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92% of Windows PCs Vulnerable To Zero-Day Attacks On Flash
CWmike writes "More than 9 out of every 10 Windows users are vulnerable to the Flash zero-day vulnerability that Adobe won't patch until Thursday, Danish security company Secunia says. According to Secunia, 92% of the 900,000 users who have recently run the company's Personal Software Inspector (PSI) utility have Flash Player 10 on their PCs, while 31% have Flash Player 9. (The total exceeds 100% because some users have installed both.) The most-current versions of Flash Player — 9.0.159.0 and 10.0.22.87) — are vulnerable to hackers conducting drive-by attacks hosted on malicious and legitimate-but-compromised sites. Antivirus vendors have reported hundreds, in some cases thousands, of sites launching drive-bys against Flash."
Well at least the iPhone is safe...
Will Flash just die already! We have the video tag, IE users can suck it up as well. FlashBlock for Firefox, but what to use for Chrome?
The noscript author is an assclown who silently enables ads (And disables noscript) for his own financial advantage.
Sounds like someone doesn't keep current on events, as this problem was worked on some months ago.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
This makes FlashBlock all the more useful. No flash that I don't explicitly enable ever runs in my browser, which should stop these drive-by attacks in their tracks (unless they somehow infect flash objects I would normally allow, instead of injecting a new "hidden" object into the hacked sites).
The fix to all Flash problems lies here on Adobe's own web site: How to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control.
is like RealNetworks was years ago.
The only difference is that when Real started raping people's computers it was replaced.
Browsing the web without a few browser mods is the only to surf these days anyway.
Yeah. When I read this headline my first impression was "should I try to act surprised?"
This is just history repeating itself. Even if it required an NDA, if Adobe were smart they'd try to hire the OpenBSD folks to audit their code as they're obviously not capable of securing it themselves.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I've always said(for years) that Flash would be the killer infection vector and that its cross platform ubiquity would be the Achilles heel for Linux and Mac.
This is but a taste of things to come. Flash is an abomination. It has too much power with too little end user control over that power. Combined with its insanely large install base and you have disaster waiting to happen.
I'm not sorry for being right all the time. So suck it!
The noscript author is an assclown who silently enables ads (And disables noscript) for his own financial advantage.
He admitted his error and has stopped doing this. See this link. The very first line? "I screwed up. Big time."
Any fool can make a mistake. It takes some guts to admit it, correct it, and try to move on especially in public like that. For that reason I do not count myself among the folks who still want to figuratively crucify him.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Capable? I'm sure they could, I just get the distinct feeling that they don't feel like doing it. Which would be fairly typical, MS for instance likes to get angry when people mention the fact that they've been taking months to patch a serious vulnerability. Admittedly you don't want a patch to cause another vulnerability, but how long does it really take to get a proper fix?
You should get that lisp checked out.
I am the lawn!
Capable? I'm sure they could, I just get the distinct feeling that they don't feel like doing it. Which would be fairly typical, MS for instance likes to get angry when people mention the fact that they've been taking months to patch a serious vulnerability. Admittedly you don't want a patch to cause another vulnerability, but how long does it really take to get a proper fix?
If the FOSS community is any indication, it takes anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days after the vulnerability is disclosed.
I am surprised how Microsoft often gets a pass on these issues, considering the vast resources at their command and the fact that Windows is a monoculture so their mistakes simultaneously affect millions of people. Most FOSS software is written by a "rag-tag band" by comparison, so why isn't Microsoft held to a higher standard of responsibility?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
FlashBlock stops Flash from running after a second or two. Some of the remote code still runs. This may be enough time for an attack to get through.
I was under the impression that it replaced the flash objects in the page's DOM before Firefox gets chance to call the plugin. I'll have to see if I can't verify that...
Do you have a link for that? The info I've read suggests otherwise. AFAIK, Flashbock blocks Flash completely before the page even loads, although this suggests a bypass is very easy.
