It wasn’t that long ago (back in October 2010) when there was another Critical 0-day Vulnerability In Adobe Flash Player, Reader & Acrobat and Adobe were scrambling to fix it.

They are promising an out of band patch for this vulnerability as it’s marked as critical and has apparently been seen in the wild, but only in a few targeted attacks according to this blog post by Adobe:

Background on APSA11-01 Patch Schedule

Adobe Systems plans to release emergency patches for its Flash and Reader applications after learning a critical vulnerability is being exploited to install malware on vulnerable machines.

The out-of-cycle patches for Adobe Flash Player 10 and Acrobat and Reader versions 9, 10, and X will arrive during the week March 21, the company said on Monday. The updates will cover all versions of those programs except for Reader X for Windows, which ships with a security sandbox that blocks the exploits Adobe has observed so far.

The announcement comes after members of Adobe’s security team received reports of targeted attacks aimed “at a very small number of organizations and limited in scope” that “install persistent malware on the victim’s machine,” the company said in an advisory. The exploits wield a booby-trapped Flash file hidden inside a Microsoft Excel file attached to an email.

The attacks exploit an unspecified flaw in Flash Player for the Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and Android operating systems. Adobe security members are unaware of other types of attacks, such as those that plant the malicious Flash file in documents using the the PDF, or portable document format, specification.

It’s a pretty tricky attack with multiple layers, it seems like the Flash exploit itself is embedded in an Excel file attached to e-mails. It looks like corporate users of Reader X will be out of luck as there is no patch for that version. But then Adobe states as Reader X comes with a sandbox the exploit won’t actually function anyway.

The patch is slated to come out next week sometime, there are no specifics as of yet – I guess it depends how long it takes them to fix the problem reliably. They are looking to rush the patch out though rather than waiting for the next cycle.

“However, attackers have leveraged these type [sic] of Flash Player vulnerabilities in the past via .pdf files to attack the embedded authplay.dll component shipping with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9,” Brad Arkin, Adobe’s senior director of product security and privacy, wrote. “Out of a preponderance of caution we took the decision to ship out-of-cycle updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9, and Acrobat X to mitigate the risk of attackers shifting the attack from an .xls container to a .pdf container.”

The unscheduled patch won’t cover Reader X for Windows, because that recently released version of the program contains a Sandbox that isolates remotely supplied payloads from the OS’s core functions. As a result, the exploits Adobe has seen to date aren’t able to successfully execute on machines that run it. Many Reader users, particularly those in corporate settings, still run versions 10 or 9 of Reader, meaning they will remain vulnerable until the emergency patch is installed.

Excluding Reader X for Windows from the out-of-cycle release will allow Adobe engineers to publish it more quickly than it otherwise could. The fix for that version will be released on June 14, during Adobe’s next scheduled quarterly update.

The Security Bulletin from Adobe is here:

Security Advisory for Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Acrobat

It has been assigned the CVE Number: CVE-2011-0609

Source: The Register

tl;dr version is something like this: Michal Zalewski writes a DOM fuzzer, fuzzes IE, finds flaws, Chinese dudes Google some .dll functions and find fuzzer results.

It could be some kind of weird coincidence, or you could read a whole conspiracy theory into it (unreleased tool, very specific search terms etc.).

Details concerning a potentially serious security vulnerability in fully patched versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer have been leaked to people in China, a researcher warned over the weekend.

Michal Zalewski, a security researcher at Google, blogged that data concerning at least one “clearly exploitable crash” in the Microsoft browser was inadvertently disclosed to people who were using a Chinese IP address. Details about the bug, which resides in the mshtml.dll component, were stored on a server that had accidentally been indexed by Google, Zalewski wrote elsewhere. On December 30, detailed search queries showed that the sensitive information, in addition to files for an unpublished security tool, had been retrieved by the unknown party.

“This pattern is very strongly indicative of an independent discovery of the same fault condition in MSIE by unrelated means,” Zalewski wrote. “Other explanations for this pair of consecutive searches seem extremely unlikely.”

