Happy New Year
As 2008 begins, security professionals are facing an unprecedented escalation of targeted attacks that are penetrating the defenses causing enormous damage. Antivirus tools are more and more impotent; firewalls are being bypassed. A much higher level of skill is needed. During 2008 SANS will try to help by radically improving training in key areas from secure coding to penetration testing to searching for the enemy within." We hope you will join with us in raising the standards of excellence in information security and we wish all of you a healthy and happy new year.
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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Where can you find Hacker Exploits, Secure Web Application Development, Security Essentials, Forensics, Wireless, Auditing, CISSP Prep, and SANS' other top-rated courses? - - New Orleans (1/12-1/17): http://www.sans.org/security08/event.php - - San Jose (2/2 - 2/8): http://www.sans.org/siliconvalley08/event.php - - Phoenix (2/11 - 2/18) http://www.sans.org/phoenix08/event.php - - Prague (2/18-2/23): http://www.sans.org/prague08 - - and in 100 other cites and on line any-time: www.sans.org
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1) Insider threat research report shows CEO's in denial. Download the report now from ArcSight. http://www.sans.org/info/21463
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Part I for this issue has been compiled by Rob King 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 AOL Picture Editor is an image editing application by AOL. Some of its functionality is provided by an ActiveX control, known as "YGPPicEdit". This control contains several methods vulnerable to buffer overflows. A specially crafted web page that instantiated this control could exploit one of these vulnerabilities, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Full technical details and a proof-of-concept for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: AOL has not confirmed, no updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the affected control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism, using CLSID "085891E5-ED86-425F-8522-C10290FA8309". Note that this may impact normal functionality.
Description: The Persits Software XUpload ActiveX control is an ActiveX control to simplify uploading of files to remote servers. It contains a buffer overflow in its "AddFolder()" method. A specially crafted web page that instantiates this control could trigger this buffer overflow, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Full technical details and a proof-of-concept for this vulnerability are publicly available. This control is used in other software, including HP's LoadRunner load testing suite.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the affected control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism using CLSID "E87F6C8E-16C0-11D3-BEF7-009027438003". Note that this may affect normal application functionality.
Description: The Video LAN Client (also known as VLC or the VLC media player) is an open source, cross-platform media player. It contains multiple vulnerabilities in the parsing of subtitle information and a flaw in its web interface. A specially crafted media file containing subtitle information could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that, depending upon configuration, malicious files may be opened automatically by the application without first prompting the user. Additionally, a flaw exists in VLC's web interface. By sending a specially crafted request to the web interface, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the web interface process. Note that the web interface is disabled by default. Full technical details and proofs-of-concept for these vulnerabilities are publicly available.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Winace is a popular archiving solution for Microsoft Windows. It contains a flaw in its handling of uuencoded files. Uuencoding is a plain text encoding format used to send binary files across media that may not support binary transmission (such as email). A specially crafted uuencoded file could trigger a buffer overflow vulnerability in Winace, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that, depending upon configuration, uuencoded files may be opened by Winace automatically without first prompting the user.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
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 5694 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.
Subscriptions: @RISK is distributed free of charge by the SANS Institute to people responsible for managing and securing information systems and networks. You may forward this newsletter to others with such responsibility inside or outside your organization.