Apple revealed a big, bad set of vulnerabilities in Mac OS X - some leading to remote root compromise. Some of them already are being targeted in published exploits. CA's backup product, BrightStor, is back on the list of software with critical flaws. McAfee's bugs are a little less critical, but still require rapid action. These latter two are a reminder of the retargeting that criminals have done over the past 18 months - focusing much more of their research, and huge numbers of attacks, on applications ranging from back-up to security to office applications to media players. 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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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: Mac OS X contains multiple vulnerabilities that can be exploited to completely compromise users' systems. (a) An image with a specially-crafted embedded ColorSync profile (data used to provide color consistency between various displays) could trigger a stack-based buffer overflow. Successfully exploiting this buffer overflow could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that this flaw may affect images embedded in web pages. (b) A specially-crafted Disk Image file could trigger several vulnerabilities, including integer and buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Successfully exploiting these vulnerabilities could lead to arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user, and possibly with kernel-level privileges. Note that, depending on configuration, disk images are opened automatically by Safari after download. Disk images are often used to distribute software and software updates. (c) A logic error in the DirectoryService subsystem could allow an unprivileged LDAP user to arbitrarily change the system root password, allowing for complete system compromise. Note that the system must be configured for LDAP usage. (d) A specially-crafted GNU tar (tape archive) file could overwrite arbitrary files when extracted. These files must be owned by the current user. Note that, depending on configuration, tar files may be automatically extracted after download. (e) A specially-crafted GIF, PICT or RAW image file could exploit an integer overflow in the ImageIO subsystem or a heap overflow in the QuickDraw manager subsystem. Successfully exploiting these overflows could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that this flaw may affect images embedded in web pages. (f) The default version of the MySQL server shipped with Mac OS X Server contains multiple vulnerabilities, including some that could lead to arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the MySQL process. (g) A logical flaw in the handling of authentication credentials in Mac OS X Server's Server Manager subsystem could allow an attacker to access the Server Manager without proper authentication. (h) A specially-crafted Software Update Catalog file could exploit a vulnerability in the Software Update subsystem, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the Software Update process. (i) iPhoto fails to handle specially-crafted XML. Subscribing to a malicious photocast could trigger a format string in iPhoto and potentially execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that the user must manually subscribe to a malicious podcast. This update was shipped as a separate update from Apple Security Update 2007-003. Several of these vulnerabilities have technical details and/or working exploits publicly available (see references below). Additionally, several of these issues have been discussed in earlier issues of @RISK. This software update also addresses several other, lower-severity vulnerabilities including local-only, denial-of-service, and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
Status: Apple confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the reporting council sites is using the affected software and they are in the process of pushing the updates out to the affected systems.
Description: Computer Associates BrightStor ARCserve Backup products provide backup services for Windows, NetWare, Linux and UNIX. The Tape Engine feature allows the backup products to use tape drives as a storage media. The Tape Engine process, which listens on port 6502/tcp, contains multiple vulnerabilities in the handling of RPC requests that can be exploited to either shut down the Tape Engine service or possibly execute arbitrary code with "SYSTEM" privileges. In addition, the portmapper service also contains a vulnerability that can be exploited to crash the service. The technical details have not yet been publicly posted.
Status: CA has released patches for the affected products. A workaround is to block access to the port 6502/tcp and 111/udp at the network perimeter to prevent attacks originating from the Internet. Special Note: CA BrightStor products have been widely exploited during the past year. Hence, this patch should be applied on a priority basis.
Description: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and ProtectionPilot contain multiple vulnerabilities in the "SiteManager" ActiveX component. A malicious web page that instantiates this component could exploit these vulnerabilities and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that this component is generally only installed on the Orchestrator or ProtectionPilot server, or a system with the management console for one of these applications installed. Technical details for these vulnerabilities is publicly available, and reusable exploit code for ActiveX components could be easily adapted to target this component.
Status: McAfee confirmed, updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the vulnerable control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism for CLSID "4124FDF6-B540-44C5-96B4-A380CEE9826A".
Council Site Actions: Two of the reporting council sites are using the affected software. One site plans to deploy the patch during their next regularly scheduled maintenance cycle. The other site is still investigating their course of action. They may accept the risk due to the fact that their systems are in the process of being integrated into their parent company.
Description: OpenBSD, a derivative of the classical BSD operating system (itself descended from Unix) designed for high security, contains a kernel memory corruption vulnerability in its handling of IPv6 traffic. A specially-crafted IPv6 packet could exploit this memory corruption issue to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges, effectively taking complete control of a vulnerable system. Note that, to successfully exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must be able to inject traffic onto the vulnerable system's local network. IPv6 is enabled by default in OpenBSD. Technical details and a working exploit are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: OpenBSD confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Two of the reporting council sites have responded to this item. One site has already patched their systems as part of their regular system maintenance. The other site has advised their users to update their systems on their own.
Description: Apache Tomcat, a popular Java servlet container and application server, contains a directory traversal vulnerability. A specially-crafted request could allow an attacker to read arbitrary files below the configured document root of the Tomcat server. Note that the files must be readable by the Tomcat server process. A simple proof-of-concept is available.
Status: Apache confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Three of the reporting council sites are using the affect software and plan to respond on some level. The first site only has a few small installations of Tomcat and they have advised the developers to upgrade those systems manually. The second site has advised their user base to update. The third site is still investigating the best course of action - they have multiple Tomcat installations and a number of one-off solutions. They plan to research all Tomcat server locations.
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 5402 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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