The bug leads to arbitrary crashes in the EIP, or extended instruction pointer, of machines running the Microsoft browser. Zalewski said the flaw “is pretty much fully attacker-controlled.” It was uncovered using cross_fuzz, a security tool the researcher developed in his spare time more than two years ago to identify potential security vulnerabilities in IE, Firefox, and other browsers. Since its release, the tool has helped to identify nearly 100 various browser bugs.

You can find the complete history between MZ and Microsoft regarding both ref_fuzz and cross_fuzz here:

fuzzer_timeline.txt

As for the ‘discovery’ it does seem likely that someone else had already discovered the same vulnerability and were searching for further information about it and if it had been published/disclosed. The search logs are here:

known_vuln.txt

A statement attributed to Jerry Bryant, group manager in Microsoft’s Response Communications, said company researchers are working to reproduce the crash to see if the underlying vulnerability can be exploited by malicious hackers.

“At this point, we’re not aware of any exploits or attacks for the reported issue and are continuing to investigate and monitor the threat environment for any changes,” Bryant said.

Zalewski provided this account of his communications with Microsoft, which started in May 2008. In it, he claims that on December 21, Microsoft researcher David Ross “confirms being able to reproduce crashes locally right away.”

Zalewski said that Microsoft researchers asked him to delay the release of cross_fuzz until they had more time to investigate the crashes. He published his warning on New Year’s Day, after he learned that the crash logs and related files had been downloaded.

“These search queries are looking for information on two MSHTML.DLL functions – BreakAASpecial and BreakCircularMemoryReferences – that are unique to the stack signature of this vulnerability, and had *absolutely* no other mentions on the internet at that time,” he said.

cross_fuzz has been released officially now by Zalewski after Microsoft have had some time to investigate the crashes further. The moral of the story is, once again don’t use Internet Explorer!

As right now, there is a potentially dangerous 0-day for IE in the wild and as we well known with Patch Tuesday it’ll be quite some time before it gets fixed.

Source: The Register

A zero-day for Windows 7 back in July of this year also bypassed Windows UAC.

Once again a serious zero-day has hit Windows, this time an unpatched vulnerability in the Kernel. So far it only seems to be a local exploit, for full devastating effect hackers will need to combine this with a remote zero-day to get access to the machine and then elevate their permissions and bypass UAC with this.

Microsoft is investigating reports of an unpatched vulnerability in the Windows kernel that could be used by attackers to sidestep an important operating system security measure.

One security firm dubbed the bug a potential “nightmare,” but Microsoft downplayed the threat by reminding users that hackers would need a second exploit to launch remote attacks.

The exploit was disclosed Wednesday — the same day proof-of-concept code went public — and lets attackers bypass the User Account Control (UAC) feature in Windows Vista and Windows 7. UAC, which was frequently panned when Vista debuted in 2007, displays prompts that users must read and react to. It was designed to make silent malware installation impossible, or at least more difficult.

“Microsoft is aware of the public posting of details of an elevation of privilege vulnerability that may reside in the Windows kernel,” said Jerry Bryant, a group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center, in an e-mail. “We will continue to investigate the issue and, when done, we will take appropriate action.”

The bug is in the “win32k.sys” file, a part of the kernel, and exists in all versions of Windows, including XP, Vista, Server 2003, Windows 7 and Server 2008, said Sophos researcher Chet Wisniewski in a Thursday blog post.

Microsoft is aware of the flaw but has not yet issued a statement as to when they will be patching this, I’d imagine given their past that will wait for the next Patch Tuesday before pushing the patch out. And plus the fact it’s a kernel bug it, it may take a little more time to fix.

The security companies seem to be taking this one quite seriously as the publicly-released code is confirmed working across multiple versions of Windows.

There is a very slight chance that Microsoft might push an Out-of-band-patch for this, but I find it unlikely as it’s not a remote vulnerability.

Several security companies, including Sophos and Vupen, have confirmed the vulnerability and reported that the publicly-released attack code works on systems running Vista, Windows 7 and Server 2008.

Hackers cannot use the exploit to remotely compromise a PC, however, as it requires local access, a fact that Microsoft stressed. “Because this is a local elevation-of-privilege issue, it requires attackers to be already able to execute code on a targeted machine,” said Bryant.

“On its own, this bug does not allow remote code execution, but does enable non-administrator accounts to execute code as if they were an administrator,” added Wisniewski.

