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Emergency Workaround For Oracle 0-Day
Almost Live writes "Oracle has released an out-of-cycle alert to offer mitigation for a zero-day exploit that's been posted on the Internet. The emergency workaround addresses an unpatched remote buffer overflow that's remotely exploitable without the need for a username and password, and can result in compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the targeted system." Whoever published the vulnerability and matching exploit code did not contact Oracle first.
I sent the email to 0racle. Too much l33tness, sorry.
Anyone else remember Oracle's ad campaign claiming to be "unbreakable"?
This would seem to be a pretty decent answer to the previous thread (How do geeks get exercise).
Now would be a good time to pull out one of those Oracle "Unbreakable" spots :)
"Oracle: can't break it; can't break in"
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
What a surprise! They were exploited by an actual hacker. Whodathunkit?
...pen and paper.
The CB App. What's your 20?
For christ's sake. At least link to the fucking Oracle page.
If I wanted to read ZDNet, I'd just go to fucking ZDNet.
Maybe not
This is a troll? In what way?
The C/C++ defect that the compiler has no idea of the size of an array claims another victim.
I would have thought that an exploit like this would be worth a huge amount of money ... For Oracle, but now for the great pool of unwashed out there.
It strikes me that if Oracle (and other HUGE software vendors) were to offer substantial cash incentives to find holes as gaping as this one obviously is, that the exploit would have been reported directly to Oracle. By substantial i mean in excess of 100,000 euros. (I would have said US dollars, but that currency isn't worth much any more!)
Somebody didn't like it and did not have the balls to argue against it since that might expose them to refutation. Therefore, it's a troll. You must be new here.
Some Oracle That Is !!
this exploit is over 10 days old now, slashdot you are wayyy to late on reporting this.
i just tried to google mod_wl and the first page
of the results do not clearly tell me what mod_wl
even does. i do not know a single person who uses
it and i work a large ISP.
this has nothing to do with oracle's database and
i think slashdot editors really need to stop with
these silly headlines designed to get me to click
on stories. grow up! make a profit without deceit!
frankly, this post about this overflow is such
a non issue for me it is funny.
can anyone explain what in the heck mod_wl even does?
Substantial improvement in security and software quality will require vendors to take responsibility for their bugs. The most likely way to achieve this, is to force actual losses upon their customers, who will then complain effectively to the vendors.
Not that TFA says anything about whether C or C++ are actually involved, but:
The C/C++ feature that the compiler has no idea of the size of an array claims another example of misuse.
The lack of array size information is a feature of C/C++, and a well-known one at that. If you don't know how to deal with it, you shouldn't be using the language, much less talking about it.
Sureee...let me guess, you would have contacted Oracle, but you were too much of a coward and figured they might find out who you were.
Sweet, I've been wondering how to hack the trouble ticket system's Oracle back end at work. Now when a deploy has issues in production that weren't seen in development, I can retroactively fix my ticket attachments so it looks like the system engineers screwed up the deploy. Muahahahahaha!!!!
The hacker thought "Oracle" already knew ;-)
not nearly as panic inducing as I first thought, although I'm sure my program management is going to get all bent out of shape about it anyway. Bad news if you Apache with WL though.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
Oracle != Microsoft. Therefore, it can't be hacked (this was a feature, not a bug).
The Oracle knew that employees of companies using these databases needed a day off.
What a fucking champ.
"Whoever published the vulnerability and matching exploit code did not contact Oracle first."
It's interesting to me that this is a tag in the OP. I realize it's part of the Hacker's Code of Ethics to report exploits to vendors and I fully agree with it. For the most part it's people pushing software to its limits that find the bugs. BUT - the more business is done on the Internet the more valuable exploits become.
I am under the belief that somewhere out there, black-hat organizations have some really scary databases of exploits that have never been reported to vendors.
Reporting to vendors is the right thing to do, but if there's one thing I've learned in my life it's that when money and ethics collide money almost always wins.
I seriously don't think that we would have seen any kind of information from Oracle about trying to mitigate a possible problem if this had simply been sent only to Oracle. As such, we are a little safer in the sense that at least we know of the issue, and as a result can apply the remedies both Oracle provided as well as any other solutions to help protect against this kind of attack.
Had this not gone public, it would almost definitely be another few months before we had a fix in place from Oracle, and in the mean time had been vulnerable to attack that someone has already found (which means it is likely that many people know of the flaw and may be looking to exploit it).
While some cases full disclosure may not be the best idea, this case (or any case for that matter where the exploit can be defeated with certain configuration options) it is better that we know of it immediately so we can put our own protections in place and use our own judgment as to what extra actions may need to take place (possibly including taking affected systems off-line or otherwise unavailable). We are all safer now because of this person releasing the exploit into the wild on the public internet, which forced a company to make a statement about that exploit and give immediate advice to protect against it, as opposed to sitting on that exploit, not telling anyone about it, and quietly have a patch released with the normal patch cycle.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
One man's unrefined ruffianity is another man's unconscious vernacular.
Moving to a university research lab after five years in IT at a paper mill in East Bumville, I really had to make a conscious effort to unlearn the conversational vernacular that I had picked up over the last few years.
Oh, and I believe the correct expression is "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?"
Though many experts in the area make it policy to inform the vendor, some vendors respond in wildly inappropriate ways. Some simply ignore it, others will contact law enforcement authorities believing that they are being blackmailed. And yes indeed, some security conscious people have been arrested for trying to do "the right thing."
