Both Firefox and JAVA Run Time Environment and SDK have high risk vulnerabilities that need attention because their exploitation is easy.
All of us at SANS hope you have a healthy and satisfying year in 2007. We look forward to your comments, contributions, and criticisms, and to seeing you at one of SANS educational programs.
@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).
Part I for this issue has been 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: Various Mozilla products, including Thunderbird (an email client), SeaMonkey (an integrated suite of network applications), and Firefox (a web browser), contain multiple vulnerabilities, including remote code execution, cross-site scripting, privilege escalation, content spoofing, and denials-of-service. At least one of the remote code execution vulnerabilities is known to be exploitable by simply viewing a malicious web page. Some of the technical details have not been publicly posted yet; they may be obtained via source code analysis.
Status: Mozilla confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are using Mozilla, although it is not officially supported by their perspective IT departments. Thus, all sites are relying on Mozilla's Auto Update features to install the latest updates.
Description: The Sun Java Runtime Environment and the Sun Java Software Developer Kit (SDK) contain multiple vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities include remote code execution, privilege escalation, and information disclosure. If a user browses a webpage containing a malicious Java applet, the applet may be able to execute arbitrary code on the client system with the privileges of the logged-on user. Note that the Java applets are automatically downloaded and executed in typical browser configurations. Also, the Sun Java Runtime Environment is installed by default on Microsoft Windows systems prior to Windows XP, many Unix and Unix-like operating systems (including Sun Solaris), and many Linux distributions. Previous flaws in JRE have been exploited to compromise systems in the wild; hence, this update should be applied on an expedited basis.
Status: Sun confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. They are either relying on the vendors' Auto Update feature or they plan to distribute the updates during their next regularly scheduled system maintenance cycle.
Description: The Microsoft Windows MessageBoxA function, used to display graphical message boxes, contains a kernel memory corruption vulnerability that can be triggered by passing a specially-crafted argument to the function. It is believed that this vulnerability may also be exploited to execute arbitrary code. The flaw can be exploited remotely if any application that accepts remote data passes that data to the vulnerable function. No such application is currently known publicly. The technical details and a proof-of-concept are publicly available.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed, no updates are available. The Microsoft Security Response Center Blog has a blog post that may refer to this issue (see below), but it does not confirm that the issue exists or is exploitable.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are waiting on additional information and a patch from the vendor. Once available, they plan to distribute during their next regularly scheduled system maintenance cycle.
Description: Mozilla Firefox's password manager component contains an information disclosure weakness. The password manager can be used to automatically fill out username and password forms. If this capability is used on web pages that can have arbitrary HTML code included by an attacker, the attacker could gain these username and password entries. This vulnerability can be exploited to conduct phishing attacks such as stealing MySpace passwords etc. Note that this issue is distinct from the other Mozilla issues outlined in this edition of @RISK. A proof of concept for this vulnerability is publicly available.
Status: Mozilla confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are using Mozilla, although it is not officially supported by their perspective IT departments. Thus, all sites are relying on Mozilla's Auto Update features to install the latest updates. Status: Mozilla Bugzilla Entry https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360493 Posting by fash1on@gmail.com http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/452382 Proof of Concept http://www.info-svc.com/news/11-21-2006/ rcsr1/"> http://www.info-svc.com/news/11-21-2006/ rcsr1/ Article by Chapin Information Services http://www.info-svc.com/news/11-21-2006/ SecurityFocus BID http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/21240
Description: ESET NOD32, a popular antivirus solution, contains a heap overflow in its handling of CAB ("cabinet") archive files. A specially-crafted CAB file could exploit this vulnerability and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the scanning process.
Status: ESET 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: MailEnable, a popular mail solution for Microsoft Windows systems, contains a buffer overflow vulnerability in the POP server's PASS command implementation. An unauthenticated attacker can send an overly-long argument to the PASS command, and exploit this buffer overflow to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the POP server. Exploit code for the previously disclosed flaws can be easily modified to leverage this flaw.
Status: MailEnable 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: Typo3, a popular content management system, contains multiple remote command execution vulnerabilities. By passing a specially-crafted request to the application, an attacker could execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the server process. Note that versions 3.7 and 3.8 are not vulnerable in their default configuration. Technical details and a proof-of-concept are publicly available for these vulnerabilities.
Status: Typo3 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: McAfee NeoTrace software enables a user to run traceroute, whois etc. utilities on any computers that are trying to connect to the user's system, and display the information graphically. The NeoTraceExplorer.NeoTraceLoader ActiveX control that ships with the NeoTrace software contains a stack-based overflow. The overflow can be triggered by passing an overly long string (500 bytes or more) as an argument to the ActiveX control's "TraceTarget" method. A malicious webpage can exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code on NeoTrace users' systems. McAfee Visual Trace may be bundled with a number of McAfee software thereby increasing the number of vulnerable systems.
Status: McAfee has not confirmed the flaw; no fixes available.
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 5314 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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