Although many Windows XP users, especially consumers and those in very small businesses, run the OS via administrator accounts, Microsoft added UAC to Vista and later operating systems as one way to limit user privileges, and thus malware’s access to the PC.

Attackers would have to combine the exploit with other malicious code that takes advantage of another vulnerability on the machine — not necessarily one in Windows, but in any commonly-installed application, such as Adobe Reader, for example — to hijack a PC and bypass UAC.

“This exploit allows malware that has already been dropped on the system to bypass [UAC] and get the full control of the system,” said Prevx researcher Marco Giuliani in an entry on that security company’s blog Thursday.

Prevx reported the vulnerability to Microsoft earlier in the week.

Microsoft has changed the way UAC functions before when it was demonstrated that it could be easily bypassed. The next patch cycle is due on Tuesday, Dec. 14 – which thankfully isn’t too long. I’d be expecting a kernel patch for this issue by then.

There is more info about the issue here:

Sophos – New Windows zero-day flaw bypasses UAC
Prevx – Windows 0-day exploit: Q&A session

Source: Network World

It was that long ago that a critical flaw in Flash put Android phones at risk. The core vulnerability exists in Flash but it’s being actively exploited in Adobe Reader via the usual pdf route.

The vulnerability exists across all OS versions (including Android), but as usual the active exploitation seems to be taking place on the Windows platform.

Adobe has confirmed reports that yet another unpatched vulnerability in the latest versions of its ubiquitous software is being actively exploited to infect end users with data-stealing malware.

The vulnerability exists in Adobe’s Reader document viewer and Flash Media Player for Windows, OS X and Unix operating systems, Adobe warned on Thursday. According to independent researchers, it is being exploited in the wild against Reader for Windows to install a nasty trojan known as Wisp, which according to Microsoft, steals sensitive user data and installs a backdoor on compromised systems.

The vulnerability itself resides in Adobe’s Flash Player, which is available as stand alone software and is also embedded into Reader. According to researcher Mila Parkour of the Contagio Malware Dump blog, poisoned PDF documents are circulating that drop two malicious binaries onto Windows machines that open the document files.

A screenshot identified the two files as nsunday.exe and nsunday.dll. A Virus Total scan showed just 15 of 42 antivirus programs were detecting the malicious EXE. She didn’t say whether the attacks succeed against more recent versions of the OS, which Microsoft has designed to withstand many of the most common types of exploits.

This vector comes to pass as Flash player is also embedded into Adobe Reader, so by using a malicious PDF file with the AuthPlay exploit – they can trigger the Flash player flaw and drop malware into the OS.

There is information on how to disable the AuthPlay functionality at the bottom of the Adobe advisory:

Security Advisory for Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Acrobat

Basically you need to go to the Adobe Reader directory and delete the AuthPlayLib.bundle (Windows/Mac OSX) or libauthplay.so.0.0.0. (linux) file.

Adobe said it planned to patch the vulnerability in Flash during the week of November 9 and in Reader during the week of November 15. The schedule is puzzling, since Reader has been confirmed to be under attack and Flash has not been confirmed.

In the meantime, users can protect themselves by using an alternate document viewer, such as Foxit. For those who must use Reader, Adobe said they can mitigate attacks by removing functionality known as AuthPlay, by following the instructions near the bottom of this advisory. Adobe provided no temporary measures Flash users can follow.

It’s been a bad couple of years for Adobe’s security team, which has gotten repeatedly hammered by critical vulnerabilities that are exploited by criminals to install malware on users’ machines. Three weeks ago, the company issued a fix for a security flaw in Reader that was also under attack by a highly sophisticated exploit. Last month, Adobe fixed a critical vulnerability in Flash that was also being used to compromise end user computers.

Adobe is also in the process of developing a patch for a code-execution bug in its Shockwave Player. By many researchers’ reckoning, Reader is among the world’s most exploited applications, in close competition with Oracle’s Java framework and, of course, various Microsoft programs.

From recent attacks it seems Adobe Reader and Flash are amongst the most exploited applications, especially when it comes to serious vulnerabilities that allow code-execution.

The new generation Adobe Reader with Sandbox Feature can’t come soon enough.

