All four of the most critical vulnerabilities this week are associated with security products (the fifth is in FireFox). No surprise here; most security products were written when attacks focused on vulnerabilities in system software. Today, however, more attacks focus on applications - especially security applications that run with high privileges. Secure programming skills are now far more valuable than programming skills alone. Sadly colleges and universities have continued to graduate computer scientists and computer engineers and programmers without ever teaching them secure coding techniques in any required courses. Buyers have no way to know whether suppliers of software have a clue about secure coding techniques. When the National Secure Coding Exam is released this summer, organizations that buy software may want to ask their vendors and consultants how well their programmers did on the exam. They may be ashamed to report bad scores, and that could lead to sharply improved security skills.
Alan
P.S. Cisco's IP phone also has a lot of vulnerabilities.
P.P.S. SANS 2007 (San Diego at the end of March) early registration discount deadline is this Wednesday, Feb. 28. www.sans.org/sans2007/
@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: Snort, a popular open source intrusion detection and prevention system, contains a buffer overflow in its handling of the DCE-RPC protocol. Microsoft RPC protocol, based on the DCE-RPC reference, is decoded by Snort to detect numerous attacks targeting RPC vulnerabilities. A sequence of specially-crafted DCE-RPC requests could trigger this buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the Snort process, often root. Since Snort's DCE-RPC preprocessor is enabled by default, attackers can easily send malicious traffic on a network segment monitored by Snort to exploit this flaw. The technical details can be obtained via source code analysis.
Status: Snort confirmed, updates available.
Description: Trend Micro ServerProtect, an anti-virus product designed for file-servers and web-servers, contains multiple vulnerabilities: [a] ServerProtect runs an RPC service, which can be accessed without authentication, on the TCP port 5168. A specially-crafted request to this service can trigger buffer overflows in the "StCommon.DLL" or "eng50.dll" libraries. Successfully exploiting these overflows allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code with "SYSTEM" privileges. Comprehensive technical details for these vulnerabilities are publicly available. [b] ServerProtect's web configuration interface contains an authentication-bypass vulnerability. An easily-determined session identifier can be sent to the server to spoof an authenticated session. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability can allow an attacker to reconfigure or disable the anti-virus checks.
Status: Trend Micro confirmed, updates available. A workaround is to block the port tcp/5168 at the network perimeter to prevent attacks from the Internet.
Description: SupportSoft provides "support automation" software to resolve end-user technical issues and is used by a number of vendors including Symantec. The software uses SmartIssue, RemoteAssist, and Probe ActiveX controls that contain stack-based buffer overflow and unauthorized access vulnerabilities. A malicious webpage can exploit these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code on a client system with the privileges of the logged-on user. The technical details regarding the vulnerabilities have not been publicly posted.
Status: SupportSoft has released an update for its software versions 5.6 and 6.x. These ActiveX controls are included in Symantec's Symantec Automated Support Assistant, Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2006, Symantec Norton Internet Security 2006 and Symantec Norton System Works 2006. Symantec disabled the vulnerable controls in its installed product base via LiveUpdate in November 2006. Symantec has also released software updates for its affected products.
Description: The Configuration Checker ActiveX control, VSCndChk.dll, is included in VeriSign's Managed PKI Client Local Hosting and Remote Hosting kits.. This ActiveX control contains a stack-based buffer overflow that can be triggered by passing a parameter (over 28 bytes) to the control's VerCompare() method. A malicious webpage can exploit this overflow to execute arbitrary code on the client system with the privileges of the logged-on user.
Status: VeriSign has updated the ActiveX control to fix this flaw.
Description: Mozilla released a security update for Firefox browser last week. This update fixes 8 security issues with 2 issues rated critical and 1 issue rated high by the Mozilla team. The memory corruption vulnerability, addressed by this patch, involving the "onUnload" Javascript event handler can be potentially exploited to execute arbitrary code. The patch also fixes a vulnerability that can allow malicious webpages to alter cookies for other domains.
Status: Firefox version 2.0.0.2 and 1.5.0.10, containing the patches, have been released. Some of the vulnerabilities also affect Thunderbird and SeaMonkey software. Thunderbird version 1.5.0.10 and SeaMonkey version 1.0.8, when released, will address those vulnerabilities.
Description: ClamAV (or Clam Anti-Virus) is a popular open source antivirus software. It contains two vulnerabilities:
Status: ClamAV confirmed, updates available. Ensure that the ClamAV process does not run with "root" privileges. This will prevent the vulnerability being exploited to overwrite system files.
Description: S&S Computer System News Rover, a popular Usenet news reader, contains a buffer overflow vulnerability in the processing of NZB files (used to store Usenet posts). A specially-crafted NZB file could exploit this buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Depending on configuration, NZB files may be opened by default by the vulnerable application.
Status: S&H has not confirmed, no updates available.
Description: Quiksoft EasyMail contains several ActiveX components that provide various email-related functions. The IMAP4 component contains a buffer overflow in the "hostname" parameter of its "Connect" method. A web page that instantiates this component could trigger a buffer overflow by passing an overlong argument to this method, and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user.
Status: Quiksoft confirmed, updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the vulnerable control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism for CLSID "703B353E-FA2E-4072-8DDF-F70AAC7E527E".
Description: Cisco's Unified IP Phone and Conference Station products contain multiple vulnerabilities:
Status: Cisco confirmed, updates available.
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