Attacks Against Unpatched Microsoft Bug Multiply 122
CWmike writes "Attacks exploiting the latest Microsoft vulnerability are quickly ramping up in quantity and intensity, several security companies warned today as they rang alarms about the developing threat. Symantec, Sunbelt Software, and SANS' Internet Storm Center bumped up their warnings yesterday after Microsoft announced that attackers were exploiting a bug in an ActiveX control used by IE to display Excel spreadsheets. There is no patch for the vulnerability; Microsoft didn't release one in today's Patch Tuesday. A temporary fix that sets the 'kill bits' of the ActiveX control is available, but experts believe it's likely most users won't take advantage of the protection. Symantec raised its ThreatCon ranking to the second of four steps. "We're seeing it exploited, but currently on a limited scale," said Symantec's Ben Greenbaum. Sunbelt also bumped up its ranking, to high." Firefox users can't be too complacent; Secunia is warning of a 0-day in version 3.5.
server side scanning (Score:5, Insightful)
Why dont web hosts scan for hosted vulnerabilities? I imagine a nightly clamav scan by web hosts would make all the difference in cases like these where there is no patch yet but there is an web-based exploit. Heck, some users dont even patch, as was shown by Conficker, which was patched in October and spread like wildfire in January.
Re:server side scanning (Score:5, Informative)
You have a good point, but are you sure web sites are actually legally entitled to inspect what people are paying them to put on their servers?
If so, probably just a case of lazy and/or clueless administrators.
Re:server side scanning (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:server side scanning (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a good point, but are you sure web sites are actually legally entitled to inspect what people are paying them to put on their servers?
If you read the small print in the ToS you'll see they entitle themselves to doing anything they could imagine. Even if it was not in the ToS, adding it in there is trivial.
The reason they don't do it is one of pure economy. Integrating and running antivirus programs daily on a server is not free. It slows down the server (so they can pack less sites per server), it means license/support contracts (even if the basic software is free), means the staff spending time on integrating and supporting this feature.
At the same time, browser exploits are simply small static files that don't affect or abuse the server in question in any significant way. If they scan, it would be just to protect the site visitors, which are not a party that matters to web host providers. So, unless site owners decide they would rather take their business with a host who scans, the hosts have no interest to implement this.
Re:server side scanning (Score:4, Insightful)
How are web hosts going to handle dangerous files they find, if they start searching the users' stuff? That upload of the latest Conficker might not be malicious (user rents serverspace to host virus/trojan/worm research), the upload might be referenced in a database by the CMS (whoops, it's gone - does the user know how to fix the now-apparent bug in the CMS' filehandling?).
How does a virus scanner even know if the file is visible to the outside world? You have .htaccess files, scripts which may or may not display the files in an index (and it doesn't have to be anywhere near the same directory) and non-Apache/IIS systems which serve up content based on Python, Java or whatever.
Lots of issues with automated scanning/removal before you even start to consider the processing power to scan. Although that could be handled by having a reasonably beefy cluster of pure file servers which the web servers get their user directories from.
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If so, probably just a case of lazy and/or clueless administrators.
More likely, since web hosting has been a race to the bottom for several years now, they just aren't interested in anything that would even slightly increase the cost of providing service. At $10/month or less, it takes less than 10 minutes a month of required intervention to render an account unprofitable.
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Hey, sure. We flush-n-fill workstations, planet wide in corporate offices. Ya know, maybe we could make friends with aliens and have THEM also scan our computers.
OR WE COULD JUST USE SOMETHING LESS FRAGILE.
Look at the risk; we're always hearing of people losing thousands of dollars, spending most of a decade trying to get it back. TWO MILLION active viruses and another 100,000 every month for the last decade.
Where else do you go buy a product, and then *immediately* buy someone else's product to ensure it
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I agree that if there is a company that always has faulty products, that people would stop buying products from them. But nobody has stopped using windows (In this case the problem is IE, activex yada yada) because it generally works in most cases, for what people want it for.
