Java 7u5 and 6u33 released

Published: 2012-06-12
Last Updated: 2012-06-12 21:21:27 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 3)
4 comment(s)

Toby reminded us that Oracle is releasing Java 7 update 5 and Java 6 update 33 today.

Updated after Oracle released the vulnerability details.

Unfortunately it's all still made to be useless to determine what the problems are with the software and perform your own risk assessments.

Just note there are CVSS scores of 10 in there, and in the past months we saw what slacking on patching Java can do (Ref: the recent Apple Mac OS X malware), so just patch this on a rather urgent time schedule due to lack of detailed descriptions.

Update:

My words above were barely written or I got the notification of Apple that they are releasing Java for OS X 2012-004 and Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 9 today as well. This brings them in line with the updates to 1.6.0_33 above as well as implementing the deactivation of the Java browser plugin and Java Web Start if they remain unused for 35 days to Snow Leopard and deactivating the Java browser plugin and Java Web Start if they do not meet the criteria for minimum safe versions (on Both Lion and Snow Leopard.

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

Keywords: java Patch Tuesday
4 comment(s)

Microsoft Security Advisory 2719615 - MSXML - CVE-2012-1889

Published: 2012-06-12
Last Updated: 2012-06-12 19:30:57 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
10 comment(s)

Several readers mentioned that Microsoft today issued a Security advisory regarding Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML). This is in response to active exploitation.

The issues affects Office 2003 and 2007 on all versions of windows. All a user has to do to fall victim is visit the wrong website using IE. 

Microsoft has issued a fixit for it in the form of an msi file (see the KB 2719615 link below)

Alternative strategies would be to use browsers that do not support ActiveX, or disable the support in IE.

Links:

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

Keywords: microsoft MSFT
10 comment(s)

Microsoft June 2012 Black Tuesday Update - Overview

Published: 2012-06-12
Last Updated: 2012-06-12 18:42:28 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
5 comment(s)

Overview of the June 2012 Microsoft patches and their status.

# Affected Contra Indications - KB Known Exploits Microsoft rating(**) ISC rating(*)
clients servers
MS12â??036 RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) allows random code execution due to input validation issues. Also affects Small Business Server 2003 (called "Remote Web Workplace"). Having exposure to the RDP port with a vulnerable version on e.g. your web server will put you at great risk.
Remote Desktop

CVEâ??2012â??0173
KB 2685939 No publicly known exploits. Severity:Critical
Exploitability:1
Important Critical
MS12â??037 The usual MSIE cumulative patch fixing a multitude of security vulenrabilities, you want this one!
Note: this bulletin shares a CVE-2012-1858 with MS12-039 (both Internet Explorer and Lync suffer from the same)
Replaces MS12-023.
MSIE

CVEâ??2012â??1523
CVEâ??2012â??1858
CVEâ??2012â??1873
CVEâ??2012â??1874
CVEâ??2012â??1875
CVEâ??2012â??1876
CVEâ??2012â??1877
CVEâ??2012â??1878
CVEâ??2012â??1879
CVEâ??2012â??1880
CVEâ??2012â??1881
KB 2699988 CVE-2012-1875 has active exploits against it according to the bulletin. Severity:Critical
Exploitability:1
PATCH NOW Important
MS12â??038 An vulnerability in .NET framework allows random code execution with the rights of the logged on user. This not only affects users browsing websites but also servers running .NET applications as they could bypass Code Access Security (CAS) restrictions.
.NET

CVEâ??2012â??1855
KB 2706726 No publicly known exploits Severity:Critical
Exploitability:1
Critical Critical
MS12â??039 Multiple vulnerabilities in Lync allow for random code execution and information leaks.
CVE-2012-3402 is also affecting other Microsoft software (true-type font parsing).
CVE-2012-1858 is also affecting MSIE (HTML sanitation issue).
CVE-2012-1849 is related to the loading of libraries problems affecting many Microsoft products, first described in SA 2269637.
Lync

CVEâ??2012â??3402
CVEâ??2012â??0159
CVEâ??2012â??1849
CVEâ??2012â??1858
KB 2707956
No publicly known exploits, but most vulnerabilities are quite well known due to exposure in other Microsoft products Severity:Important
Exploitability:1
Critical Important
MS12â??040 A XSS vulnerability in Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal.
Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise portal

CVEâ??2012â??1857
KB 2709100
No publicly known exploits Severity:Important
Exploitability:1
N/A Important
MS12â??041 Multiple vulnerabilities in the windows kernel mode drivers allow escalation of privileges.
Replaces MS12-018.
Windows kernel mode drivers

CVEâ??2012â??1864
CVEâ??2012â??1865
CVEâ??2012â??1866
CVEâ??2012â??1867
CVEâ??2012â??1868
KB 2709162
No publicly known exploits Severity:Important
Exploitability:1
Important Important
MS12â??042 Multiple vulnerabilities in the windows kernel allow escalation of privileges.
Replaces MS11-098 and MS11-068.
Windows kernel mode drivers

