This week's top three critical vulnerabilities offer a reminder that the attackers have retargeted their efforts to find flaws in applications. Active-X controls, Symantec's backup products and CA's anti-virus products have been targeted repeatedly since the summer of 2005 when the shift to application targeting became an epidemic. Alan
P.S. We are just completing the new procurement language package that government and commercial application buyers will use to help ensure applications they buy or have built for them are as secure as possible upon delivery. This package will be distributed to all attendees at the Application Security Summit. If you have any interest in application security - as a buyer or vendor or developer - please join us at the Summit in Washington DC in August. Find the complete program at https://www.sans.org/appsummit07/
@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: The above ActiveX controls have been reported to contain vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code or command execution. A specially-crafted web page that instantiates one of these controls could exploit these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that reusable exploit code that targets arbitrary ActiveX controls is widely available and easily modified to attack these controls; additionally, full technical details are available for some of these vulnerabilities.
Status: Users are advised to check with vendors to determine the status of these vulnerabilities. Currently, only the Macrovision vulnerability has been confirmed to be fixed by the vendor. Users can mitigate the impact of these vulnerabilities by disabling the controls via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism. ?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 Computer Associates antivirus engine contains two flaws in the handling of CAB ("cabinet") archive files. An overly long stored file name or an invalid CAB file header could trigger a buffer overflow. Successfully exploiting one of these buffer overflows would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the scanning process. Note that, because the antivirus engine is often deployed to mail servers or otherwise automatically configured to scan systems, simply sending an email to a server running the software or sending a CAB file to a vulnerable user could trigger this vulnerability. Some technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: Computer associates 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: Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation, a popular storage management suite, contains a scheduling service. This service is used by clients to schedule actions on the server system. A flaw exists in the validation of requests to the scheduler service: by sending a specially-crafted request could bypass authentication to the scheduler service, allowing arbitrary commands to be scheduled by attackers. Any commands run in this fashion would run with the privileges of scheduler process (possibly SYSTEM). Some technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: Symantec confirmed, updates available. Users are advised to block TCP port 4888 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: The F5 FirePass SSL VPN appliance allows remote users access to internal applications via a secure VPN connection. The appliance fails to properly validate the username of users logging-in to the system. By sending a specially-crafted username to the appliance, an attacker could execute arbitrary commands in the appliance's underlying operating system (Linux). No authentication is required to exploit this vulnerability. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow an attacker complete control over the affected appliance. Note that some technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: F5 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: WordPress, a popular blogging suite, contains an SQL injection vulnerability. By sending a specially-crafted request to the XMLRPC subsystem of the suite, an attacker could execute arbitrary SQL with the privileges of the WordPress database user. A proof-of-concept is publicly available; additionally, because WordPress is open source, technical details for this vulnerability can be determined via source code analysis.
Status: WordPress has not confirmed, no 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: MPlayer, a popular multiplatform media player, contains a flaw in its parsing of responses from CDDB servers. CDDB, the Compact Disc Database is a protocol used to store Compact Disc disc and track information. (Note that CDDB can also refer to the Gracenote commercial implementation of the CDDB.) If MPlayer queries a malicious CDDB server, the server can trigger a buffer overflow by sending a specially-crafted response. Successfully exploiting these vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that, because MPlayer is open source, technical details are available via source code analysis. Note that MPlayer is configured by default to query known CDDB servers (mostly from the FreeDB project), however, these (and other) servers accept updates from anonymous users and may therefore be compromised.
Status: MPlayer 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 5465 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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