I used to do tech support in a call center. The company I worked for made networking hardware, so the internet service that packaged our products the most, hired us to also do tech support for the customers with our products. Literally
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The reason MSFT knows own the Netbook market, with a decade old OS to your brand new Linux, isn't some plot and the sooner you accept it the better. It is because the GUI in 10 year old XP works better than the 2009 GUI in Linux.
To each his own I guess, this netbook came with XP preinstalled and I quickly replaced it with Eeebuntu; XP isn't really suited for small displays in my opinion. And the performance is much better, wifi was somehow really unstable under XP. And no, up to this point (and I recon I have done much more with this puter than the average user ever will) I've never done anything that couldn't have been done via the GUI; however CLI is much more convenient if you know how to use it. Actually an usable shell is one
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I use the CLI in XP quite often, sometimes it's just a lot easier and faster and more versatile than the gui option.
And now there's Powershell for XP, that's the new and improved CLI if I'm not mistaken, haven't used it yet though.
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PowerShell uses cmd.exe as its frontend. Which means NO unicode support whatsoever (like Finale :( ) ... unlike bash on gnome-terminal, which is simply awesome
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Why dont web hosts scan for hosted vulnerabilities? I imagine a nightly clamav scan by web hosts would make all the difference in cases like these where there is no patch yet but there is an web-based exploit. Heck, some users dont even patch, as was shown by Conficker, which was patched in October and spread like wildfire in January.
Perhaps they realize that doing so would be damage control, not security? That's if you're using a malware scanner like clamav.
If they were to scan with something, there are more useful ways. They could scan their hosted systems with something like nessus. That would stand a chance of finding vulnerabilities and identifying what is exploitable so that they may be fixed. That actually would improve security, which is mostly prevention. Then there would be fewer opportunities for malware to infect the
Firefox 3.5? (Score:5, Funny)
Firefox users can't be too complacent; Secunia is warning of a 0-day in version 3.5.
Well, I guess I'm safe. At my workplace, my Redhat 9 installation is incapable of running any version newer than Firefox 2.0.0.20.
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"Firefox users can't be too complacent;"
Complacency is the mother of mothers.......
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Firefox users can't be too complacent; Secunia is warning of a 0-day in version 3.5.
Well, I guess I'm safe. At my workplace, my Redhat 9 installation is incapable of running any version newer than Firefox 2.0.0.20.
That, and the fact that there are no exploits for the Firefox vulnerability in the wild. The two pieces of news are hardly comparable. Seriously, this is like reporting a string of car thefts exploiting a defect in Ford's keyless entry systems and ending the story by reminding Chevy drivers that their vehicles can be broken into with a sledgehammer.
Re:Firefox 3.5? (Score:5, Insightful)
That, and the fact that there are no exploits for the Firefox vulnerability in the wild. The two pieces of news are hardly comparable. Seriously, this is like reporting a string of car thefts exploiting a defect in Ford's keyless entry systems and ending the story by reminding Chevy drivers that their vehicles can be broken into with a sledgehammer.
False analogy. Better analogy:
It's like reporting a string of car thefts exploiting a defect in Ford's keyless entry systems and ending the story by reminding Chevy drivers that their keyless entry sytem is also flawed but luckily since fewer people drive Chevy's (and Ford drivers are usually foolish enough to park their car in front of a big warehouse with a sign that says "Not a chop shop") no one's bothered to learn how to break in to a Chevy yet.
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It's the same as the cool kid in highschool. Popularity also means more people will hate him, or exploit his keyless entry, or the bug in his active x controllers.
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But what is he uses passive x controllers?
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If, not is.
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But what is he uses passive x controllers?
Easy: Then hax0rs will insert their active probes into his passive security hole, especially after he dropped his canned aire can in the computer cleaning facilities.
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Yeah, except for that whole thing being an unsubstantiated claim that was first promoted
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Re:Firefox 3.5? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. The details are public and exploits could be happening in the wild. How do you know they're not?
