Vulnerabilities

Apple pushed out a Java update for its Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion systems Wednesday, fixing vulnerabilities Oracle tackled in last week’s emergency CVE-2012-4681 patch. Both Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 10 and Java for OS X 2012-005 update the Java SE 6 plugin and, in what might be a sign of Apple’s growing displeasure with the platform, help configure browsers to not automatically run Java applets.

Details of a dangerous virtual machine escape exploit were revealed Wednesday by French research outfit VUPEN Security. The attack exploits a recently reported vulnerability in Xen hypervisors and allows an attacker within a guest virtual machine to escape to the host and execute code.

There is a feature supported by the SSL/TLS encryption standard and used by most of the major browsers that leaks enough information about encrypted sessions to enable attackers decrypt users’ supposedly protected cookies and hijack their sessions. The researchers who developed the attack that exploits this weakness say that all versions of TLS are affected, including TLS 1.2, and that the cipher suite used in the encrypted session makes no difference in the success of the attack.

UPDATE–Oracle last week patched the two zero-day vulnerabilities in Java that attackers had been exploiting in targeted attacks, but it didn’t take long for researchers to poke more holes in the software. A new bug that allows a complete Java sandbox escape has been identified already, the latest in what has become a long line of flaws haunting the Java software running on hundreds of millions of machines.

Oracle on Thursday released a new version of Java that included a fix for the CVE-2012-4681 vulnerability that has been used in limited targeted attacks in the last couple of weeks. The release of Java 7 update 7 comes about four days after the Java flaw was publicly disclosed, but several months after researchers say they notified Oracle of the problem.

More security researchers are recommending users disable the current version of Java after zero-day exploits gained traction in the Web world.Patrick Runald, director of security research for Websense, told PC World today that his team had uncovered more than 100 infected domains – a figure expected to rise sharply after the exploit code for the Java vulnerabilities was added in recent days to the popular hacker tool Blackhole.

Researchers who have dug into the exploit for the new Java CVE-1012-4681 vulnerability found that there are actually two previously unknown security bugs in Java 7 and that the exploit, which has been tied to attackers in China, is using both of them to get full control of vulnerable machines.