A long time ago, Novell was a safe operating environment because the attackers ignored it. As you'll see from the first item, that's no longer true. The reason: competition for victims has caused the cyber criminals to look beyond Windows and UNIX to other operating systems and especially to applications and appliances. A more subtle, and more troubling, element of this week's @RISK newsletter is the number of new web application vulnerabilities discovered (more than 66 this week alone). They are not called "critical," because they are in software that is not as widely used as Windows or UNIX. But to the people who run those software packages - they are very critical.
Those web application vulnerabilities are often caused by programmers who were never taught about the common errors and how to avoid them. In December, twenty two government and commercial organizations in three countries are going to be testing a new exam that hopes to measure how well programmers have mastered knowledge about the common security errors and what to do about them. Eight more organizations can participate. Qualifications include (1) you employ at least 200 programmers, and (2) you are willing to ask nearly all of them to try the exam and provide feedback (anonymously), and (3) you will help answer the key questions needed to decide how to move the project forward. If you are interested (no commitment needed, but you do have to have at least 200 programmers) email SPA@sans.org with a description of your organization and the number of programmers you employ. SPA stands for secure programming assessment.
Alan
@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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Three Great SANS Training Conferences Coming Up (and a $1,000 challenge) San Jose, New Orleans and Washington DC. Shon Harris and Eric Cole will be teaching the CISSP prep courses in San Jose and DC respectively. We'll pay a $1000 prize to any person who is the first to identify a higher rated CIISP prep teacher than Eric and Shon. In DC, Ed Skoudis will be teaching Hacker Exploits, Jason Fossen will be teaching Windows Security, Stephen Northcutt will be teaching comprehensive security management, Josh Wright will be teaching Wireless Security, Mike Poor will be teaching Intrusion Detection, Rob Lee will be teaching Forensics and there are more. The same $1000 challenge goes for every one of them. The faculty sets SANS apart. You have simply never had a better teacher of these topics. Many of those same teachers will also be in New Orleans.
That's why more than 8,000 students have written comments like this: ++ "I have attended courses by several of SANS rivals, and SANS blew them away." - Alton Thompson, US Marines
New Orleans: Nov. 14-21, http://www.sans.org/neworleans06/event.php
San Jose: Dec. 4-9 http://www.sans.org/siliconvalley06/index.php
Washington DC: Dec. 9-16 http://www.sans.org/cdieast06/event.php
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*************************** Sponsored Links: **************************
1) Insider threat research report shows CEO_s in denial. Download the report now from ArcSight. http://www.sans.org/info/1568
2) Security professionals will focus on fighting the most common threats to data at the SANS Secure Storage & Encryption Summit, December 6-7. http://www.sans.org/info/1569
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Part I for this issue has been compiled by 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: Novell's eDirectory, a multi-platform directory service with millions of installations worldwide, allows businesses to manage identities and secure access to network resources. In addition to LDAP protocol, the eDirectory product also supports Netware Core Protocol (NCP) over IP. (a) Novell's iMonitor provides monitoring and diagnostic capability for Novell eDirectory via HTTP. iMonitor server, that listens on port 8028/tcp by default, is automatically started along with the eDirectory services on Windows platforms. This server contains a stack-based buffer overflow that can be triggered by an HTTP "Host" header longer than 64 bytes. The overflow can be exploited to execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM/root privileges. Note that exploit code for similar flaws previously discovered is publicly available. (b) The NCP functionality of eDirectory as well as the LDAP server contain heap-based buffer overflows. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit these flaws to execute arbitrary code on the eDirectory server. The technical details about the flaws have been publicly posted.
Status: Novell has released version 8.8.1 FTF1 to address the buffer overflows in LDAP and NCP services. Version 8.7.3.8 FTF1 addresses the iMonitor buffer overflow.
Description: Oracle has released a cumulative security patch for a wide range of products on October 17, 2006. This critical update patches over 100 vulnerabilities that can be exploited via HTTP or Oracle Net protocol. Oracle Application Express is the most severely affected product according to the CVSS ratings for its vulnerabilities (computed by Oracle). Although Oracle's advisory has reported low CVSS scores on a large number of database flaws (i.e. the flaws are moderate or low severity), NGSSoftware points out that some of the database flaws can be exploited without a valid userid/password. Hence, Oracle Database and Application Express patches should be applied on a priority basis.
Status: Apply the Oracle Critical Patch Update for October 2006. NGSSoftware also reports that updates are not available for some platforms.
Council Site Actions: Most of the reporting council sites are taking action on this item and plan to role out the patches at some point in the future. A few sites will use the next regularly scheduled system maintenance window. Other sites are processing through their normal, but rigorous Oracle patch regression testing process, and will deploy the patches once testing is complete and successful.
Description: Asterisk is an open-source PBX server for UNIX-based systems and is being deployed from small and medium to large enterprises for VoIP services. Asterisk contains a heap-based buffer overflow that can be triggered by a specially crafted Skinny protocol packet. An unauthenticated attacker, who can connect to the Asterisk server's port 2000/tcp, can exploit the overflow to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. Proof-of-concept exploit has been publicly posted.
Status: Vendor confirmed. Asterisk versions 1.2.13, 1.0.12 and 1.4.x are not vulnerable.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the reporting council sites is using the affected software. They are still in the process of evaluating if their configuration is vulnerable.
Description: ClamAV is an open-source antivirus software designed mainly for scanning emails on UNIX mail gateways. The software includes a virus scanning library - libClamAV. This library is used by many third party email, web, FTP scanners as well as mail clients. The library contains a heap-based buffer overflow that can be triggered by specially crafted executable (PE) files. The attacker can send the malicious files via email, web, FTP or a file share, and exploit the heap-based overflows to execute arbitrary code on the system running the ClamAV library. The technical details can be obtained by comparing the fixed and the affected versions of the software. Note that for compromising the mail/web/FTP gateways no user interaction is required.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the reporting council sites is using the affected software and only on a very limited basis. They are in the process of applying the DSA-1196-1 update.
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 5224 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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