From http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/07/stopgap_fix_for_critical_firef.html [washingtonpost.com]
Instructions showing hackers how to exploit an unpatched, critical security hole in Mozilla's new Firefox 3.5 Web browser have been posted online.
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Firefox users can't be too complacent; Secunia is warning of a 0-day in version 3.5.
Well, I guess I'm safe. At my workplace, my Redhat 9 installation is incapable of running any version newer than Firefox 2.0.0.20.
Redhat 9?? You're lucky...
[/mpython]
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You're in luck!
Seeing as how its related to the font html tag, I bet its backwards compatible a few versions!
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Sweet. I'm rocking out with Firefox 2.0.0.14 on my FC8 box right now. At least flash doesn't crash it, which really annoys the "gotta have the latest" version fanbois. I can leave Pandora running in one window, and have another open with a whole bunch of tabs, watch YouTube, and never worry about it crashing.
Ohh noes.... (Score:1, Troll)
A vulnerability to opening an Excel sheet in IE? How many people do that on a regular basis? How many EVER do it? I dont think I can remember having ever tried to nor needing to. How is this newsworthy?
Re:Ohh noes.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, a lot given that the attacks are becoming more intense and frequent.
My guess is that when Office installs, various ActiveX controls are linked into the OS and by extension, the web browser MSIE. But there are lots of places where this should never have happened.
1. ActiveX has been proven time and time again to be a very bad idea. It is not sandboxed. There is no way to keep it away from the rest of the OS.
2. The web browser's integration with the OS. Not only has it been ruled illegal by various nations antitrust courts, but any exploit of the browser also exploits the OS by extension.
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Re:Ohh noes.... (Score:5, Funny)
Without an unsandboxed version of the win32 api, which is what ActiveX is, they would be unable to deny the ability to use the internet to those without a recent version of windows and office.
My head didn't stay unexploded while I wasn't unreading this unstatement.
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That's unpossible!
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Without an unsandboxed version of the win32 api, which is what ActiveX is, they would be unable to deny the ability to use the internet to those without a recent version of windows and office.
With a sandboxed version of the win32 api, which is what ActiveX is, they would be able to allow the ability to deny the internet to those with a recent version of windows and office.
To paraphrase: "IE plugins from Office won't work without Win32 API running with increased privilages"
Took me a while to work it out, though.
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I'm a little more militant in my opinion of ActiveX.
Dumbest idea EVER. Microsoft has tossed more money down this sinkhole of a technology trying to fill the hole. People, Companies and governments have tossed even more down the same hole fixing issues that directly arise from some ActiveX bug.
How much further along would Microsoft have been along if they had just passed over this DUMB marketing idea anyway. ( It had to come from marketing, it must have, really who else could be this dumb. )
What it's been
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Not if you sell the loan to some other sucker.
ActiveX (Score:2)
Not a marketing gimmick. If you did any component-based programming, you'd see a lot of utility in ActiveX objects. They allow people to write libraries that you easily plug into your application and interact with at design time using a GUI like pre-.NET Visual Basic or Delphi.
What really made this kind of object valuable is that it allowed you to use an object-oriented framework like MFC or VCL without knowing jack about object-oriented programming. Unfortunately, this capability was simply ignored when th
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A vulnerability to opening an Excel sheet in IE? How many people do that on a regular basis? How many EVER do it? I dont think I can remember having ever tried to nor needing to. How is this newsworthy?
All it takes is a link to http://example.com/NUDE_PICS_CELEBNAME.xls [example.com]
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Re:Ohh noes.... (Score:5, Informative)
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Excel.Sheet.8\BrowserFlags",00000008,"REG_DWORD"
I didn't put it in place for this vulnerability though, just because a lot of people use macros and don't know how to save as.
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wouldnt that be the patch that doesnt exist then?
Re:Ohh noes.... (Score:4, Informative)
You are totally correct in saying that Office Web components won't be affected, I was just replying to the previous poster. Still anyone worth their weight as an admin wouldn't install Office Web components on anything.