There’s also more here:

Hackers exploit newest Flash zero-day bug

Source: The Register

In this case it was used via an iFrame on nobelpeaceprize.org which then downloaded malware to the visitors machine using a multi-exploit back-end which amongst others also leveraged this 0day Firefox exploit.

Malicious hackers have exploited an unpatched vulnerability in the latest version of Firefox to attack people visiting the Nobel Peace Prize website, a Norway-based security firm said on Tuesday.

Mozilla representatives confirmed a “critical vulnerability” in versions 3.5 and 3.6 of the open-source browser. It came several hours after the organization members were said to have made the same admission on this password-protected Bugzilla page. According to Einar Oftedal, a detection executive at Norman ASA in Oslo, the official website for the Nobel Peace prize, nobelpeaceprize.org, was compromised so that it contained an iframe link to a malicious server.

“This iframe has a multi exploit backend and serves exploits for Firefox, including a working remote exploit for Firefox 3.6.11,” he said in an instant message to The Register. “We didn’t see any 0day for IE,” he added, referring to Microsoft’s browser.

Mozilla claims they will address this issue soon and past history dictates that a patch will come out within a few days, so look forwards to Firefox 3.6.12 by the end of the week. It seems to be a fairly advanced and targeted attack.

Of course the conspiracy theorists will say that the attack was carried out by the Chinese Government as their way of complaining that the most recent Nobel Peace Prize was given to a Chinese dissident named Liu Xiaobo.

He said the attack exploited a race condition vulnerability in Firefox to force end users to install malware his firm has dubbed Belmoo. The Windows executable was created on Sunday and attempts to connect to several internet addresses, according to his analysis.

If the addresses resolve, “the malware attaches a command shell to the opened socket, giving an attacker access on the local computer with the same rights as the logged on user.” If not, the malware will exit.

If Norman’s report proves accurate, it’s the first time in recent memory attackers have exploited an unpatched vulnerability in Firefox. Most so-called zero-day attacks are perpetrated against Adobe Reader or Flash Player, Microsoft software and to a lesser extent Oracle’s Java. The report is also unusual because the attack didn’t appear to target other applications, as is typical with exploit packages.

Hours after the reports surfaced, Mozilla said it would issue a fix as soon as possible. In the meantime, users can protect themselves by disabling JavaScript altogether or installing the NoScript extension that allows users to control which websites are permitted to run JavaScript.

As per usual you can protect yourself against this flaw by using NoScript or disabling JavaScript functionality in your browser.

It’s been a while since there’s been a serious bug in Firefox, most of the recent ones have not been exploitable or have involved passive activities like data leakage and clickjacking.

Source: The Register

It’s a pretty serious bug and it seems hackers have been maliciously exploiting it in the wild for over a month. The Stuxnet malware has been using this vulnerability to gain access to machines then download further attack files including a root kit.

Microsoft on Friday warned that attackers are exploiting a critical unpatched Windows vulnerability using infected USB flash drives.

The bug admission is the first that affects Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) since Microsoft retired the edition from support , researchers said. When Microsoft does fix the flaw, it will not be providing a patch for machines still running XP SP2. In a security advisory , Microsoft confirmed what other researchers had been saying for almost a month: Hackers have been exploiting a bug in Windows “shortcut” files, the placeholders typically dropped on the desktop or into the Start menu to represent links to actual files or programs.

“In the wild, this vulnerability has been found operating in conjunction with the Stuxnet malware,” Dave Forstrom, a director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, said in a post Friday to a company blog . Stuxnet is a clan of malware that includes a Trojan horse that downloads further attack code, including a rootkit that hides evidence of the attack.

Forstrom characterized the threat as “limited, targeted attacks,” but the Microsoft group responsible for crafting antivirus signatures said it had tracked 6,000 attempts to infect Windows PCs as of July 15.

Limited but targeted attacks are the worst kind as they can really burrow through corporate defenses. A lot of companies are taking this seriously, including all the main players in the anti-virus arena.

You have to wonder if Microsoft will break their patch tuesday policy and issue an emergency out-of-band patch for this.

Especially since more virus writers are picking up on this flaw meaning it’s becoming more widespread.

