The big news this afternoon is that Microsoft HAS gone out of the routine patch cycle to release a security fix for the VML vulnerability that’s been actively exploited in recent days for everything from sneak keylogger installs to massive spyware installs. Sans has a few links, if you de-registered the affected DLL you should consider re-registering the same so that you’ll be able to view/access vml content in the future. Here’s Microsoft’s technet Security Bulletin on the matter. (Visit update.microsoft.com if it’s not automatically downloaded for you.) It should be noted that the RC of IE 7 was not affected by this vulnerability.
Tag: Security Fix
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Apple Macbook pro and other wireless fixes
Do you remember the big bruhaha a month or so back about the “apple wireless vulnerability” that everybody picked apart because in the video taped demonstration they used a third party card…. EVEN though the demonstrators stated that the same vulnerability existed in Apple’s own driver some on the internet tore one reporter up over stating that because Apple denied being shown exploit code (slight semantic issue there…) Well… those driver vulnerabilities that must have not existed, were fixed today by Apple. Brian Krebs has the story, as well as incidents.org
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More Microsoft Patch problems MS06-042
This has been one of the “problem child” patches this time around and it looks as though it’s worse than initially thought. Apparently, instead of “just” crashing IE SP1 when viewing compressed http 1.1 web pages on WinXP SP1 or Windows 2000 SP4…. as stated in Microsoft’s bulletins, this could also lead to a buffer overflow allowing for code execution. Microsoft is saying that they are not aware of that vulnerability being exploited or impacting customers at this time. The issue that was originally reported is detailed in this knowledge base article.
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Microsoft August Updates
Incidents.org has an initial list of the updates today from Microsoft, there is also a brief from Microsoft on the updates. It appears as though one is Powerpoint specific, another is Office releated, one is tagged as an Internet Explorer update and the rest Windows. More details later in the day. Hopefully we can get more details from the technet security page when it’s updated.
Update…. Details time…
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Nasty Javascript attack possibilities
There were demonstrations of some nasty javascript attacks at Black Hat as well (as if the wireless driver issues wasn’t a big enough problem…) Javascript is a powerful language and can be used for many things, but in these demonstrations, it was used to track recently visited sites (by the browser victim) and identify the IP address of the victim on the internal LAN AND to alter firewall settings. From the way I read the article at the Security Fix – this is changing HARDWARE firewall settings.
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7 Updates coming from Microsoft in July
We can expect 7 updates next week from Microsoft on the monthly patch day for July. Four of the updates will be for Windows, and 3 for Microsoft Office. There will be at least one critical update for each. It’s expected that we’ll see an update for the Excel issues that have been talked about the last few weeks. There are a number of publicly known Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, but it’s not known if Microsoft has prepared patches for those yet. It should be noted that many times 1 patch will cover a number of issues. This is commonly seen with Internet Explorer cumulative updates where several vulnerabilities are addressed with one update.
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Phishing – so many flaws to exploit so little time
In the last week there was a well documented writeup of a cross site scripting vulnerability which had allowed a phisher to pose as a paypal login with THE LEGIT PAYPAL SSL CERTIFICATE…. Brian Krebs at the Security Fix has some details on some of the new and interesting ways phishers are trying to exploit to seperate us from our personal information.
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The spammers win a round
There is a company (well, unfortunately, WAS a company) called Blue Security. They had an innovative approach to stopping spam. A small download essentially sent opt-out return emails that were junk back to the REAL spam sender (clever concept huh? bouncing to the person that REALLY sent the message… Of course what was clever here was that they were coordinating the responses of all their users – herding a “white hat” network of sorts.) Anyway, it was a successful concept at getting several of the top 10 to clean their mailing lists.It looks as though 6 of the top 10 agreed to clean up their mailing lists. Unfortunately, they were the subject of a Massive DDOS. They managed to recover and come back, but the dDos took out other sites as well and there were threats of more it seems.
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Microsoft updates for May
It looks as though there are two critical updates to be had today, one moderate/low (depending on the OS version.) The critical updates are one biggy for Exchange server which is reported to break some functionality with regards to Blackberry -> exchange server integration… This is an obviously important patch to get in since the vulnerability would allow for remote code execution. The other critical patch….
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BIOS based rootkits coming soon….
There have been a couple stories out of the “Blackhat federal” conference in the last couple days. Brian Krebs at the Security Fix gives a good overview. One of the more troubling notes is the possibility of creating a rootkit that can hide itself in a systems BIOS. Security Focus has some detail on this as well.