If it were an actual mistake, then I would agree with you. It wasn't an error.
He purposefully did it and when he got caught he then apologized for it. What I'm saying is, if nobody said anything, he'd still be doing it.
Um, if your operating system is fucking brittle that a Flash update brings it down, then you've got really huge problems.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"A critical vulnerability exists in the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems" (emphasis added.)
TFA only mentions Windows because they don't bother scanning Macs or Linux boxes.
You know ...
I hate Adobe software.
There, I said it.
Photoshop is buggy. Premiere is often weird and arcane. Flash and Reader have had some NASTY security holes of late. Reader is a painfully source resource pig. Adobe is at least a year late in releasing a 64 bit version of Flash (outside of the Linux beta).
You know you're in trouble when freakin' MicroSoft is putting out better software.
Adobe's releasing one awful update after another. They seem to lack the resources and expertise to maintain a huge portfolio of overly-ambitious software on a wide variety of platforms. They just can't seem to get anything right with their free (as in beer) software from a security, and sometimes even usability, standpoint.
Dear god.
Request to Adobe: if you want to be the gateway for rich content on the 'net, please realize what's at stake if you fsck things up. By botching security, you're putting millions of people at risk for having their lives turned upside down by thieves and fraudsters. You're releasing the digital equivalent of Pintos. Please start fixing your mess.
People get pissed when Open Source patches break things too.
The difference is that in the Open Source world things tend to be more modular so making a change isn't as likely to cause unintended side affects.
Flash is now among the top attack vectors for Windows, and it isn't even covered by Windows Update.
There were 23 reported security issues in the last 2 years, including at least 4 browse-and-get-owned vulnerabilities.
In comparison, Silverlight has had no security bulletins since its 1.0 release (it's now at 3.0).
This may be just yet another reason to migrate to Silverlight, especially for intranet applications.
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
as this problem was worked on some months ago.
It's not a "problem" that can be "worked on". It's the character of the author. As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
The character of the author of NoScript is that of the authors of
1) adware (redirecting to his ad-laden website with each meaningless update and preventing you from blocking these ads)
2) spyware/malware (changing configuration without the user's consent).
He admitted his error
You're kidding us right? Look up the definition of the word "error" and compare it with the definitions of the words "willful", "deliberate" and "intent".
An interesting approach, using IP addresses as version numbers
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Um, if your operating system is fucking brittle that a Flash update brings it down, then you've got really huge problems.
Huh. The post you're replying to is talking about Windows updates, not Flash, because the discussion got sidetracked at some point. I haven't heard of a Flash update bringing down Windows, except maybe if it messes with boot.ini or MBR or system files. I would imagine the same thing would happen in Linux or OS X.
Now if you're talking about Flash vulnerabilities in Windows, remember that OS X/Linux is similarly exploitable through Flash.
From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/adobe_flash_attacks_go_wild/
In an advisory that was updated after this article was published, Adobe says the "vulnerability exists in the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems."
The company expects to release an update fixing Flash in Windows, OS X and Unix on July 30 and fixing Acrobat and Reader on those same three platforms on July 31.
This space for rent.
WRONG on many levels. If you're not running as admin, only your user files will get affected in all the current OSes including XP. But IE8 on Windows 7/Vista does sandboxing and hence is more secure than Firefox on Ubuntu out of the box. Don't believe me? Read is straight from the horse's mouth. http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2941
Why Safari? Why didnâ(TM)t you go after IE or Safari?
Itâ(TM)s really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit. The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs donâ(TM)t do. Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You donâ(TM)t have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations youâ(TM)d find in Windows.
Itâ(TM)s more about the operating system than the (target) program. Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too. The underlying OS doesnâ(TM)t have anti-exploit stuff built into it.
