The critical problems this week are all web-related: Firefox & Thunderbird, Sun Java Web Start, and Oracle WebLogic (formerly BEA WebLogic) Apache Connector.
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 - - Las Vegas (9/28-10/6) http://www.sans.org/ns2008 NETWORK SECURITY 2008 - - Boston (8/9-8/16) http://www.sans.org/boston08/ - - Virginia Beach (8/21-8/29): http://www.sans.org/vabeach08/ - - Chicago (9/3-9/10) http://www.sans.org/chicago08 AUDIT & COMPLIANCE - - and in 100 other cites and on line any time: www.sans.org
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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: Products based on the Mozilla codebase, including the popular Firefox web browser, contain a memory corruption vulnerability. A specially crafted web page containing a script that manipulates CSS objects could trigger this vulnerability. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Full technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability via various advisories and through source code analysis. Note that Thunderbird is not believed to be vulnerable in its default configuration.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Java Web Start is a technology using Sun's Java Runtime Environment to automatically launch applications distributed via the web. It contains multiple vulnerabilities in its handling of these applications. A specially crafted Java applet using Java Web Start could trigger one of these vulnerabilities, leading to arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user, or modify arbitrary files with the privileges of the current user. Depending upon configuration, Java Web Start applets may be launched upon receipt. Java Web Start is installed by default on all Apple Mac OS X systems, as well as many Unix, Unix-like, and Linux-based operating systems, and a large number of Microsoft Windows systems. Some technical details are publicly available for these vulnerabilities.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Oracle WebLogic (formerly BEA WebLogic) contains a buffer overflow in its "mod_wl" Apache module. An overlong HTTP POST request to a sever using this module could trigger this buffer overflow, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Full technical details and a proof-of-concept exploit are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: Vendor has not confirmed, no updates available.
Description: The DNS flaw discussed in a previous edition of @RISK has had its technical details disclosed and several working exploits published. The full details of the exploit were originally going to be initially disclosed at the Black Hat information security conference, but were released early. Several exploits have been published, including at least two for the popular Metasploit exploit framework. An attacker who used one of these exploits could poison a target DNS server's cache, allowing the attacker to return falsified responses to users' queries. This could result in an attacker redirecting users to malicious hosts for further exploitation, or for an attacker to steal sensitive information.
Status: Vendors confirmed, updates available. Users are urged to apply updates and patches as quickly as possible.
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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