IBM Websphere has newly reported remotely exploitable vulnerabilities; Mac OS X WebCore and WebKit have vulnerabilities reminiscent of the type for which Internet Explorer has earned unwanted fame; and Computer Associates' Ingress database has critical, newly reported, remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.
If you are interested in companies are getting the security bugs out of software, take a peek at the end of this issue. You'll find the fascinating agenda for the Application Security Summit. http://www.sans.org/appsummit07/ And Wednesday is the final day for savings on SANSFire 2007's 56 courses in Washington: http://www.sans.org/sansfire07/
@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 Ingres Database, a popular enterprise database engine, contains multiple vulnerabilities. A specially crafted database request could trigger one of a number of stack- or heap-based buffer overflows, and exploit these overflows to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Additional flaws include denial-of-service and file overwrite vulnerabilities. Note that the vulnerable process may run with root or SYSTEM privileges. At least one affected version of the product is open source, allowing technical details to be extracted via source code analysis. Additional technical details for some of these vulnerabilities is publicly available.
Status: Ingres confirmed, updates available.
Description: Apple WebCore and WebKit, two core components of Mac OS X used to render web content by numerous applications (including Apple's Mail.app and Safari), contain multiple vulnerabilities. A specially-crafted web page could trigger one of these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user or exercise a cross-site scripting vulnerability. Other applications that use these components may also be vulnerable.
Status: Apple confirmed, updates available. The necessary updates have been released via Apple's Software Update facility.
Description: Products using F-Secure security engines may flag certain LHA and RAR archive files as invalid and stop examining them for possible viruses and other malware. These files may be crafted in such a way that the file is still considered valid by end-user applications. Any malware archived in such a file would bypass detection by F-Secure products.
Status: F-Secure 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: IBM WebSphere Application Server contains multiple vulnerabilities. The exact details of these vulnerabilities are unknown, but IBM has confirmed that security-bypass and denial-of-service vulnerabilities exist and are remotely exploitable. No further details are publicly available for these vulnerabilities
Status: IBM confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Two of the reporting council sites are using the affected software. Both sites are reviewing the update from IBM and investigating the potential impact to their site in order to determine course of action and/or patch schedule.
Description: Novell exteNd Director, a popular web application development environment, includes an ActiveX control. This ActiveX control fails to properly validate arguments to certain methods, leading to arbitrary command execution. A specially crafted web page that instantiates this control could leverage this vulnerability to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the current user.
Status: Novell confirmed. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the vulnerable control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism for CLSID "2B1AA38D-2D12-11D5-AAD0-00C04FA03D78".
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: Novell NetWare supports remote filesystem access via the Network Filesystem (NFS) protocol. A specially crafted mount request for an NFS filesystem to a Novell NetWare server could trigger a denial-of-service vulnerability on the NetWare server. Note that this vulnerability is exploitable even if no NFS filesystems are currently exported from the NetWare server. Note that some technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: Novell 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: Cerulean Studios Trillian, a popular instant messaging client, contains a flaw in its handling of Unicode strings. Unicode is an Internet-standard format for encoding characters that is designed to handle all the world's written languages. A specially-crafted Unicode string in a message sent to a user could trigger a buffer overflow, and allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. No user authentication is necessary to exploit this vulnerability. While the MSN instant messaging protocol is currently the only protocol confirmed vulnerable, it is believed that the vulnerability could be exploited via any protocol.
Status: Cerulean Studios confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Two of the reporting council sites have a limited user base of this software. The first site has notified their user base and verified the software is configured with the auto update feature. The second site does not support the application, but will notify the limited number of users that may be using this software. They will request that the users update to the latest version/patch.
Description: Apple's AppleTV, a popular multimedia display device, contains a flaw in its Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP) implementation. UPnP is an industry standard suite of protocols used for automatic device and network configuration. A specially-crafted Internet Gateway Device Standardized Device Control Protocol (IGD) request could trigger a buffer overflow and allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable device. This vulnerability is related to a previous vulnerability in Mac OS X discussed in an earlier issue of @RISK.
Status: Apple confirmed, updates available. Note that the updates are automatically distributed via the AppleTV's automatic update mechanism.
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.
(c) 2007. All rights reserved. The information contained in this newsletter, including any external links, is provided "AS IS," with no express or implied warranty, for informational purposes only. In some cases, copyright for material in this newsletter may be held by a party other than Qualys (as indicated herein) and permission to use such material must be requested from the copyright owner.
Agenda for the Application Security Summit, Aug. 15-16, Washington DC Expert Briefings:
1. Expert Briefing: The Three Programming Errors that Caused More than 90% of all Critical Vulnerabilities Reported in 2006. Surprisingly nearly all critical vulnerabilities reported during 2006 were caused by just three types of programming errors. You'll learn what they are, how they happen and how to fix them in this briefing. Rohit Dhamankar, editor @RISK, and Senior Engineer, TippingPoint
2. Expert Briefing: New Frontiers of Web Hacking: AJAX Vulnerabilities, Deep SQL Injection, Cross Site Reference Forgery, and More An eye-opening briefing on a series of the newest attacks enabling criminals to compromise web-application (leaders from the application security field)
3. Expert Panel: Application Security and PCI Compliance - What It Means The credit card industry has changed its standards requiring every organization that processes credit cards to upgrade application security, In this expert panel you'll learn what PCI requires and how to meet the requirements.
User Panels: Key questions User Are Asking
4. User Panel: Validating Application Security: Choosing the Right Combination of Tools for Your Application Security Tool Box? Can application firewalls replace application scanners? Do application scanners do a better job that source code analyzers. How bad are the false positives? In this panel users of experienced users of the various tools will share their experiences and try to reach consensus on the right tools for an application security toolbox.
5. User Panel: Essential of a comprehensive application security program? Some organizations start their application security initiative without a comprehensive picture of the elements they will be putting in place as part of that program. This panel of very experienced users illuminates the elements you may have missed in your planning and explains why they matter.
6. User Panel: Justifying, planning, launching and organizing an application security program This panel will address questions such as: What are the costs of an application security program and how are the benefits best presented to management? Who should be in charge and what are the first steps to get a program solidly on track?
7. User Panel: Promising Practices in Building the Partnership Between Security Staff and the Developers (building into SDLC, when to use code reviews) In this panel users focus squarely on the ultimate goal - moving beyond application testing by the security group to get the programmers to embrace the tools or at least to get them to fix the problems willingly and quickly. This panel also looks at where application security best fits in the SDLC.
8. User Panel: Training and testing our application developers and testers Are the courses being offered by web security experts actually working? How do you know? In this panel users and experts will discuss the various training alternatives open to application developers and review the new international certification examinations that were launched this summer to measure application security skills in each major programming language.
9. User Panel: Innovative uses of procurement to improve application security Innovative CIOs have discovered that the most powerful weapon in the application security arsenal is the language the use in their procurements. In fact they have discovered that when they don't include explicit application security requirements in their procurement documents and contracts, the cost of better security rises exponentially. This panel will review ways to use procurement language effectively.
10. User Panel: Trust but Verify: Managing application security when applications development projects are outsourced Expanding on the procurement panel topics, this panel explores the unique character of outsourced development and looks at what special programs help ensure outsourced application development meet high security standards.
Vendor panels
11. Vendor Panel: Implementation lessons learned. When uses deploy application security tools, they often make mistakes that lessen the value of the tools. In this panel technical experts from application security tool vendors share the most common mistakes and tell how to avoid them.
12. Vendor Panel: Tools shootout A great chance to pick the application security vendors you'll want on your short list of products to consider.
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