[ SEE: 10 questions for MacBook hacker Dino Dai Zovi ]
With my Safari exploit, I put the code into a process and I know exactly where itâ(TM)s going to be. Thereâ(TM)s no randomization. I know when I jump there, the code is there and I can execute it there. On Windows, the code might show up but I donâ(TM)t know where it is. Even if I get to the code, itâ(TM)s not executable. Those are two hurdles that Macs donâ(TM)t have.
Itâ(TM)s clear that all three browsers (Safari, IE and Firefox) have bugs. Code execution holes everywhere. But thatâ(TM)s only half the equation. The other half is exploiting it. Thereâ(TM)s almost no hurdle to jump through on Mac OS X.
This space for rent.
the exploit demo they link to does not work in 3.5, so it seems the bypass gap was closed...
Wait a minute, you mean errors can't be willful ? So if someone does something willfully, deliberately and with an intent, he can't later realise his mistake and make amends ? I think you need to review your position on this.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
It's not a "problem" that can be "worked on". It's the character of the author. As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
That's a pretty dismal view of human nature. I, on the other hand, believe people can change.
--Bruce
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
If by "decent", you simply mean, "holds your archaic worldview", I suppose...
The notion that people's character is set in stone at birth is laughably absurd.
The character of the author of NoScript is that of the authors of
1) adware (redirecting to his ad-laden website with each meaningless update and preventing you from blocking these ads)
2) spyware/malware (changing configuration without the user's consent).
How about:
3) people who make mistakes.
The real "test of character" isn't whether he made a mistake, but what he does about it afterwards. So far, he seems to have responded appropriately, which shows good character, actually.
No decent psychologist I know of would ascribe personality (of which character is a part of) to inborn traits, disregarding experience and environment. Character as an inborn trait is an asinine idea: neither the behaviorist nor the biopsychologist would take that statement seriously.
Don't believe me? Read is straight from the horse's mouth
Wish I could, but it appears to be highly trademarked.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Let's not let the facts get in the way of rabid fanboyism! After all, Linux is 100%, completely secure! There are magical GPL fairies in the kernel that protect it from any and all attacks, even when the app in question is from a 3rd party.
A computer worm that spreads through Flash and PDFs on PCs without the latest security updates is posing a growing threat to users blitheringly stupid enough to still think Windows is not ridiculously and unfixably insecure by design.
1) This vulnerability exists on OSX, Windows, and Linux.
2) The annual pwn2own competition, among others, shows that Linux and Windows are similarly secure and OSX is much less secure. OSX goes down first every year, while Windows and Linux both last until later days of the competition when more direct access to the systems is granted to the contestants.
A Windows machine is more likely to be compromised, but that's because of market share. "Insecure by design" implies that you're talking about the security of the OS against someone who wants to compromise it. It's proven every year that only OSX lags in this area, and it lags quite badly (this year's winner rated the difficulty of compromising Vista and Linux as a 9-10, and the difficulty of breaking into OSX as a 3, IIRC).
3) Goto 1)
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Flashblock will not save you from this vulnerability. Flashblock only blocks flash objects in your internet browser (firefox/seamonkey.) This attack uses flash objects embedded in pdf documents which are handled by Adobe Reader. Now, who decided it was a good idea to allow pdf documents to have flash embedded in them?
Because a "rag-tag band" doesn't have to QA their source change against an entire operating system? Remember how people tend to get pissed when MS releases patches that break functionality?
So if I understand you correctly, you are saying this is an unfair comparison, like comparing an apple and an orange.
I disagree because the concern you have raised applies to every general-purpose operating system on the planet. Certainly the software license (MS EULA or GPL) does not change this situation. If a bug is found in the Linux kernel or an important piece of userspace software, the people who patch it also have the same concerns about whether their fix is going to break anything else. So, I am satisfied that we are comparing an orange to an orange. We are still without a good explanation as to why the entity with superior resources and superior manpower is not doing the better job.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I wonder how true that really is.
