A Microsoft Zero-Day caused a lot of frenetic activity this week, but the big "oh darn" moment this week was learning that the wireless infrastructure people had deployed in thousands of large organizations has hard coded user names and passwords and default community strings - -- which make their networks remotely exploitable.
Separately, with Rohit Dhamankar's help, we have launched a very cool new "Software Security @RISK" Newsletter that analyzes major current vulnerabilities from @RISK and shows the exact programming errors that caused the vulnerabilities. The newsletter will be distributed to all programmers who register for the secure coding exam (www.sans-ssi.org), as a continuous learning tool for them. In the mean time, we'll send the current issues to any programmer or tester or auditor who knows enough about secure coding in Java or C to review the current test blueprint in one of those languages and help us rate the secure coding rules in the blueprint on importance and frequency of use. Email spa@sans.org and tell us which language (Java or C) you are capable of reviewing.
@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: Microsoft DNS server supports an RPC interface that can be accessed via high TCP ports (> 1023). The interface can also be accessed via "\\dnsserver" named pipe on ports 139/tcp and 445/tcp. This interface contains a buffer overflow that can be triggered by a function call with a specially crafted zone name. The overflow can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the DNS server with SYSTEM privileges. Compromise of a DNS server may lead to further compromises in an enterprise by re-directing people to malicious domains. Exploit code for this vulnerability has been publicly posted, and the flaw is being exploited in the wild. Note that the DNS service running on port 53 is not affected by the buffer overflow.
Status: Microsoft has issued certain workarounds that can be employed before a patch is released. The suggested workarounds are: (a) Block requests to the DNS server on TCP ports > 1023, 139 and 445 from the Internet. (b) Disable the remote management over RPC feature for the affected DNS servers. The steps are outlined in the Microsoft advisory.
Description: Cisco Wireless LAN Controller and Wireless Control System are the building blocks of an enterprise-scale wireless network supporting business critical applications. The Wireless LAN Controller uses "private" community string for SNMP read-write operations. An attacker can exploit the default SNMP read-write community string to take control of the device. Similarly, the Cisco Wireless Control System (WCS) has a hardcode username and password for its FTP server (used for data backup purposes). An attacker can use these default credentials to potentially compromise the server running the Cisco WCS application.
Status: Cisco confirmed, updates available.
Description: Microsoft Content Management Server (MSCMS), used to create and maintain web sites, contains multiple vulnerabilities: (a) A specially-crafted HTTP GET request could trigger memory corruption vulnerability in MSCMS. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the MSCMS server process. (b) A cross-site scripting vulnerability exists in the way MSCMS handles HTML redirection requests. An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to execute arbitrary scripts on other users' systems with the same privileges as other scripts downloaded from the Internet. Further technical details for this vulnerability are unavailable.
Status: Microsoft 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 responding council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
Description: Microsoft Agent is a Microsoft technology used to provide animated characters for user interaction. Microsoft Agent contains a memory corruption vulnerability. A specially-crafted URL could trigger this memory corruption vulnerability, and allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. A malicious web page that embedded such a URL could exploit this vulnerability when the user views the page. Clicking on the link itself is not necessary.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. They plan to deploy the patches during their next regularly scheduled maintenance window.
Description: Kaspersky AntiVirus product contains the following vulnerabilities: (a) The ActiveX controls AXKLPROD60Lib.KAV60Info and AXKLSYSINFOLib.SysInfo installed by the anti-virus product can be exploited to download/delete arbitrary files to/from a user's system, when the user visits a malicious webpage. (b) The anti-virus engine contains a heap-based buffer overflow that can be triggered by specially crafted ARJ archives. The flaw can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on a system running a vulnerable version of the anti-virus engine. Note that no user interaction is required to exploit this flaw. The e-mail gateways are most severely affected by this vulnerability.
Status: Kaspersky confirmed, updates available.
Description: Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a collection of open technologies, including HTTP and XML, used to advertise and discover network services and configuration. The implementation in Microsoft Windows XP contains a memory corruption vulnerability. By sending a specially-crafted HTTP request to a vulnerable system, an attacker could trigger this vulnerability. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability could lead to arbitrary code execution with the privileges of "LocalSystem". Note that the vulnerable service is not enabled by default. Under most network configurations, the attacker would need to be in the same sub network as the victim. A working exploit is known to exist, and is available to members of Immunity's partner program.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available. Users are advised to block UDP port 1900 and TCP port 2869 at the network perimeter.
Council Site Actions: All reporting council sites are responding to this issue. They plan to deploy the patches during their next regularly scheduled maintenance window.
Description: PunBB is a popular PHP-based bulletin board system. It contains several vulnerabilities: (a) Failure to properly sanitize the "Zend_Hash_Del_Key_Or_Index" parameter can trigger an SQL injection vulnerability. A specially-crafted request would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary SQL code with the privileges of the web server process. Note that the PHP "register_globals" option must be on for this vulnerability to be possible; "register_globals" is off by default in all recent versions of PHP. (b) Failure to properly sanitize the HTTP "Referrer" header can lead to a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the "misc.php" script. The discoverer of this vulnerability has shown how this can be leveraged to also execute arbitrary PHP code by manipulating the header and uploading a false image containing PHP code. Full technical details for these vulnerabilities, plus a working exploit, are publicly available.
Status: PunBB 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 responding council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
Description: AOL AIM and ICQ, two popular instant messaging applications, contain a directory traversal vulnerability. These applications fail to properly validate filenames used in file transfers. An attacker who sent a file with a specially-crafted name including path traversal characters (i.e. "../" or "..\") could trigger this vulnerability, and overwrite arbitrary files on the victim's system, or place the file in an arbitrary location. Note that the victim must explicitly accept the file transfer from the attacker, and ICQ will not overwrite existing files without prompting.
Status: AOL confirmed, updates available. ICQ patches are available via ICQ's automatic update system. AIM patches are available, and the AIM infrastructure has also been patched to help mitigate the impact of this vulnerability.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the responding council sites is using the affected software; however it is not an officially supported application in their environment. They have notified the server team and desktop team to be aware of the problem. They believe their risk low because they block file transfers at their gateway.
Description: Cosign is a Single Sign On system written by the University of Michigan. It is widely deployed in educational institutions and is used as a central authentication mechanism for multiple websites. It contains two authentication bypass vulnerabilities: (a) A specially-crafted cosign cookie, containing embedded newlines and cosign commands, can trigger an authentication bypass vulnerability in the cosign daemon. By sending such a cookie, an attacker could execute arbitrary cosign commands, including impersonating an arbitrary user without authentication. (b) A specially-crafted POST request to the central cosign server could allow an already-authenticated attacker to impersonate another user without authentication. Full technical details are available for both of these vulnerabilities, and a proof-of-concept is publicly available.
Status: University of Michigan 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 responding council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
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 5423 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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