It is rare that security flaws like these are announced in this way. I find it more likely that someone attempted to contact Oracle on the matter and the message didn't get to the right eyes or ears and was discarded. Now they are simply claiming to have no knowledge of being prior informed... or maybe just as likely, they were adequately informed and they simply did nothing about it. Microsoft is well known for doing that. There have been exploitable flaws in their OSes for years that have not been patched. Ultimately, I find it more likely that they were informed and for whatever reason did not act on it.
It's best to report it to the vendor/maintainer first and give them 30 days to fix it, but even then you're probably better off remaining as anonymous as possible or someone may be knocking on your door before you know it.
I'd comment on the absurdity of your comment, but it's much more fun to point out to trolls that their grammar stinks.
It's "might not have caught it", although, we all expect trolls to have the linguistic skills of neanderthals.
I hate printers.
It could of been a standard kdawson article were we were given a link to a blog which linked to the zdnet or more likly wired article.
you should panic if it's for weblogic. Your oracle databases are not open to the Internet. But weblogic, or especially this buggy plugin in your apache, is!
That means: potentially free access to your webserver!
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
"True, but if people got paid for reporting vulnerabilities they would be more inclined to report them to Oracle."
Actually, I think it would make security researchers (white hat) and 'security researchers' (black hat) far more likely to not contact Oracle with full details as they may have in the past, and instead tell Oracle "we've found a vulnerability. For $100,000 we will tell you what it is. For $0 we will tell... other ...interested parties." ( where other interested parties may be baddies or the public at large; either way rather undesirable. )
I'm not saying that everybody would suddenly get dollarsigns in the eyes - but certainly many would be tempted.. given that this would essentially be legal extortion.
I remember coming in every other morning in the office to restart our oracle concurrent manager servers because they had mysteriously gone haywire somewhere between their backend and apache interface.
I remember teams of expensive consultants, weeks without sleep and 24/hr oncall in order to restart crashed IStore servers
this was when i worked for a certain popular bed company. i also remember our oracle DBA's primary solution being to "reboot all the oracle servers" when something was wrong. his "learn oracle from oracle" book clenched firmly in hand. I remember the database running as a privileged user with full passwordless sudo, as per our oracle reps insistence. i remember files stored at access 777 and no one caring. more power to the 0-day exploits. people need to know this software isnt indestructible just because marketing says it is.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The poster was talking about reporting security vulnerabilities, not breaking into systems. You seem to have a problem with reading.
Your DBA's didn't know what they were doing. Was this an Oracle sales rep or a technical consultant? They were clueless too - there is NO reason to run the Oracle database in that way. I can't speak to the Istore or concurrent manager stuff, but if their lack of knowledge on the core database product was this bad, I can only imagine...
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Did anyone actually drill through the article to the fix?
The exploit is in BEA WebLogic server, not in the Oracle database. BEA is a web application server company that Oracle acquired about 2 months ago.
Wow - run from that job. Seriously, it sounds like no one there had a clue.
Oracle may suck, but it does run relatively securely (as does any other DB) if you follow proper procedures.
We had hot-failover oracle DB servers running in a 5 9s configuration for 3 years without any unscheduled downtime. There was no need to patch the DB because it was fully firewalled from everything except the application servers, and we could patch those in sequence without bringing down the entire system, or customers even realizing that we were doing so.
The entire point is that you can make anything secure, yes, even MS products with the possible exception of IIS/ASP apps, with proper system architecture design coupled with software architecture and application coding. Some are more onerous (MS) to do so. Some might require validating, security, and filtering front-ends to do so, but anything can be made relatively "secure". Note that doing so may limit certain types of functionality and access, so it becomes a balancing act of functionality vs security.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Though many experts in the area make it policy to inform the vendor, some vendors respond in wildly inappropriate ways. Some simply ignore it, others will contact law enforcement authorities believing that they are being blackmailed. And yes indeed, some security conscious people have been arrested for trying to do "the right thing."
I'm surprised this bug wasn't handled through the Zero Day Initiative. The researcher gets paid, TippingPoint runs interference on any legal bullying, responsible disclosure happens, TippingPoint gets a market advantage.
The only way this isn't win-win-win is if your goal is to embarrass the vendor.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Where the exploit code runs? Apache web tier because the BOF is in mod_wl OR on the App Server Tier because mod_wl packages the exploit up, hands it to WebLogic, and says "here you go, run this" ?
My jaw hit the desk when I saw the technique used to overload the array boundries. Write "." chars to the socket until the write fails? Thats really crashing apache/BEA ??? Ya'll should set a maxRequestSize of less than the upper bound of the array now, ya hear?
Stereotype much? Some women I know swear like sailors...
Damn it, now I have to get my irony meter recalibrated. You just pegged it.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
this is an article about an exploit in the BEA Weblogic J2EE Server, which until very recently had nothing to do with Oracle (the company)
If the software sucks so much, maybe they shouldn't have bought it.
(Note to those with a high input impedance, the above is called hyperbole. I don't know a thing about BEA WebLogic J2EE server, other than that I'm sure it's expensive. The point is that when a company purchases another company, they're taking on obligations with it. This is Oracle Inc's problem.)
(I agree that clarifying that this isn't Oracle-the-product in The Summary would have been a good thing.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Where the code is available, it looks like those buffer overflows are in C code of the Java implementation. Glue code between Java and some C component usually seems to be the problem.
I think this was moderated at least once in every category. Keep in mind that there is no "-1:Disagree".
I was using a list because I needed fast random insertion/removal, since it was for game entities which could be created/destroyed at any time. An array would have been crazy slow without doing some sort of funky hashing. Also, as it was for game entities, I didn't need random access. I'd be iterating over the list once per frame and adding/removing.
Then you don't need a list as much as an unordered set (C++ std::hash_set, Python set, Java HashSet).