On Friday, Siemens alerted customers of its Simatic WinCC management software that attacks using the Windows vulnerability were targeting computers used to manage large-scale industrial control systems used by major manufacturing and utility companies. The vulnerability was first mentioned on June 17 in an alert issued by VirusBlokAda , a little-known security firm based in Belarus. Other security organizations, including U.K.-based Sophos and SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center , picked up on the threat Friday. Security blogger Brian Krebs , formerly with the Washington Post, reported on it Thursday.

According to Microsoft, Windows fails to correctly parse shortcut files, identified by the “.lnk” extension. The flaw has been exploited most frequently using USB flash drives. By crafting a malicious .lnk file, hackers can hijack a Windows PC with little user interaction: All that’s necessary is that the user views the contents of the USB drive with a file manager like Windows Explorer.

Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisory with Sophos, called the threat “nasty,” and said his tests showed that the exploit works even when AutoRun and AutoPlay — two functions that have previously been used by attackers to commandeer PCs using infected flash drives — are disabled. The rootkit also bypasses all security mechanisms in Windows, including the User Account Control (UAC) prompts in Vista and Windows 7 , said Wisniewski in a blog entry Friday.

I’m sure they’ll come up with some reason for not patching this sooner rather than later. The scary part is the attack can still be carried out even if AutoRun and AutoPlay are disabled.

The rootkit also bypasses the security mechanisms in Windows 7 and Vista making this a very dangerous attack.

You can find a temporary workaround in the Microsoft Security Advisory here:

Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Windows Shell could allow remote code execution

And Microsoft has stated they are working on a patch.

Source: Network World

I’m sure you’ve heard about the Microsoft IE7 Exploit that allows Remote Code Execution on XP & Vista, it turns out it’s actually much worse than first expected.

The exploit also affects IE5.01, IE6 and IE8 on all OS versions! That’s a pretty worrying turn of events for MS especially as they are seemingly leaving it unpatched.

You can find a clarification of the various workarounds for the IE flaw on Technet here.

Researchers are warning that the unpatched security vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer affects more versions of the browser than previously thought, and that steps users must take to prevent exploitation are harder than first published.

According to an updated advisory from Redmond, the bug that’s been actively exploited since Tuesday bites versions 5.01, 6, and 8 of the browser, which is by far the most widely used on the web. A previous warning from Microsoft only said that IE 7 was susceptible to the attacks. IE is susceptible when running on all supported versions of the Windows operating systems, Microsoft also says.

What’s more, while there is some protection from Vista’s User Account Control, the measure doesn’t altogether prevent the attack, according to this post on the Spyware Sucks blog. Microsoft and others have suggested that those who must use IE in the next few weeks set the security level to high for the internet security zone or disable active scripting. These are sensible measures, but they don’t guarantee you won’t be pwned, according to this post from the Secunia blog.

Once again Firefox users for the win, this is a flaw in the whole family of Internet Explorer and must effect a shocking amount of users. I guess setting your Security Zone to high and disabling Active Scripting helps but then it also disables a lot of features on a lot of sites.

So you are losing out on the user experience of the web just to be more secure, mostly because Microsoft doesn’t want to release an ad-hoc patch.

Well Google Chrome final version is out now too, so there’s another option for people.

Secunia goes on to revise what it says is the cause of the vulnerability. Contrary to earlier reports that pinned the blame on the way IE handles certain types of data that use the extensible markup language, or XML, format, the true cause is faulty data binding, meaning exploit code need not use XML.

Microsoft has yet to say whether it plans to issue a fix ahead of next month’s scheduled release. For the moment, the volume of in-the-wild attacks remains relatively modest and limited mostly to sites based in China. But because attackers are injecting exploits into legitimate sites that have been compromised, we continue to recommend that users steer clear of IE until the hole has been closed.

Plenty of other researchers have weighed in with additional details about the flaw. Links from SANS, Sophos and Hackademix.

I think an imminent danger is if people start using iframe vulnerabilies and XSS to inject this exploit into some more prominent sites – that could cause a huge spread of infections!

Anyway just let people using IE know that this is another reason they shouldn’t be using it! Show them how to download and install Firefox and please teach them to use Tabs!

