Vulnerabilities


Steam Gaming Platform Vulnerable to Remote Exploits; 50 Million at Risk

More than 50 million users of the Steam gaming and media distribution platform are at risk for remote compromise because of weaknesses in the platform’s URL protocol handler, a pair of researchers at ReVuln wrote in a paper released this week.Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferrante discovered a number of memory corruption issues, including buffer and heap overflows that would allow an attacker to abuse the way the Steam client handles browser requests. Steam runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Fake Payroll Confirmation Email Leads to Black Hole Exploit Kit

Criminal hackers launched an attack campaign earlier this week in which they sent a slew of emails purporting to come from the financial software developer Intuit. The emails contained links that led to sites hosting the Blackhole exploit kit in an apparent attempt to infect the machines of corporate users.


A zero-day vulnerability in Novell ZENworks Asset Management Software 7.5 gives access to any files with system privileges and could also allow an attacker to grab configuration parameters, including the backend credentials in clear text, according to Rapid7 exploit developer Juan Vazquez who discovered the vulnerability and wrote an exploit module for Metasploit

Oracle will not patch a critical sandbox escape vulnerability in Java SE versions 5, 6 and 7 until its February Critical Patch Update, according to the researcher who discovered the flaw. Adam Gowdiak of Polish security firm Security Explorations told Threatpost via email that Oracle said it was deep into testing of another Java patch for the October CPU released yesterday and that it was too late to include the sandbox fix.

Buckle up Oracle administrators for 109 patches coming your way tomorrow. Oracle’s quarterly Critical Patch Update is due, and the company is releasing fixes for security vulnerabilities across most of its enterprise products, addressing a host of remotely exploitable flaws. This comes a little more than a month after exploits of a serious zero-day vulnerability in Java were reported, as well as a critical zero-day vulnerability in Java SE.

It’s been an interesting couple of days for Firefox users. First Mozilla released version 16 of the popular browser on Wednesday, then quickly pulled it back yesterday after a serious security vulnerability was found in the new version. Less than 12 hours later, Mozilla had repaired the problem and re-released the updated browser, but not before exploit code was released.