CVEâ??2012â??0217
CVEâ??2012â??1515
KB 2711167
CVE-2012-1515 was publicly disclosed. No publicly known exploits Severity:Important
Exploitability:1
Important Important
We will update issues on this page for about a week or so as they evolve.
We appreciate updates
US based customers can call Microsoft for free patch related support on 1-866-PCSAFETY
(*): ISC rating
  • We use 4 levels:
    • PATCH NOW: Typically used where we see immediate danger of exploitation. Typical environments will want to deploy these patches ASAP. Workarounds are typically not accepted by users or are not possible. This rating is often used when typical deployments make it vulnerable and exploits are being used or easy to obtain or make.
    • Critical: Anything that needs little to become "interesting" for the dark side. Best approach is to test and deploy ASAP. Workarounds can give more time to test.
    • Important: Things where more testing and other measures can help.
    • Less Urgent: Typically we expect the impact if left unpatched to be not that big a deal in the short term. Do not forget them however.
  • The difference between the client and server rating is based on how you use the affected machine. We take into account the typical client and server deployment in the usage of the machine and the common measures people typically have in place already. Measures we presume are simple best practices for servers such as not using outlook, MSIE, word etc. to do traditional office or leisure work.
  • The rating is not a risk analysis as such. It is a rating of importance of the vulnerability and the perceived or even predicted threat for affected systems. The rating does not account for the number of affected systems there are. It is for an affected system in a typical worst-case role.
  • Only the organization itself is in a position to do a full risk analysis involving the presence (or lack of) affected systems, the actually implemented measures, the impact on their operation and the value of the assets involved.
  • All patches released by a vendor are important enough to have a close look if you use the affected systems. There is little incentive for vendors to publicize patches that do not have some form of risk to them.

(**): The exploitability rating we show is the worst of them all due to the too large number of ratings Microsoft assigns to some of the patches.

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

5 comment(s)

Adobe June 2012 Black Tuesday patches

Published: 2012-06-12
Last Updated: 2012-06-12 15:31:21 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
0 comment(s)

This month Adobe decided to fix a ColdFusion vulnerability for Black Tuesday:

APSB12-15 tells about the fix for CVE-2012-2041, a HTTP response splitting vulnerability in the ColdFusion Component browser.

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

0 comment(s)

F5 ssh configuration goof

Published: 2012-06-12
Last Updated: 2012-06-12 11:34:08 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
1 comment(s)

A reader pointed us to F5's SOL 13600, a vulnerability notice by now almost a week old. It details fixes and workarounds for a configuration mistake where unauthorized root access is possible via ssh over port 22. It doesn't exactly spell out their mistake. 

Now any unix administrator will start to wonder: why configure ssh to even allow root access at all ? And moreover you'd still need the appropriate credentials of root.

It turns out that unpatched F5 systems not only allow root to connect over the network, but that they authorize a public RSA key for root and that they also left the corresponding supposedly private key on all of their systems. 

If you have an F5 box and have not installed this update or worked around it properly, better do it now: every F5 customer has the keys to yours. And it takes only one to leak the key for all those who'd like to harm you to have it too.

CVE-2012-1493

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

Keywords: f5 ssh
1 comment(s)

The bane of XSS

Published: 2012-06-12
Last Updated: 2012-06-12 11:33:48 UTC
by Johannes Ullrich (Version: 1)
0 comment(s)

I would like to thank Andrew for pointing out a XSS vulnerability in one of our tools. The tool pretty simply echoed back user input without proper output encoding.

XSS is in particular difficult to avoid as it may happen anywhere you send data back to the user. The proper encoding depends on the context the data is used in, and sometimes, a simple "replace < and > with &lt; and &gt;" doesn't cut it [1]. However, in my experience, many cross site scripting errors happen because the coder (in this case me), just didn't bother to properly escape at all.

A while back, I started using a "safe_out" function. This function will do the simple HTML entity replacement before printing the data. By using "safe_out" instead of "echo" or "print", I got a simple check ("grep print") to make sure I didn't miss a spot. The function is only good if you return data in the HTML body of a page, but this is what I am doing 99% of the time. 

function safe_out($sText){
    echo(htmlentities($sText,ENT_QUOTES,'ISO-8859-1'));
}

The function is however a pain to use if you are mixing HTML and user data. Lets say you are trying to replace a print statement like:

print "<tr><td>$col1</td><td>$col2</td><td>$col3</td></tr>";

this would become:

print "<tr><td>";
safe_out($col1);
print "</td><td>";
....

To overcome this, I modified the safe_out function somewhat, to make it easier to use in these case:

function safe_out($sText,$aVars=''){
  if ( $aVars=='' ) {
    echo(htmlentities($sText,ENT_QUOTES,'ISO-8859-1'));
  } else {
    if ( is_array($aVars) ) {
      foreach ( $aVars as $key=>$value ) {
        $value=htmlentities($value,ENT_QUOTES,'ISO-8859-1');
        $sText=str_replace(":$key",$value,$sText);
      }
      echo $sText;
    }
  }
}
Now, it almost starts to look like  a prepared statement:

safe_out("<tr><td>:col1</td><td>:col2</td><td>:col3</td></tr>",array("col1"=>"abc","col2=>"axy",":col3"=>"123"));

Of course Java users, may want to consider the OWASP ESAPI framework. It includes appropriate output encoders. But for php coders like me, the above snippet may be of help.

[1] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_(Cross_Site_Scripting)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet

------
Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
SANS Technology Institute
Twitter

Keywords: xss
0 comment(s)
ISC StormCast for Tuesday, June 12th 2012 http://isc.sans.edu/podcastdetail.html?id=2593

Apple iTunes Security Update

Published: 2012-06-12
Last Updated: 2012-06-12 02:22:44 UTC
by Scott Fendley (Version: 1)
0 comment(s)

Apple announced a new update for iTunes today.  Per APPLE-SA-2012-06-11-1, this update addresses a problem when importing a maliciously crafted m3u playlist within iTunes and a problem within WebKit when visiting a maliciously crafted website.

The bulletin is available at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5318 .

Scott Fendley ISC Handler

Keywords: apple iTunes
0 comment(s)

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