One of the oldest vulnerable services, telnet, is newly vulnerable on Solaris (#1). A working exploit is available, but Sun has not even confirmed the vulnerability nor provided a patch. Security vendor Trend Micro's antivirus system is now a back door into systems on which it is deployed (#2)
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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TRAINING UPDATE: Why Attend SANS 2007 in San Diego? Ask past SANS attendees:
1) "This training provided the opportunity to learn from many of the people who are defining the future direction of information technology" (Larry Anderson, Computer Sciences Corp.)
2 )"The SANS classes have been uniformly excellent. To learn as much through traditional classes would have entailed weeks away from work." (David Ritch, Department of Defense)
3) "The best aspect of SANS is that it is tailored each year to what I, as an administrator, need to learn. SANS does an excellent job of keeping pace with current technologies, issues and trends." (John Mechalas, Intel)
4) "Fantastic! Tons of information! My brain is now Jello - I'll be back next year." (Kurt Danielson, National Marrow Donor Program) SANS2007: http://www.sans.org/sans2007/index.php More venues (100 cities) http://www.sans.org/index.php
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1) The SANS Encryption Summit, April 23-25, provides concrete, actionable information you can deploy as soon as you return to work. http://www.sans.org/info/3366
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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: Sun SunOS (the Unix-derived core of the Solaris Operating System) contains an authentication-bypass vulnerability in its telnet daemon. By passing a username beginning with "-f" to the server via the "-l" switch on the telnet client, an attacker can cause the server to ignore other authentication credentials and allow the attacker to log in as any user, including root. Depending on operating system revision, telnet may be enabled by default. Users are advised to disable telnet if possible, and to switch to a more secure remote-access protocol, such as SSH. Technical details and a working exploit are publicly available for this vulnerability. This vulnerability is similar to one discovered for other UNIX-derived and UNIX-like operating systems in 1994.
Status: Sun has not confirmed, no updates available.
Description: Trend Micro Antivirus, a popular antivirus solution, contains a buffer overflow vulnerability when parsing executables compressed with the UPX executable compression program. A specially-crafted executable could trigger this buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM/root privileges, allowing complete control of the vulnerable system. Note that the malicious file can be sent to a vulnerable system via email (spam messages), web, FTP, Instant Messaging or Peer-to-Peer file sharing. UPX file format vulnerabilities have been widely-reported in the past, and UPX file fuzzers are commonly available.
Status: Trend Micro 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 council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
Description: Samba, an open source implementation of the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) or Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS) protocol, contains multiple vulnerabilities: 1) Samba provides a "winbind" module that is loadable by the Name Service Switch facility on several UNIX and UNIX-like systems. This module allows nameservice lookups via the WINS protocol. On Sun Solaris systems configured to use this module, a specially-crafted request can trigger a stack-based buffer overflow to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. 2) Samba contains a format string vulnerability that can be triggered while serving Andrew File System (AFS) directories via CIFS. If the "afsacl.so" module is loaded on a vulnerable system, a user with write privileges could exploit this format string to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the Samba process. Both the vulnerable configurations are rare, and are not the default configuration. Note that, because Samba is open source, technical details for these vulnerabilities are available via source code analysis.
Status: Samba confirmed, updates available.
Council Site Actions: Two of the reporting council sites are using the affected software. Both sites plan to update their systems during their next regularly scheduled system maintenance period. One of the sites commented that even though they are not using the vulnerable features right now, they can't say that they will not be used in the future. Thus, they feel the best practice is to install the patches now.
Description: IBM AIX, IBM's UNIX-based operating system, contains an unspecified buffer overflow vulnerability in its remote-access commands. Currently, only the "rdist" command (used to distribute files among multiple systems) is confirmed vulnerable, but other remote access commands (such as "rsh") may also be vulnerable. A specially-crafted request could trigger this buffer overflow and allow an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. Note that traditional ".rhosts" authentication is believed to be sufficient; this authentication method is generally regarded as easy to bypass. No details are available on the exact nature of this vulnerability.
Status: IBM 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 council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
Description: The Alipay Password Input ActiveX control is an ActiveX component used for securely entering passwords and other authentication information. It is widely deployed throughout Asia, and is (according to the vendor's website) the leading online payment service in China. This ActiveX control contains a buffer overflow vulnerability. A specially-crafted web page could instantiate this control and exploit this vulnerability, leading to arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user. Technical details and a proof-of-concept for this vulnerability are publicly available. Additionally, reusable exploit code targeting arbitrary ActiveX controls is widely available.
Status: Vendor has not confirmed, no updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling this control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism for GUID "66F50F46-70A0-4A05-BD5E-FBCC0F9641EC". Note that this may impact normal usability of websites that depend on the affected control.
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 council sites. They reported that no action was necessary.
Description: Mercury LoadRunner, a popular solution for application performance and load testing, contains a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability. A specially-crafted request with an overlong "server_ip_name" could exploit this vulnerability, and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the LoadRunner process. Users are advised to block access to TCP port 54345 at the network perimeter, if possible. Technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: HP 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 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 5362 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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