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Unless the PHBs think that it's Super Cool to embed Excel Sheets and .PPTs in SharePoint's webpages...
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When some one sends me the "Oh please check out my super duper cool Share point embedded Office power point blah blah blah" very important link. I respond.
Sorry Doesn't load on my iPhone.
( I don't really own an iPhone. But iPhone makes them go "Oh crap, iPhones are cooler than this. I'd better re-do it so iPhone's can view it. )
After that it tends to be de-Microsoft'd enough for me to feel comfortable opening the link.
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Eh, they don't even need elevated privledges :)
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http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/167040-46-registry-login-script#t612376 [tomshardware.com]
or
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/23744-changing-permissions-registry-key.html#post230094 [edugeek.net]
might be of interests to you
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set oShell= Wscript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
objFSO.CopyFile "u:\scripts\test.vbs", "C:\temp\test.vbs"
oShell.Run "runas /noprofile /user:domain\administrator ""%windir%\system32\cmd.exe /C wscript c:\temp\test.vbs"""
WScript.Sleep 100
oShell.Sendkeys "password~"
Wscript.Quit ()
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A vulnerability to opening an Excel sheet in IE? How many people do that on a regular basis? How many EVER do it? I dont think I can remember having ever tried to nor needing to. How is this newsworthy?
I think you missunderstand how this works. Hackers can craft a special page which calls the control, which means anyone with Office installed on their system is vulnerable.
Also as an AC pointed out, it's not really in "Excel", its in "Office Web Components" which are mini-applications specifically designed to be included in (intranet) web pages.
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It's about time... (Score:2, Funny)
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Yo dawg, I heard you liked ActiveX, so I put some Excel in your Excel so you could get exploited while you were getting exploited.
kill bits (Score:5, Informative)
A temporary fix that sets the 'kill bits' of the ActiveX control is available, but experts believe it's likely most users won't take advantage of the protection.
Well, Computer World (and CWmike in particular), perhaps more users would take advantage of the protection if you would provide them a link telling them how when you first mention it [microsoft.com] rather than wait until the end of the article where they may not associate it as being the aforementioned solution.
My solution for ActiveX (no, not installing Linux) (Score:5, Informative)
I use the IE security settings. Yes. It works. The only real problem with it, is that they are a bit convoluted for ActiveX. I had to slow down and think before I got what I wanted, which is essentially to have any web site that wants to run ActiveX prompt me, and then I can choose to accept (but virtually never do).
Notice to web developers: If your site requires ActiveX, and it's not an absolutely essential service from a company that I can yell at, I will go someplace else. IIRC, I have one online financial service that fits that category.
Otherwise, I DON'T NEED ACTIVEX. NOBODY REALLY DOES. ANYTHING WORTH DOING CAN BE DONE WITHOUT IT.
And yes, that's shouting. It needs to be shouted loud enough for these people to hear it. It needs to be shouted again, and again. ActiveX belongs with IE6. Actually, it should have been killed off many revs before that. It should have been shot down by somebody who countered the suggestion at the very first meeting where it was discussed. Maybe somebody had the flu that day.
Hear Hear, and let me add.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hear hear on your ActiveX rant, and let me add "What you have said about ActiveX also applies to Javascript."
I see too many sites that will have almost every link be of the form <a href="#" onclick="follow_link(some_damn_link.html)"> - in other words the only way to follow the link is to use Javascript. This is just sloppy and stupid-lazy - such pages are usually machine generated, and there is NO REASON why the tool couldn't have filled in an appropriate href.
Yes, there are good uses for Javascript - but do we really want to be allowing J. Random Website to run code in a Turing-complete[*] language on every potential page load? I don't - and that is why I have NoScript installed, and no web site gets to run Javascript by default on MY browser - and since the Securina exploit against Firefox is Javascript based, that reduces (but does not eliminate) my exposure.
