Another bad week, but not as bad as last week. The critical vulnerabilities this week are in the Blackberry Attachment Service (anyone use that?) and in Oracle and Novell eDiscovery and the Linux Kernel.
The LINUX problem, in particular, illustrates one of the untold stories (at least in the press) of security. More than 370 versions of LINUX are vulnerable. Many are embedded in appliances (like security appliances?) and software tools where the user probably has no idea even what version of LINUX they are running. When vendors or open source groups announce a patch, saying they have "fixed the problem," the public is misled. Nothing is "fixed" until the patch is successfully installed. Most vendors and developers take no responsibility for ensuring their customers even know about the patches - much less install them. As politicians learn of the misperception (deception?), I expect to see a movement toward updating breach disclosure laws to require disclosure when ISP or web site or other application errors cause customers' computers to be infected enabling personal data (and money) to be lost. This will also affect all medium and large organizations that are ISPs for their employees or that have web sites available to customers or citizens.
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: Oracle has released its Critical Patch Update for July of 2008. This update addresses numerous vulnerabilities in several Oracle products. These impact of these vulnerabilities ranges from remote code execution with the privileges of the vulnerable process to SQL injection, information disclosure, and denials-of-service. Some of these vulnerabilities are exploitable without authentication. Additionally, technical details are publicly available for several of these vulnerabilities.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: The Linux kernel is the core component of the various Linux-based operating system distributions. It contains a flaw in its decoding of Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN.1) data that has been encoded using the Basic Encoding Rules (BER). ASN.1 is used by a variety of protocols and requests processed by the Linux kernel. A specially crafted request using one of these protocols could trigger a buffer overflow in the kernel. Successfully exploiting this buffer overflow would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. Technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available via source code analysis.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: eDirectory is Novell's implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). The server contains a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in its processing of user search requests. A specially crafted search request could trigger this vulnerability, allowing an attacker to corrupt system memory. It is believed that this vulnerability could lead to remote code execution with the privileges of the vulnerable process (often root), but exploitation is considered difficult. Technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available. Note that this vulnerability is distinct from the one discussed in last week's edition of @RISK.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: The Research In Motion BlackBerry is a popular mobile telephone and messaging device. It provides enterprise connectivity by running server software that integrates with an enterprise's messaging infrastructure. This server software preprocesses some document types to make them more easily viewable on a mobile device. The server software contains a flaw in its processing of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. A specially crafted PDF could trigger this flaw, resulting in arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Note that a user must first open the PDF on a BlackBerry mobile device for exploitation to occur. Some technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: Vendor confirmed, no updates available.
Description: Mozilla Firefox, when running on Apple Mac OS X, contains a flaw in its handling of Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images. A specially crafted GIF image could trigger this flaw, leading to memory corruption. Successfully exploiting this flaw would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that GIF images are usually rendered automatically upon receipt. Full technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available via source code analysis. Note that only Mozilla Firefox on Apple Mac OS X is affected.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: The embedded operating system running Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch contains multiple vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities range from remote code execution to the spoofing of websites. Successfully exploiting one of the remote code execution vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to take complete control of the affected device. Some technical details are publicly available for these vulnerabilities.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Mozilla Firefox fails to properly handle URIs passed to it upon invocation. If another application causes Firefox to launch, and this application passes a specially crafted URI to Firefox via its command line, an attacker could trigger this vulnerability. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow an attacker to spoof or inject URIs into multiple tabs in the newly created Firefox session. If this vulnerability is used to exploit an additional vulnerability in the validation of error pages in Firefox, an attacker could execute arbitrary script code with the privileges of the current user. Note that Firefox must not be running to be vulnerable. Technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available.
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 5549 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
(c) 2008. 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.
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