A small number of critical problems, but affecting a whole lot of computers and people: Both Macs and Windows computers are at risk from the multiple critical QuickTime vulnerabilities. And a large portion of the corporate and government and university world is at risk from the HP OpenView buffer overflows. If that's not enough work for one week, Internet Storm Center is also seeing (though not reported below) a big upsurge in attacks using malicious PDFs that are effective and damaging where people have not patched Adobe Reader.
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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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: QuickTime is Apple's streaming media framework for Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It contains multiple flaws in its handling of streaming media content. A specially crafted movie file could trigger one of these flaws and potentially exploit a variety of vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities range in severity from arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user to denial-of-service and information disclosure. Some technical details are available for some of these vulnerabilities.
Status: Apple confirmed, updates available.
Description: Network Node Manager is the system monitoring component of the HP OpenView suite of applications. It contains a buffer overflow vulnerability in its 'ovas.exe' component. A specially crafted request to this component could trigger this buffer overflow, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process (often SYSTEM). Full technical details and a proof-of-concept are publicly available for this vulnerability. It is not currently known if OpenView for platforms other than Microsoft Windows is vulnerable.
Status: HP has not confirmed, no updates available.
Description: Macrovision InstallShield provides a web-based "one-click" install system. This functionality is provided by an ActiveX control. This control fails to properly validate its input, allowing users to load arbitrary libraries and execute arbitrary code. A malicious web page that instantiated this control could trigger this vulnerability and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
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 "53D40FAA-4E21-459f-AA87-E4D97FC3245A".
Description: Opera is a popular cross-platform web browser. It contains memory corruption vulnerabilities in its handling of newsfeeds and the HTML "CANVAS" tag. A specially crafted web page or newsfeed could trigger one of these vulnerabilities. Successfully exploiting one of these vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Few technical details are publicly available for these vulnerabilities.
Status: Opera 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 5549 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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