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Adobe Flash Zero-Day Attack Underway
Robellus writes "Security researchers have found evidence of a previously unknown Adobe Flash vulnerability being exploited in the wild. The zero-day flaw has been added to the Chinese version of the MPack exploit kit and there are signs that the exploits are being injected into third-party sites to redirect targets to malware-laden servers. From the article: 'Continued investigation reveals this issue is fairly widespread. Malicious code is being injected into other third-party domains (approximately 20,000 web pages) most likely through SQL-injection attacks. The code then redirects users to sites hosting malicious Flash files exploiting this issue.'"
That's why you should be using Gnash. Monoculture (all Flash being played by Adobe Flash player) is a bad thing when an infection occurs.
Put identity in the browser.
It plays them now
A Stack Canary is a value placed at the end of a function's stack frame. Just before function return, the canary's value is checked, and if it has changed, the user is notified.
So what you do is built a test version of Flash with canaries enabled in the compiler, then try feeding it all kinds of potentially buffer-overruning input.
To enable canaries:
- Visual Studio for Windows: Use the
/GS option
- GCC for Mac OS X: use -fstack-protector in your "Other C Flags" option in XCode
The Xcode-Users post I linked to says that stack canaries were discussed in session 109 at Apple's developer conference, in 2007 I think. You should be able to view it on the Apple Developer Connection website.I'll send you my bill in the mail.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
SWF and other payload files cannot be uploaded and hosted on the compromised web server as easily as SQL-injecting a script fragment which downloads them from a 3rd party site in full control of the attacker. In this and all the recent mass-infection cases, the 3rd party hosts have been improbable domains Chinese domains likely registered ad hoc (such as wuqing17173.cn, woai117.cn or dota11.cn), and very unlikely to be in your NoScript whitelist, no matter how savage your browsing habits could be.
So in all "real world" scenarios seen so far, this one included, you are protected by NoScript in its default configuration, which blocks 3rd party embeddings even if you're visiting a trusted page.
Then if you want extra protection for the use cases you've listed (i.e. frequent usage of Flash-intensive community driven web sites), you can also configure NoScript to block ALL the embedded objects, with no regard for their origin: you will still be able to temporarily allow them selectively, by clicking on a visual placeholder.
There's a browser safer than Firefox, it is Firefox, with NoScript