Microsoft's monthly vulnerability announcement included two that demand immediate action, one in Microsoft Word and one in Microsoft Jet Engine. 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: Microsoft Word contains several vulnerabilities in its handling of Rich Text Format (RTF) and Microsoft Word documents. A specially crafted RTF or Word document could trigger one of these vulnerabilities, leading to a memory corruption condition. Successfully exploiting this flaw would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that on recent versions of Microsoft Word, documents are not opened upon receipt without first prompting the user. Some technical information is publicly available for these vulnerabilities.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Description: The Microsoft Jet Engine is a database engine used by a variety of Microsoft applications. This engine is included by default in some versions of Microsoft Windows. The engine contains a stack-based buffer overflow in its handling of "MDB" database files. A specially crafted MDB file could trigger this buffer overflow, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that MDB files by default are considered an "unsafe" file type by Microsoft applications and will not be opened without first prompting the user. A new attack vector has been discovered, however, that is capable of bypassing this restriction. It is believed that this advisory or its exploitation vector is related to an issue discussed in a previous edition of @RISK. If this is the case, then full technical details and a proof-of-concept are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Description: Microsoft Publisher contains a flaw in its handling of Publisher files. A specially crafted Publisher file could lead to a memory corruption condition within Publisher. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that on recent versions of Microsoft Word, documents are not opened upon receipt without first prompting the user. Some technical information is publicly available for these vulnerabilities.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Description: Windows CE is Microsoft's version of its Windows operating system for consumer and embedded electronics. It is a popular operating system for smartphones and other devices. Windows CE contains several flaws in its handling of JPEG and GIF image files. A specially crafted image file loaded by a Windows CE application could trigger one of these flaws. Successfully exploiting one of these vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. On most commons hardware platforms, successful exploitation would allow complete control of the vulnerable device. These flaws would affect any application that uses the operating system routines to parse images, included email and web browser applications.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Description: OpenSSL is an open source cryptography library that provides a variety of cryptographic services, as well as an implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. It is used by numerous applications, including Mozilla Firefox and OpenSSH. OpenSSL is included by most Linux distributions, including the Debian Linux distribution. The Debian project patched OpenSSL for their distribution and this patch introduced a weakness in the random number generation algorithm for secure keys. These keys are used for authentication in a variety of situations, most notably by the SSH server included in the operating system. These keys are, due to this flaw, easily guessable. Successfully guessing the key would allow an attacker to eavesdrop on encrypted sessions and potentially bypass authentication altogether. A public proof-of-concept is available that can enumerate through the entire keyspace very rapidly. Full technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability. Note that other Linux distributions based on Debian (such as Ubuntu) are likely vulnerable.
Status: Debian confirmed, updates available. Users of Debian-derived distributions are advised to check with their vendor for updates.
Description: The Microsoft Malware Protection Engine is an anti-malware and antivirus engine used by a variety of Microsoft products. It contains multiple denial-of-service vulnerabilities. A specially crafted file, when analyzed by the engine, could trigger one of these vulnerabilities. Successfully exploiting one of these vulnerabilities could cause the malware protection engine to restart, or cause the system to become slow or unresponsive. Note that on email systems, a specially crafted email message transiting the server is sufficient for exploitation. Additionally, depending upon configuration, receipt of a malicious file is sufficient for exploitation.
Status: Microsoft confirmed, updates available.
Description: IDAutomation provides a variety of barcode related tools an technologies, including several ActiveX controls used for barcode production and analysis. Several of these controls contain arbitrary file overwrite vulnerabilities. A malicious web page that instantiated one of these controls could trigger one of these vulnerabilities. Successfully exploiting one of these vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files with the privileges of the current user. These vulnerabilities could be leveraged to execute arbitrary code. Full technical details and a proof-of-concept are publicly available.
Status: IDAutomation has not confirmed, no updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of these vulnerabilities by disabling the affected controls via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism for CLSIDs "0C3874AA-AB39-4B5E-A768-45F3CE6C6819", "DB67DB99-616A-4CAB-A3A1-2EF644F254E7", "E97EE6EB-7FBE-43B1-B6D8-C4D86C78C5A0" and "eba15b30-80b4-11dc-b31d-0050c2490048".
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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