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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.'"
And people wonder why I use noscript and flashblock. When untrusted adds in flash are being served on big "trusted" websites people are eventually going to get bit.
Situation Normal, All Flashed Up
This isn't the first or the last time Flash will have vulnerabilities discovered, and I understand this can happen with any software. It is just the frequency and consistency of these vulnerabilities that concerns me. When I install a binary blob from Adobe its always in the back of my mind that I could be opening up my system to attack.
A taste of what it could've been and what it might yet become?
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
What kind of horrible, horrible update scheme will Adobe come up with to try to combat this?! The thoughts are too terrible to imagine...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
It's Windows only because Microsoft wrote it to promote their Silverlight initiative. Siverlight doesn't work on Macs or Linux, so there's no point porting the exploit there.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
After all, it's my God-Given Right to name my son Robert'; DROP TABLE STUDENTS. I shouldn't be getting nasty phone calls from every school he's ever attended!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
In France, a popular IT proverb says "Adobe, c'est de la daube". True one more time today...
(won't translate; lost in translation).
-- Rastignac was here.
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.
That is not the definition of zero day. If you are going to condemn people for using it incorrectly, at least use it correctly yourself. The 'zero day' status merely refers to how long the exploit has been known - the 'zeroth' day being the day it is publicly disclosed. This day is important due to the fact it is basically impossible for people to be patched against the vulnerability on this day. In other words, tomorrow this will no longer be a 'zero day exploit'. (no doubt it was disclosed several days ago and isn't a zero day exploit today either).
I.O.U One Sig.
> That's what temporary permissions are for.
Yes, I use them all the time, but what does that really mean? After I temporarily enable Flash/JS malware for a badly designed site which is just not viewable without them, I'm not going to get temporarily "pwned". It's already "game over".
Except for times like this, if the choice is enabling JS/Flash, or not getting information I was interested in, my thirst for information wins, all other things being equal (i.e., the URL looks like a legitimate one, etc.)
I never enable JS or Flash in order to see sites which I get to through advertisements, however.
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
If that's your definition, ('zero day' == ) then it still hasn't been used correctly, since the linked article is already a day old. ...
and
Given that the phrase 'zero day' is made of two single syllable words
OneSmartFellow isn't today.
Put identity in the browser.
Last Friday at work I was approached by a PM who was panicking: we lost the people who were working on Flash components for the corporate website. Someone was supposed to be flown from India to work on the component, but they couldn't make it for personal reasons. So the question was: can this be done in dynamic html? Well, of-course it can be done in dhtml, I said. It can look exactly like flash and do exactly what flash is doing. Some of the devs who were also working on Flash components, but who couldn't handle the Flash problem in this case, were insisting that it is in fact 'impossible' to do this, to make a dhtml component that would look and do exactly the same thing as Flash, and dhtml will not work in all browsers etc. 3 days later they were proven wrong.
In any case, my point is that Flash is an overkill for most GUIs on the web, it's good for video streaming, but even for that it is not absolutely necessary. However for whatever reason various dynamic functionality is often required by the business to be done within the browser. Something that cannot be done without some sort of scripting - sliding tabs, smooth transformations between images/text whatever. Such functionality is what browser side scripting is for. In order to be able to use this functionality at least javascript will have to be allowed. Whether anyone really wants to go to the website is a different question, but some websites provide useful functionality that is welcomed by the customers.
You can't handle the truth.
See also Symantec Threatcon here
So it looks as if you have the latest flash plugin (9.0.124) you may be ok.
Andy