([*] - Javascript is as Turing complete as C/C++/Java or whatnot - the only thing that makes it NOT truly Turing-complete is the absence of infinite storage, just like C/C++/Java or whatnot).
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I have been wrestling with that myself. Some of the reason sites do that is essentially URL rewriting, where they have a name for the page but then depending on your current context they might take you to a different directory or something. Most aren't, but some of the examples I see are actually very clever time-saving devices, viewed from the programmer's perspective. Could you put the same logic in the back-end? Sure. In fact it would be far more secure and protect your IP. And wouldn't be copyable
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"the only thing that makes it NOT truly Turing-complete is the absence of infinite storage"
I've never really understood this part of 'Turing-complete'. If an algorithm requires infinite storage, isn't it also going to take infinite time to access that storage? Therefore it will never complete, therefore it's undecidable, surely. Or did you mean 'finite but unbounded, just slightly bigger than the (computable) problem at hand requires'?
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'finite but unbounded" - in terms of the Turing machine this is a meaningless statement. Yes, you can say the surface of an orange is finite but unbounded, but for storage, you cannot just keep reusing what you have, like retreading the surface of an orange.
Thus, you have to have storage that is NOT finite - storage that cannot run out. In other words, infinite.
Just because an ideal Turing machine has access to "infinite" storage does not mean that all algorithms will use it. I could design a Turing machine
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I see at the top of this page:
"Your security settings do not allow Web sites to use ActiveX controls installed on your computer. This page may not display correctly. Click here for options..."
Well smack my forehead.
(no, this is not my PC, behave yourself)
Only 9 posts? (Score:5, Funny)
Active X again? (Score:4, Funny)
With the number of ActiveX related security issues you would have thought they would simply drop it or at least sandbox it?
Re:Active X again? (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe Microsoft thinks ActiveX is sandboxing.
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My cat sandboxed it.
They have (Score:5, Informative)
If you go read the notice, you find out that Vista and Server 2008 aren't affected. Reason is that IE has a sandbox mode on those OSes (Windows 7 too) for things like that. However, it relies on changes to the OS so it hasn't been backported to XP and I don't know that it could be easily.
So yes, they have sandboxed ActiveX, but it applies to newer versions of Windows only.
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Funny thing is, the Firefox 3.5 exploit doesn't work on Vista either according to our testing. Only works on Windows 2000 and XP. Good thing everyone's bashing Vista like it has no features of value and as if it's still broken like pre-SP1 when SP2 is out.
So your average Microsoft-hating fanboi who is running Firefox 3.5 because IE8 isn't cool enough, and who is running Vista because XP is "way better", is the one who is vulnerable to this Firefox exploit.
Re:They have (Score:4, Interesting)
Good thing everyone's bashing Vista like it has no features of value
No, we bashed it because it didn't have features of $200+ value.
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Good that I only paid 17 euros for my vista license, wheeeeeee
Re:Active X again? (Score:5, Insightful)
What ActiveX needs is a pine box
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An ActiveX library is just a DLL. However, it is a DLL that can be indiscriminately loaded by scripts... even scripts on a web page no less (this IS being addressed in Windows > XP). What needs to happen is a whitelist of what scripts can use what libraries if you even want to go that far.
The solution, in my eyes, is to remove abilities to create ActiveX controls in remote sc
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Re:Active X again? (Score:4, Informative)
Whores only exist to lure married men from their wives, right? Kill 'em all, right? Just like ActiveX controls, whores have a purpose... not necessarily in line with their intended nature. What should we do with them?
I think I see the part you're missing that would explain to you why some (including me) think ActiveX is fundamentally flawed.
In terms of security, I think we can agree that the Internet including the Web is rightly regarded as a hostile network. We can also probably agree that good security is done in overlapping layers in order to minimize single points of failure. That's important for many reasons, not the least of which is that a glaring, single point of failure increases both the severity of exploits and the ease with which they may be carried out.
