The quiet time for vulnerability discovery seems to have passed; more that 120 new vulnerabilities were reported this week. Among the critical problems, Microsoft vulnerabilities dominate, but AOL's "You've Got Pictures" buffer overflow could create a lot of new zombies.
@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 for this issue has been compiled by Rob King 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: The WebViewFolderIcon ActiveX component, used by the Windows Explorer shell in modern versions of Microsoft Windows, contains an exploitable integer overflow vulnerability. A web page that instantiates this control could exploit this vulnerability and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that numerous proofs-of-concept are available. This issue was reported in an earlier @RISK bulletin (see references below). This entry details the official Microsoft disclosure and response.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available. Users may be able to lessen the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the affected ActiveX controls via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism. The affected CLSIDs are: "e5df9d10-3b52-11d1-83e8-00a0c90dc849" and "844F4806-E8A8-11d2-9652-00C04FC30871".
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. Most sites are deploying the patches on an expedited basis, while other sites plan to deploy the patch during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
Description: Microsoft Excel contains multiple exploitable vulnerabilities in file-format processing code for Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 files. A specially-crafted Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 file could exploit these vulnerabilities and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that Microsoft Excel files are not opened by default in configurations other than Microsoft Office 2000 without the Microsoft Office Document Open Confirmation Tool. A proof-of-concept for this vulnerability has been publicly posted.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. Most sites are deploying the patches on an expedited basis, while other sites plan to deploy the patch during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
Description: Microsoft Word contains multiple vulnerabilities in file-format processing code. A specially-crafted Word document file could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that Microsoft Word files are not opened by default in configurations other than Microsoft Office 2000 without the Microsoft Office Document Open Confirmation Tool. Note that an exploit is known to be in the wild for this vulnerability.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. Most sites are deploying the patches on an expedited basis, while other sites plan to deploy they patch during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
Description: Microsoft Office contains multiple vulnerabilities in the parsing of a variety of Office file formats. A specially-crafted Office file could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that most Microsoft Office files are not opened by default in configurations other than Microsoft Office 2000 without the Microsoft Office Document Open Confirmation Tool.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. Most sites are deploying the patches on an expedited basis, while other sites plan to deploy the patch during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
Description: Microsoft PowerPoint contains multiple vulnerabilities in file-format processing code. A specially-crafted PowerPoint file could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that Microsoft PowerPoint files are not opened by default in configurations other than Microsoft Office 2000 without the Microsoft Office Document Open Confirmation Tool.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. Most sites are deploying the patches on an expedited basis, while other sites plan to deploy the patch during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
Description: The Microsoft XML Parser (used to parse XML documents) and Microsoft XML Core Services (used to perform operations on XML documents) contain multiple exploitable vulnerabilities: (1) A specially-crafted XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) document could exploit a buffer overflow vulnerability in the XML parsing component and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. XSLT documents can be implicitly downloaded when viewing a web page, without further user interaction. (2) A specially-crafted web page could exploit a cross-site-scripting vulnerability in the XML Core Services component to bypass normal domain restrictions on web content.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. Most sites are deploying the patches on an expedited basis, while other sites plan to deploy the patch during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
Description: The America Online You've Got Pictures ActiveX Control, used to view and manage pictures, contains an exploitable vulnerability. A web page that instantiates this control could exploit this vulnerability and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Reusable exploit code for this vulnerability is publicly available, and similar vulnerabilities have been widely exploited in the past. Note that the vulnerable ActiveX control will be automatically upgraded upon the user's next login to the America Online service.
Status: AOL confirmed, updates available. Users may be able to mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the affected ActiveX controls via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism. The affected CLSID is: "D670D0B3-05AB-4115-9F87-D983EF1AC747".
Council Site Actions: Only two of the reporting council sites are responding to this issue. One site is still investigating whether the ActiveX Control is present on their computers. The other site plans to implement fixes during their next regularly scheduled maintenance window.
Description: Microsoft Object Packager, a tool that can be used to create software package files, contains a vulnerability. Due to a failure to properly validate file extensions, a specially-crafted package file could misrepresent the type of files being handled, allowing an attacker to install malicious files. Note that considerable user interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. Most sites are deploying the patches on an expedited basis, while other sites plan to deploy the patch during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
Description: IBM WebSphere, a popular suite of enterprise applications and server software, contains multiple exploitable vulnerabilities. While details have not been released for these vulnerabilities, they are believed to include an authentication bypass or privilege escalation vulnerability, an information disclosure vulnerability, and at least one other vulnerability of unknown impact.
Status: IBM confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Three of the reporting council sites are investigating the potential impact of this vulnerability at their site. The other sites are not using this product.
Description: cPanel, a popular web hosting control panel system, contains an exploitable privilege escalation vulnerability. Attackers who exploit this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code with the elevated, possibly root, privileges. Note that attackers would need authentication credentials to exploit this vulnerability. This vulnerability has been exploited and subsequently used to distribute a common Microsoft Internet Explorer exploit to other users.
Status: cPanel 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: Microsoft ASP.NET, Microsoft's .NET-based web development platform, contains a cross-site scripting vulnerability. A malicious web server could execute arbitrary script code in a user's web browser with the privileges of the current user. Note that attackers must host a malicious site and convince users to visit this site to exploit this vulnerability.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue and plan to deploy during the update during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
Description: Microsoft's implementation of TCP/IP contains multiple exploitable denial-of-service vulnerabilities: A specially-crafted ICMP or TCP message could cause an existing IPv6 connection to be dropped. Additionally, an attacker could exploit a failure to properly validate IPv6 TCP SYN packets, resulting in a system-wide denial-of-service condition. Attackers must belong to the same IPv6 network as the victim. Note that IPv6 support is not installed by default.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue and plan to deploy during the update during their next regularly schedule maintenance window.
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 5214 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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