Apple OS/X, Oracle, IBM Tivoli and Nortel's VPNs all had major security vulnerabilities announced this week. 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: Gracenote provides software that enables consumers to better manage and discover digital media. Gracenote products are being used by a large number of vendors. The GraceNote CDDBControl ActiveX control, used to access the GraceNote database of compact disc information, contains a buffer overflow vulnerability. A malicious web page that instantiates this control can trigger this overflow, and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Limited technical details about the overflow are available in the posted advisories.
Status: GraceNote confirmed, updates available. Please contact your vendor for vendor-specific updates.
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: Nortel routers and switches offering VPN functionality contain multiple vulnerabilities that can be exploited to either gain access to the private network or compromise the VPN router/switch. (a) The VPN routers contain 2 default user accounts "FIPSecryptedtest1219" and "FIPSunecryptedtest1219" that are stored in the LDAP template. The accounts are used by system diagnostics during the boot-up, and are not visible to the system manager. An attacker can use these accounts to gain an access to the private network. (b) The VPN router web management console contains an authentication bypass vulnerability. An attacker can access certain administrative pages via specially crafted URLs without using any authentication credentials. An attacker can potentially compromise the VPN device and open up the private network for further attacks.
Status: Nortel confirmed, updates available. The Nortel advisory has also listed workarounds for these issues.
Description: Apple's latest security update addresses multiple vulnerabilities in Mac OS X. Two vulnerabilities in default and common configurations could allow remote code execution with the privileges of the current user: (a) Mac OS X's implementation of 'fsck', the filesystem check utility, fails to properly handle malformed Unix Filesystem (UFS) filesystems. Mac OS X supports creating disk images using UFS. A specially-crafted UFS disk image could cause fsck to run upon opening the image, and then exploit this vulnerability.Note that disk images are commonly used to transfer applications and other files, and may be opened without prompting. (b) A specially-crafted web page could trigger an invalid memory access in the "libinfo" library (used by the WebKit framework). Safari uses WebKit, and is vulnerable. All users of Mac OS X are advised to upgrade immediately. Additional vulnerabilities patched in this update include authenticated remote code execution in the FTP server subsystem, remote code execution when Internet Connection Sharing is turned on, vulnerabilities in third-party software included in Mac OS X, various information disclosure vulnerabilities, and various local-only privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
Status: Apple confirmed, updates available. This security update is automatically distributed via Mac OS X's "Software Update" facility.
Description: The Oracle Critical Patch Update addresses numerous vulnerabilities in a variety of Oracle products. Most critical among these vulnerabilities include numerous SQL injection vulnerabilities in a variety of packages in the Oracle Database and E-Business Suite products. These SQL injection vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary statements with elevated privileges. Note that an attacker may be able to execute SQL statements on the database via SQL injection vulnerabilities in public-facing websites. Additional vulnerabilities patched in this update include a variety of denial-of-service, security policy bypass, and cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities. All users of the Oracle Database and E-Business Suite products are advised to upgrade immediately if either product is accessible via or used by a public-facing website, or if untrusted users have the ability to access the database.
Status: Oracle confirmed, updates available. Note that some of these vulnerabilities were unpatched for as long as five years.
Council Site Actions: Most of the responding council sites are using the affected software and plan to install the patches during the next regularly scheduled maintenance window after the complete their normal QA and testing. A few sites are still investigating the impact to their site.
Description: Novell GroupWise WebAccess, used to provide web access to the GroupWise system, contains a buffer overflow vulnerability. The overflow can be triggered during the HTTP Basic authentication by sending more than 335 base-64 encoded bytes. Successfully exploiting this buffer overflow allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the server process. Technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: Novell confirmed, updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by blocking TCP ports 7205 and 7211 at the network perimeter. Note that this will prevent legitimate access to the affected application.
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: BMC Performance Manager products are designed to manage the availability and performance of network, and a broad range of applications, databases, and operating systems. Two BMC products, Performance Manager and Patrol, contain vulnerabilities: (a) BMC Performance Manager contains a vulnerability in the way it handles requests to its "PatrolAgent.exe" component, which listens on TCP port 3181. Failure to properly sanitize user input could allow an attacker to arbitrary modify the configuration of the product. If the attacker modifies the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) configuration, the attacker could then execute arbitrary code via SNMP requests with the privileges of the affected process. Some technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available. (b) BMC Patrol contains a vulnerability in the way it handles requests to its "bgs_sdservice" component, which listens on TCP port 10128. By sending a specially-crafted External Data Representation (XDR) string to this component, an attacker could trigger a memory corruption vulnerability. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the affected process. Some technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: BMC confirmed, updates available. BMC has stated that issue #1 is not a vulnerability, in that "properly configured" systems are not vulnerable.
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: IBM Tivoli Monitoring Express, used to monitor other systems in an enterprise environment, contains a vulnerability in the way it handles requests to several services. By sending an overlong string to the Tivoli Universal Agent Primary Service, Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server, or Tivoli Monitoring Agent for Windows OS, an attacker could trigger a buffer overflow in the "kde.dll" shared library. Successfully exploiting this buffer overflow allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the affected process. Some technical details are available for this vulnerability.
Status: IBM confirmed, updates available. Users are advised to block TCP ports 10110, 6014, and 14206 at the network perimeter, if possible.
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: Sun Java Web Console, used to provide a central interface to installed Java-based administration tools, contains a format string vulnerability. By sending a specially-crafted login request to the system, an unauthenticated attacker could trigger this vulnerability. Successfully triggering this vulnerability would allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the Java Web Console process. Technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: Sun 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: The Akamai Download Manager, a popular download management application from Akamai, contains multiple vulnerabilities in its ActiveX version. A malicious web page that instantiates this ActiveX control and passes it a specially-crafted URL could trigger these vulnerabilities, and potentially execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that only users of the Akamai Download Manager are vulnerable; users that download content from the Akamai content network are not inherently vulnerable.
Status: Akamai 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: ClamAV, a popular open source antivirus solution, contains a buffer overflow in its handling of Microsoft Cabinet (CAB) files. A specially-crafted CAB file could trigger this buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the "clamd" process. Note that the CAB file may be attached to an email transiting a network monitored by ClamAV. Since ClamAV is open source, technical details for this vulnerability may be obtained via source code analysis.
Status: ClamAV 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: LANDesk Management Suite, a popular system management application, contains a buffer overflow vulnerability. By sending a request longer than 268 bytes to the "AOLNSRVR.EXE" process, an attacker can trigger this buffer overflow. Successfully exploiting this buffer overflow would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges.
Status: LANDesk confirmed, updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by blocking UDP port 65535 at the network perimeter, if possible.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the responding council sites is using the affected software and they are currently pushing the patches.
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 5431 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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