A tough week for Microsoft's competitors: Samba, distributed with UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X, has a critical buffer overflow flaw; Security vendor Symantec's Norton Internet Security and Personal Firewall both have buffer overflow vulnerabilities; Apple Darwin also has buffer overflow vulnerabilities; and the Java Development Kit has image processing vulnerabilities.
In fact, more than 100 vulnerabilities were discovered this week. Most are in application software, but there's some good news, too. If you hope to improve security of applications you are deploying, you can now invite your programmers to take the pilot test of the new secure coding exams in C or Java, on August 14 in Washington DC. Space is available for a maximum of 100 people, and those who sign up in the next few days will get an invitation to a webcast that helps them ensure they know what will be covered and where to find study materials. Details at: http://www.sans.org/gssp07/
@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: Samba is an open source implementation of the Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS)/Server Message Block (SMB) protocol designed to facilitate interaction between Microsoft Windows and other operating systems. It is included by default in Mac OS X and many Unix, Unix-like, and Linux operating system distributions. It contains following vulnerabilities: (a) Samba exports Remote Procedure Call (RPC) interfaces to clients just like a Windows system. A specially-crafted MS-RPC call to some of these interfaces can trigger a memory corruption or buffer overflow that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the Samba server. In many installations, Samba is run with "root" privileges. (b) If the "username map script" option is enabled in the Samba configuration (it is disabled by default), an attacker sending a specially-crafted password change request could execute arbitrary shell commands. Note that, because Samba is open source, technical details may be gained via source code analysis. A working exploit is reported to be available for members of Immunity's partner program.
Status: Samba confirmed, updates available. A workaround is to block the ports 139/tcp and 445/tcp from the Internet.
Council Site Actions: Only one of the reporting council sites is responding at this time. They are waiting on the patches from some vendors. They plan to address in their next regularly scheduled system maintenance cycle.
Description: The Symantec Norton Internet Security and Personal Firewall products are shipped with an ActiveX control. This control is vulnerable to a buffer overflow that can be triggered by specially crafted parameters to its "Get" and "Set" methods. A malicious web page that instantiates this control can successfully exploit the buffer overflow to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user.
Status: Symantec 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: Apple Darwin Streaming Server, a Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) streaming media server, contains multiple buffer overflow vulnerabilities. By sending a specially-crafted invalid command or a specially-crafted SETUP command, an attacker can trigger one of these buffer overflows. Successfully exploiting one of these buffer overflows will allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the server process (usually root). Note that, because the Apple Darwin Streaming Server is open source, technical details about the vulnerability can be obtained via source code analysis.
Status: Apple 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 Sun Java Development Kit, used to develop applications that run on the Sun Java platform, contains multiple vulnerabilities in the way it handles BMP and JPEG images. A JPEG image containing specially-crafted ICC color correction data could trigger a buffer overflow in the Java virtual machine. Successfully exploiting this buffer overflow would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Additionally, a specially-crafted BMP image can result in a denial-of-service condition.
Status: Sun confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Two of the reporting council sites are responding to this item. The first site plans to deploy the patch during the next maintenance window. The second site is still investigating. They don't believe they have any internal applications using this kit; however, they are waiting on additional information for the various support teams.
Description: Multiple Intrusion Prevention and Intrusion Detection Systems (IPS/IDS) fail to properly inspect HTTP requests when the requests are encoded with full-width or half-width Unicode characters. By sending a specially-crafted HTTP request an attacker could potentially bypass IPS/IDS inspection. This may result in the compromise of vulnerable systems behind the IPS/IDS.
Status: Some vendors have confirmed. Users are advised to check with their vendor or the CERT advisory.
Council Site Actions: Most of the reporting council sites are responding to this issue. They plan to distribute the patches as they become available for the different platforms. A few of the sites are working with the respective vendors on the appropriate response.
Description: Centennial Discovery product tracks IT assets deployed across an organization. Its "CentennialIPTransferServer service (xferwan.exe)" contains a buffer overflow vulnerability that can be triggered by malformed strings in the TCP traffic. A specially-crafted string in a request to this service would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Note that this process generally runs with SYSTEM privileges. Centennial Discovery is being used by other products like Symantec Discovery and Numara Asset Manager.
Status: Some vendors have 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 5454 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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