Vulnerabilities

Researchers have identified a new vulnerability in the Linux kernel which could enable an attacker to take complete control of a vulnerable system. The flaw is in all versions of the 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernels. The Linux kernel vulnerability is a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability that derives from the kernel’s failure to validate a function pointer before dereferencing it. The flaw, discovered by two members of the Google security team, has been fixed by a patch for the Linux kernel that was made available Thursday.

This short video demonstration shows a new technique for exploiting a flaw in Apple Safari 4 that enables an attacker to hijack the Top Sites feature in Safari and replace the victim’s Top Sites with phishing sites. The vulnerability and attack were discovered by Inferno.

Apple has released Safari 4.0.3 to fix at least six security vulnerabilities that put Mac and Windows users at risk of hacker attacks.
The update is considered highly-critical and should be immediately applied on both Windows and Mac systems because of the risk of information disclosure, phishing and remote code execution attacks. See Apple’s advisory for details [apple.com]

By Eric Schultze
Microsoft has released nine bulletins today, five of them Critical, four of them Important. The bulletins cover a gamut of affected products – almost everything in your enterprise will need to be patched today with the exception of Internet Explorer. No IE patches this month! The majority of bulletin releases these days relate to client-side vulnerabilities – visit an evil website, open an evil document, or read an evil email and you’ll get hacked. These vulns are of greatest concern on the desktop where end users are filling time between Mafia Wars power-ups and Facebook updates by visiting websites that may be hosting content of questionable repute. This month, there are five bulletins addressing these types of issues.

Researchers are sounding the alarm for a serious administrator password-reset vulnerability affecting the latest version of WordPress, the popular open-source blog publishing platform.
The flaw, which can be exploited via the browser, gives an attacker a trivial way to compromise the admin account of any WordPress of WordPress MU (multiple user) installation.  Read the full story [zdnet.com]  Also see ISC SANS diary entry [sans.org]

Threatpost editors Ryan Naraine and Dennis Fisher discuss the DDoS
attacks against Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal and delve into
Apple’s Mac OS X patch and Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday plans.

Dennis Fisher talks with researcher Moxie Marlinspike about the innovative research on attacking the inherent weaknesses in the SSL infrastructure that he presented at Black Hat, and the tools he has released to demonstrate the attacks, SSLSniff and SSLStrip.