The problem with ActiveX is the lack of sandboxing. A control has the full privileges of the user running the browser. With XP machines that user tends to be an Administrator, compounding the problem. Trusting this environment to reliably and securely handle remote code on a hostile network is just begging for trouble. The idea is fundamentally flawed and tinkering with it may mitigate the problem but will not fix it. It needs to be abandoned and replaced.
Java is more suitable for this kind of task. That is, the needed sandboxing capabilities are an integral part of its design, which is not the case with the Windows DLL-type ActiveX controls. If you really want a Microsoft solution, Silverlight can run applications (both remotely and downloaded for local off-line use) and has its own sandbox. Even Flash apps are a better idea than ActiveX, which is saying something considering Flash's security history.
A solution with a good sandbox combined with running as an unprivileged user is a hell of an improvement. This means that an attacker who wants to own the machine has multiple hurdles. The more this is the case, the more difficult it is for an automated script to pull off a successful exploit. The fact that the malware is fully automated and can rapidly spread is part of why there are so many botnets and other problems. Think of it as something like a captcha: the more a successful exploit requires a determined human being, the fewer massive botnets there are. Fewer botnets mean less spam and fewer DDoS attacks and the like. Nowhere does the low-hanging fruit of ActiveX (and similarly flawed ideas) fit into that picture.
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ActiveX is just a DLL, but the only reason it exists is TO CREATE CONTROLS IN REMOTE SCRIPTS. It just uses standard Windows widgets and such to do the actual work. You're the ignorant one... the GP was perfectly right. ActiveX is simply a security hole, period.
ActiveX certainly has some problems, but in these two cases (Excel and Media Player), we are talking about plugins that are specifically designed to be used in web browsers and other "remote scripts". If they were somehow using the Netscape/Firefox plugin API, its likely the same security holes would exist.
But I will give you credit for at least knowing what ActiveX is, which puts you ahead of 99% of the open source cavemen on this site who just grunt OGG SAY ACTIVEX BAD SECURITY and get score 5 for their p
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Full disclosure or what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is Secunia (http://secunia.com/advisories/35798/2/) only featuring a link to the exploit of the ff3.5 0day but no link the Mozilla bugtracker?
Don't want to sound trollish but I don't really know how this whole security business works. So can anyone please explain why there is no bug report for the open source browser?
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There is some chance that a bug simply hasn't been filed. Mozilla does keep security related bugs private (or so I understand it, I'm not in that club) until they consider them resolved (which often means releasing an update). Full disclosure generally refers to whoever found the bug telling the public about it, so no need for the "or what?", the bug has been disclosed.
More than multiplying, I'm afraid (Score:3, Funny)
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Disable JIT for Firefox 3.5 workaround (Score:2, Interesting)
set javascript.options.jit.content to false.
http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/07/14/critical-javascript-vulnerability-in-firefox-35/ [mozilla.com]
Exploit (FX3.5) (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently, it should crash and open up calc.exe. On my machine (win7 RC1) it crashes bringing up the error report thingy.
No calc.exe for me.
Does this mean I'm "safe"?
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It probably means you have security features that Windows XP (what far too many people still mean when they say "Windows"... it's a fucking 8-year-old OS, stop using it as representative of the whole) lacks. Just like the way that this IE exploit doesn't work correctly on Vista/Server 2008/Win7 either... but nobody bothers to mention that because it works on an OS so outdated it doesn't even have a built-in instant search.
I'm using Chrome! (Score:2)
Ha-ha, suckers!
built in VM within browser (Score:1)
Virus, malware, what is that? (Score:1, Offtopic)
I don't understand what the problem is with this. Someone please explain. ( Typing on his linux workstation, to connect to his linux server, in an all linux office).
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Oh come on, that was funny.
Since when did bashing MS become flamebait, usually the mods reserve that for me bashing Apple.
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Firefox's default behaviour is to tell you when new plugins have been installed, so it should be very hard not to be aware of them.
Not excusing the behaviour, just pointing out a convenient feature that helps mitigate unfriendly auto-installs.