is available online: http://www.sans.org/top20.htm. *A list of participants may be found in the Appendix.
(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.
==end==
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