Microsoft take so long to produce patches because they have to do a huge amount of testing. The figure they gave was something like 250 versions of Internet Explorer, when you take in to account every OS, every architecture, every language, every service pack level and so on that it runs on. I don't know if they test them all, but the implication was that extensive testing to avoid breaking the Elbonian language version running on Windows XP N SP2 took far longer than developing the patch itself.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating delaying security patches to check for compatibility. It makes more sense to fix the vulnerability immediately and stop people getting infected, even if you break certain configurations in the short term. What I question is the proposition that OS software, perhaps by virtue of being more compartmentalised, is somehow less prone to this sort of thing, as opposed to simply doing the right thing even if it breaks stuff.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is something that can be detected and stopped by Antivirus software, right? Since my Avast! updates every day, if it can protect me against this Flash vulnerability, then it shouldn't matter to me when Adobe issues the patch.
These bloated plugins seem to also be responsible for 80%-ish of the crashes I have in Mozilla.
They are the big weakness of the web: what if someone decides to start putting a non-standard format out there that becomes a de facto standard because it's the easiest way to do something?
Flash seems to be the easiest way to put up an animation.
PDF is the best format for distributing documents that you don't necessarily want others to edit.
No one wants to explore alternatives because the content is in these somewhat unwieldy formats.
Futurist Traditionalism
as this problem was worked on some months ago.
It's not a "problem" that can be "worked on". It's the character of the author. As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
The character of the author of NoScript is that of the authors of
1) adware (redirecting to his ad-laden website with each meaningless update and preventing you from blocking these ads)
2) spyware/malware (changing configuration without the user's consent).
trifish: I'm getting quick on the Citation Neededs. I know from firsthand experience that people can and do change. So please, please rattle off some quotations or links providing evidence to support your theory that people can't change their "character."
The MAZZTer: I would just like to inform you that there are are entries in the about:config menu that allow you to turn off the first run "pop-op." I'm not sure that your "NoScript whitelisting NoScript" is a legit complaint, as you are capable of removing that, and I see nothing unethical about a software provider whitelisting their own site in their own software.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
I'm on 3.0.11 and it didn't even work...
I've seen the video I'm headed for frequently flash on the screen before Flashblock takes it out (Gentoo Linux here).
I noticed in early July that my Kubuntu 8.10 machine started showing corruption in the EXT3 filesystems, and it seemed to happen everytime I used Firefox (which had Flash installed). I finally got so sick of restoring from backups that I rebuilt a totally new Kubuntu 9.04 image, without Firefox. I now run Firefox in VirtualBox, using a sandboxed image of Kubuntu 9.04. This has stopped the filesystem corruption in the host OS, but I continue to see EXT3 corruption in the sandboxed Firefox with Flash. It's beginning to look very sensible to use 3 virtual machines for browsing the web now. Green Sandbox for just my banks. Yellow Sandbox for email and Paypal, and Red Sandbox for everything else (including Slashdot). Even with Noscript, the Red Sandbox gets dirty still, and needs rolling back to the initial snapshot. I haven't run rootkit detection or virus scanning yet, but I'm beginning to believe that integrated intrusion detection will be the next Great Thing (tm) for virtual machines. Charlie Stross thought about this years ago in Accelerando. It's worth a read.
I read the linked interview, and then I read a few other related things and while that's certainly cause for concern, the real question is, why do we continually read about windows zombie nets, windows holes, etc.? To my knowledge there has only been one botnet on OS X, and even that required you to download a pirated version of some software and install it --and as far as I know, that vector for attack has been in continuous use for windows machines since windows 3.1.
If Apple has about 8-10% of the usage share of PCs, shouldn't 8-10% of the stories we read be about OS X vulnerabilities? We almost never see them. As others in this thread have noted, this particular vulernability in this article is across the board, linux, os X and windows, so I'll give you that one and that OS X vulnerabilities may be underreported. But I'm not the first to observe this and various theories I've read include that Apple sells more laptops that are inherently mobile thus unattractive to malware writers, the vulnerability writing software hasn't been written for OS X yet, Apple tends to patch things more quickly, and that Apple is more litigious so nobody wants to talk about any found vulnerabilities. I don't think any of these things are really on the mark though. Maybe the virus writers just buy commodity hardware and don't want to bother spending the extra money for a mac.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
So far, he seems to have responded appropriately, which shows good character, actually.