Source: The Register

It seems a new, fairly serious flaw has been discovered in Internet Explorer 7 – and as accounts go it’s been around for a couple of months in the underground.

The worrying part is, patch Tuesday was yesterday and after testing it’s been discovered that this flaw WAS NOT patched in the updates.

ISC reports that it’s not currently widely used, but it has been found in the wild.

Microsoft said it is investigating reports that a new exploit is going around that takes advantage of an unpatched security hole in Internet Explorer 7.

The SANS Internet Storm Center, which tracks hacking trends, said today that while the exploit does not appear to be widely in use at the moment, that situation is likely to change soon, since instructions showing criminals how to take advantage of this flaw have been posted online.

SANS emphasizes that this vulnerability is not one that was fixed in the massive bundle of patches that Microsoft issued yesterday. It is not clear what steps users can take to protect themselves against this threat, other than to browse the Web with something other than IE, such as Mozilla Firefox or Opera. This appears to be the type of vulnerability that could be used to give attackers complete control over an affected system merely by convincing users to browse to a specially-crafted hacked or malicious Web site.

It seems the safest thing is not to use IE, which I personally have been doing since about 1998 anyway. But still, some people claim they have problems with Java or JavaScript or AJAX enabled sites with Firefox.

There’s always Opera, or even the new Google Chrome.

This exploit is a serious one as someone only needs to visit the site and remote code can be injected into their OS and executed.

According to SANS, the exploit works against fully-patched Windows XP and Windows 2003 systems with Internet Explorer 7.

In a statement e-mailed to Security Fix, Microsoft said once it is done with its investigation, the company “will take appropriate action to help protect customers. This may include providing a security update through the monthly release process, an out-of-cycle update or additional guidance to help customers protect themselves.”

Once again it’s demonstrated how stupid ‘Patch Tuesday’ is and how half of the people on the Internet are going to be vulnerable to this serious flaw until the first Tuesday in January.

I really hope Microsoft pushes out an emergency patch outside their schedule ASAP.

You can find a list of the sites known to be distributing the code on Shadowserver here.

Source: Security Fix

Ah finally a decent 0-day exploit tracker, one that isn’t underground and could be fairly useful to everyone.

0-day as basically stated in the article is an exploit not known publicly or available publicly well before any patches are available, some private groups often have exploits for a year or more before someone else discovers them, makes them public and they inevitably get fixed.

Like the famous remote exploit in Windows RPC, private groups had that for almost 2 years before it became public.

Scary eh?

Security firm eEye has created what’s described as the industry’s first site designed solely to track zero-day vulnerabilities, flaws where exploits are available prior to the release of security patches.

eEye’s zero-day tracking site provides detailed information on flaws and remediation strategies to users. The site will be maintained by security researchers at eEye Research, who have a track record of unearthing new security bugs, and is essentially an eEye gig rather than a cross-industry effort.

It’s a good idea even if it’s not an industry effort it’s solely an eEye effort, I’m glad someone has done it and eEye has a strong capable team, so it should be fairly relevant if it’s kept up to date.

However, eEye invites other interested parties to contribute suggestions on flaws that merit inclusion on its list. eEye said it created the site, which includes information on how long flaws have remained unfixed, in response to the growing number of zero-day exploits.

In other security tracking news, security notification firm Secunia has released a tool designed to determine insecure versions of popular software packages (such as browsers, IM clients, and media players) on consumer’s PC.

Secunia’s Software Inspector provides users with advice on what to do if they are running insecure software packages.

Both eEye zero-day tracking site and Secunia’s Software Inspector are available free of charge.

You can find the site here:

eEye Zero Day Tracker

Source: The Register

What? New vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer?

You can hack Internet Exploder Explorer? Never!

3Com Corp’s TippingPoint division has discovered and disclosed two critical new vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer through 3Com’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI).

The vulnerabilities could have allowed an attacker to gain control of a PC if the user was logged in with administrative rights.

Sounds a bit like an advert for TippingPoint to me.

Under the ZDI, 3Com rewards researchers who, while keeping the vulnerabilities confidential, alert 3Com to these vulnerabilities.

3Com can in turn alert the software vendor so that a patch can be prepared, while IPS prepares the security filter and distributes it to customers.

Interesting initiative though.

Source: The Star