The "big one" this week just happened a few hours ago when Microsoft announced an extra patch was coming out early to fix an RPC problem that is in XP and Vista (and other MS operating systems), meaning in tens of millions of systems. Kudos to Microsoft for acting quickly. The defenders need to act just as quickly.
In addition, many commercial email systems are at risk because they use libspf2 versions prior to 1.2.8. And the third critical vulnerability affects multiple security products from F-Secure. 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 - - SANS CDI in Washington 30 courses; big security tools expo; lots of evening sessions: http://www.sans.org/ cdi08/ - - Monterey (10/31-11/6) http://www.sans.org/ info/30738 - - Sydney Australia (10/27-11/1) http://www.sans.org/ sydney08/ - - Vancouver (11/17-11/22) http://www.sans.org/ vancouver08/ 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: Microsoft has provided advanced notification of a vulnerability in a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service. The vulnerability was deemed severe enough to warrant an out-of-cycle security update from Microsoft. The exact details of the vulnerability have yet to be released, but are expected to be released sometime on October 23rd, with a question-and-answer session via webcast. The vulnerability allows for unauthenticated users to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems. Microsoft believes that the vulnerability could be exploited in such a way as to provide creation of a worm.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: SPF is the Sender Policy Framework (formerly "Sender Permitted From"). SPF is a mechanism to help prevent unauthorized or undesired email messages ("spam") by indicating from what servers a domain can send email. Receiving mail servers can check SPF records exported via DNS records to determine if a server sending email from a domain is legitimately doing so. LibSPF2 is a popular implementation of the SPF protocol and is used by a variety of mail and DNS products. It contains a buffer overflow in its processing of SPF records exported from DNS. A specially crafted SPF record could trigger this vulnerability. In most common scenarios, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability by simply sending an email message to a sever known to check SPF records.; therefore no user interaction is required. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process, often a high-privilege account. Full technical details and a proof-of-concept are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: The RPM Package Manager (formerly the Red Hat Package Manager, commonly "RPM") is a package manager used by a number of Linux- and Unix-based operating systems. Its packages are distributed in files referred to as "RPMs". A number of F-Secure malware scanning products contain an integer overflow when processing RPM packages. A specially crafted RPM package could trigger this overflow, leading to arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the vulnerable process. In situations where the vulnerable product is used to scan email messages, it is sufficient to have an email message transiting the server to trigger the vulnerability; no user interaction is necessary. Some technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability. Additionally, the RPM file format is open and well documented, making it amenable to fuzzing.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Trend Micro OfficeScan is a popular enterprise malware scanning application. It provides administrative and other facilities via a web interface, using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Some of the web interface CGI programs contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities in their handling of HTTP requests. A specially crafted request to the web interface could trigger one of these buffer overflows, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Some technical details are publicly available for these vulnerabilities.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Hummingbird Host Explorer is a popular terminal access solution for remote systems, and the Hummingbird Deployment Wizard is a product used to deploy other Hummingbird products. Both products provide some of their functionality via ActiveX controls. These controls contain various vulnerabilities, including buffer overflow and input validation vulnerabilities. A specially crafted web page that instantiated one of these controls could trigger one of these vulnerabilities, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Technical details are publicly available for these vulnerabilities. A proof-of-concept is also publicly available.
Status: No confirmed updates available. Users can disable the affected controls via Microsoft's "kill bit' mechanism. Note that this will affect normal application functionality.
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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