Management Console all have newly discovered critical vulnerabilities this week. The WordPress vulnerability (a malicious back door inserted in the source code) is illuminating.
Alan
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@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 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: Apache Tomcat, a popular application server, contains a stack overflow vulnerability. An overlong URL (one greater than 4095 bytes) could exploit this buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the server process. The flaw stems from an unsafe memory copy in the Apache Tomcat JK Web Server Connector component. Certain versions of Tomcat include vulnerable versions of this component by default. Note that, because Tomcat is open source, technical details for this vulnerability can be determined through source code analysis.
Status: Apache confirmed, updates available.
Description: WordPress, a popular and widely-used blog application, contains a remotely-accessible backdoor. Backdoors are malicious code inserted into an application that allows an attacker to compromise the application by accessing it in a special, attacker-defined way. On February 25th, 2007, the source code for WordPress version 2.1.1 was altered to contain a backdoor. A specially-crafted string passed in an HTTP request in a variable named "ix" or "iz" will lead to remote code execution with the privileges of the web server process. Full technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability and it can be assumed that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild.
Status: WordPress confirmed, updates available.
Status: Cisco has released software for the affected products to mitigate the vulnerability. A temporary workaround is to block SNMP messages destined to the Catalyst switch. Proper ingress/egress filtering at the network perimeter will prevent attacks from the Internet.
Description: EMC NetWorker backup solutions are designed to deliver centralized data protection and management across heterogeneous environments. The management console, which connects to the NetWorker backup server, uses a weak authentication mechanism for this connection. Hence, an attacker can impersonate as the NetWorker management console and connect to the backup servers with administrative privileges. Further technical details regarding the vulnerability are not publicly available. Note that a similar issue reported previously resulted from using "AUTH_UNIX" authentication mechanism for RPC calls.
Status: The problem has been fixed in the "Jumbo Update 1 Build 386" for NetWorker. A general workaround is to block any access to the management console from the Internet by blocking ports 2638/tcp and 2638/udp at the network perimeter.
Description: MailEnable, a popular email suite for Microsoft Windows, contains a buffer overflow vulnerability in the processing of the APPEND IMAP command. An authenticated attacker could send a specially-crafted APPEND command to trigger this buffer overflow vulnerability and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the MailEnable process. A working exploit is publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: MailEnable has not confirmed, no updates available.
Description: Symantec Mail Security for SMTP is a popular anti-malware email scanner for Windows, Unix, and Linux. An undisclosed vulnerability in the processing of email headers can result in arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the scanning process. No further technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability. It is believed that only the Windows version of the software is vulnerable, and that this vulnerability is not currently being exploited in the wild.
Status: Symantec confirmed, updates available.
Description: Citrix Presentation Server Client for Windows contains an undisclosed vulnerability when making an ICA connection through a proxy server. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. A specially-crafted web page could exploit this vulnerability. No technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability. It is believed that this vulnerability is not currently being exploited in the wild.
Status: Citrix confirmed, updates available.
Description: The Solaris Telnet vulnerability discussed in a previous issue of @RISK is being actively attacked in the wild by a worm. This worm can attack both x86- and SPARC-architecture systems. The worm attempts to compromise a vulnerable system and execute a large number of commands as either the "lp" or "adm" user, and then proceed to infect other systems. Users are advised to disable telnet, if possible. Sun has released an "inoculation" script that will remove the worm from infected systems, and prevent re-infection by disabling the telnet service.
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 5392 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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