The Internet Explorer VMP vulnerability is being actively exploited. Immediate action (probably by unregistering VGX.DLL) SANS Internet Storm Center has been providing regular updates http://isc.sans.org/.
@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 in the parsing of VML (Vector Markup Language) data. VML is an XML-based language used to define vector graphics images. A specially-crafted HTML document (posted on a webpage or included in an email) could exploit this buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Several exploits for this vulnerability have been publicly posted, and at least one Trojan has been seen active in the wild (tentatively named "Trojan.Vimalov"). Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by unregistering the "VGX.DLL" library. Note that this will prevent normal VML usage.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, no updates available.
Council Site Actions: All responding council sites are waiting on the release of the patch from the vendor. They will deploy the patch during their next regularly scheduled update process or via their AutoUpdate capability.
Description: The Mozilla foundation has released several security advisories for vulnerabilities in Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. These vulnerabilities can be exploited for remote code execution, cross-site-scripting and spoofing attacks. Technical details for several of these vulnerabilities except remote code execution flaws have been publicly posted. As these products are open source, further details can be easily obtained via source code analysis. Some simple proofs-of-concept are included when available in the security advisories referenced below.
Status: Mozilla confirmed, updates available.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed, no updates available.
Council Site Actions: All responding council sites are waiting on additional information from the vendor and a patch. They will most likely deploy the patch during their next regularly scheduled update process or via their AutoUpdate capability.
Description: Ipswitch WS_FTP, a popular FTP server for Microsoft Windows, contains multiple remotely-exploitable buffer overflow vulnerabilities: (1) Failure to properly validate user-supplied responses to the FTP PASV command can overflow a fixed-sized buffer. This overflow occurs in the parsing of PASV responses, requiring the vulnerable server to connect back to the attacker's system. (2) Failure to properly validate user-supplied input to the extended XMD5, XSHA1, and XCRC commands can result overflow a fixed-sized buffer. By sending a specially-crafted request using one of these commands, an authenticated attacker (possibly anonymous or ftp user) could exploit one of these buffer overflows and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the FTP server process - often SYSTEM. The technical details and at least one exploit for these vulnerabilities have been publicly posted.
Status: Ipswitch confirmed, updates available.
Description: The Cisco Intrusion Prevention System contains multiple remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities: (1) By sending a specially-crafted SSL request to the web administration interface of a vulnerable system, an attacker could cause the "mainApp" administrative process to crash. This process is not restarted automatically, leading to a denial-of-service condition. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would prevent system administration (via either the web or command line interfaces), stop the reporting of alerts to remote monitoring systems (including SNMP traps), and prevent the automatic reconfiguration of other Cisco devices. (2) By specially fragmenting traffic passing through a network segment monitored by a Cisco IPS device, an attacker could bypass the traffic inspection afforded by the device. This traffic will be passed unchanged, allowing potentially malicious traffic to traverse the network undetected.
Status: Cisco 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: Several Cisco devices contain a remotely-exploitable configuration error. The operating system software on these devices is incorrectly configured to support the DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) standard. As part of this support, an additional hard coded SNMP community string with read-write privileges has been included in the SNMP configuration. This community string ("cable-docsis") cannot be removed or disabled. An attacker using this community string could alter the configuration of the device arbitrarily allowing the attacker to take complete control of the affected system.
Status: Cisco confirmed, updates available. Possible workarounds include disabling the SNMP process as a whole or configuring SNMP access control lists.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the responding council sites is using the affected software. They are currently reviewing their inventory/configurations and will distribute the patch at their next scheduled update, if applicable.
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 5181 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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