IBM Tivoli is used by many of the largest organizations in the world to deploy software and manage systems. A remotely exploitable buffer overflow in the operating system distribution component of Tivoli is a big problem, and that's what we have this week, along with a similar problem in an open source groupware and messaging product called Citadel.
Sadly many organizations won't patch these problems quickly. That's not because they are careless, but because software vendors make patching risky. The risk arises because software vendors don't test their software on securely configured systems and because they change standard configurations to non-standard configurations. The federal government is leading by example with its FDCC (federal desktop core configuration) and the requirement that all software vendors certify their software runs well on the FDCC. The lead agency (USAF) has already cut patching time from 51 days to 72 hours because of FDCC compliance across 400,000 computers. If you buy any software in 2008, make sure your vendor certifies, in advance of signing the contract that the software runs on the FDCC configuration. The federal government's OMB mandate for certification is linked at the FDCC site at http://fdcc.nist.gov/. Please follow through on this. If you don't hold the line, your country and your leading businesses will never be able to speed patching of their important systems. 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: Citadel is a popular open source groupware and messaging platform. Its Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) server component, used to send and receive email messages, contains a buffer overflow in its handling of recipient email addresses. An overlong email address passed to the recipient command could trigger this buffer overflow, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Note that, by default, no authentication is necessary to exploit this vulnerability. A proof-of-concept and full technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: Citadel confirmed, updates available.
Description: IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment is an enterprise operating system deployment suite, used to install operating systems on other machines. It contains a flaw in its handling of HTTP requests to its internal web server. A specially crafted request could exploit a buffer overflow within the affected component, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process (usually SYSTEM). Some technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: IBM confirmed, updates available.
Description: The Firebird database server is a popular relational database system. It contains a buffer overflow in its handling of usernames passed in login requests. An overlong username could trigger this buffer overflow. Successfully exploiting this vulnerability would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Full technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability via source code analysis.
Status: Firebird confirmed, updates available.
Description: HP Virtual Rooms is a conferencing and telepresence solution from HP. Users can install the client via an ActiveX control. This control contains a buffer overflow in its handling of several properties. Setting one of these properties to an overlong value could trigger this buffer overflow. A web page that instantiates this control could exploit this buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Some technical details and a proof-of-concept for this vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: HP has not confirmed, no updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the vulnerable control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism using CLSID "00000014-9593-4264-8B29-930B3E4EDCCD". Note that this may impact normal application functionality.
Description: Comodo Antivirus is an antivirus solution for Microsoft Windows. Part of its functionality is provided by an ActiveX control. This control fails to validate the arguments to its ""ExecuteStr()" method. A malicious web page that instantiated this control could call this vulnerable method to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the current user. A proof-of-concept and full technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: Comodo has not confirmed, no updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the affected control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism using CLSID "309F674D-E4D3-46BD-B9E2-ED7DFD7FD176".
Description: The Lycos File Upload ActiveX is provided by Lycos to ease file uploads to Lycos services. This control contains a flaw in its handling of its "HandwriterFilename" property. Setting this property to an overlong value could trigger a buffer overflow vulnerability. A specially crafted web page that instantiates this control could trigger this buffer overflow, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Full technical details and a proof-of-concept are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: Lycos has not confirmed, no updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the affected control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism using CLSID "C36112BF-2FA3-4694-8603-3B510EA3B465". Note that this may 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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