Adobe Reader and Firefox, again. Nothing against these products or companies, but there is a lesson here for all of us who pointed fingers at Microsoft. Alan
PS If you have a strong interest in vulnerabilities, the coolest and most useful program in the world of vulnerabilities and exploits is called the Pen Test Summit, June 1-2, Las Vegas. Brings together nearly all the people (outside the DoD) who best know how the new attacks work and gets them sharing the latest news; fascinating; the speakers are so much better at making this information understandable than speakers at other programs. http://www.sans.org/pentesting09_summit
@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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1) "Intel White Paper for Software Developers: Top 5 Security Vulnerabilities and How to Mitigate Them." http://www.sans.org/info/43044
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TRAINING UPDATE - - Toronto 5/5-5/13 (15 courses) http://www.sans.org/toronto09/event.php - - SANSFIRE in Baltimore 6/13-6/20 (24 long courses, 12 short courses) http://www.sans.org/sansfire09/event.php - - New Orleans 5/5-5/10 (6 courses) http://www.sans.org/securityeast09/event.php - -- Plus San Diego, Amsterdam and more, too. See www.sans.org - - Looking for training in your own community? http://sans.org/community/ For a list of all upcoming events, on-line and live: 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: Adobe Acrobat Reader is Adobe's viewer for the Portable Document Format (PDF). It is the de facto standard PDF viewer for many platforms. It contains a flaw in its handling of JavaScript scripts embedded in PDF documents. A specially crafted document containing a malicious script could exploit this vulnerability, and leverage it to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. PDF documents are often opened upon receipt without first prompting the user. A proof-of-concept for this vulnerability is publicly available and it is believed that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild.
Status: Vendor confirmed, no updates available. Users are advised to disable JavaScript processing in PDF documents, if possible.
Description: Mozilla Firefox contains a flaw in its handling of certain web document constructs. A specially crafted page could trigger this flaw, leading to memory corruption. This memory corruption could be leveraged by an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that this flaw was introduced by the Firefox update released last week, discussed in that week's edition of @RISK. Full technical details for this vulnerability are publicly available via source code analysis.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM) is a popular enterprise network and system management application. It contains a flaw in its 'ovalarmsrv.exe' component. A specially crafted request to this component could trigger this flaw, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process. Some technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available. Users are advised to block TCP port 2954.
Description: Sun's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is Sun's reference JVM implementation, used to execute compiled Java code. It contains a flaw in its handling of certain constructs. A specially crafted Java applet or application coudl trigger this flaw, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Sun's JVM is installed by default on all Apple Mac OS X systems and various Unix and Linux based operating systems, as well as a large number of Microsoft Windows systems. Few technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability, but it is confirmed, that this vulnerability can be exploited via a web browser.
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) 2009. 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.
Subscriptions: @RISK is distributed free of charge by the SANS Institute to people responsible for managing and securing information systems and networks. You may forward this newsletter to others with such responsibility inside or outside your organization.