*good* character would have been not doing it in the first place. he's only responding because he got caught, not because he feels he was wrong.
I stopped reading there. Obviously a slow news day.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The CanSecWest Pwn2own competition has been organized 3 times. The first event in 2007 was called "hack-a-Mac" as the competition was about hacking a into MacOSX present on the network. User level access was gained on the second day as the organizers changed the rules and let people try to hack Safari instead as noone succeded in the original contest.
The second 2008 pwn2own contest featured Vista, MacOSX 10.2.5 and Ubuntu. Both the Mac and the Vista computer were hacked into in this contest - the Mac first through a flaw in Safari on the second day and the Vista on the third day through a (windows specific) flaw in Adobe Flash.
The third contest in 2009 focused on browsers. During the first session every browser except Google Chrome were hacked. Safari was the first to be exploited by chance of a draw as contestants where chosen by a random process. IE and Firefox was also hacked at similar stages in this contest.
So - how many times has "OSX" been hacked in the CanSecWest contest? Exactly as many times as Vista or Windows 7 has been.
As for your "quote" - in fact this years winner stated that MacOSX was still the safest operating system.
Now - is CanSecWest a good indicator of whether an OS is "secure" or not? What is usually not stated is that one of the rules of this competition is that no known exploit can be used. Windows can have dozens of zero-day exploits and can yet escape unscathed from this competition. Firefox can have a (hypothetically) stellar security history and yet be "hacked in seconds". Claiming security based on these rules are exceedingly stupid.
So your hateboy statement that "It's proven every year that only OSX lags in this area" is simply disingenuous.
What is shocking though is that your post - which is so full of actual faults and reeks of hateboyism - gets modded +5 insightful. I guess it is a good indicator of the current sorry state of Slashdot.
Flash is a ongoing security nightmare. Users demand the functionality but don't understand or care about the security cost.
Flash is one abomination that should be put out of its misery ASAP.
I would highly suspect by now the entire eco-system involved in an average patch in FOSS software is very much outstripping the resources of MS. At least on the eyeball side. What does MS put at any given problem a few hundred or a few thousand programmers? Yea, there might be a whole lot more people in the marketing spin department, but they don't really count as helpful.
It is not just the guys around one project, a particular writer in FOSS that vets the patch. It is the entire community of hundreds of different distros, sub-projects, individual users, and so on that vet a patch or change and decide to include it, ignore it, put it on the shelf, and push changes back up the food chain as problems are found.
I consider myself to be fairly much an end user of FOSS, but perhaps leaning more on the power users side of things. I remember a bug in a early development release of Firefox I found. From the time it was released, to the time I found it, verified it, and went to report it, was less than 30 mins. Guess what? 100 other people found it, 10 proposed patches had been submitted, and the best was already accepted and in to the next version a full 15 mins earlier than me. That is just normal in FOSS.
No one can tell me a company with massive bureaucracy of rules and procedures would be able to mobilize anything at that speed. It likly takes them a week just to get authorization to look at the source code they wrote from the legal department.
Living in Chile
2) The annual pwn2own competition, among others, shows that Linux and Windows are similarly secure and OSX is much less secure. OSX goes down first every year, while Windows and Linux both last until later days of the competition when more direct access to the systems is granted to the contestants.
First, I don't understand why this myth keeps appearing. Ubuntu is the only one that came out without being cracked.
Second, pwn2own shows what can happen if someone specifically targets your machine. No system is unbreakable to a truly determined and resourceful attacker, and nobody claims Linux is magically untouchable to such a concerted effort.
But that kind of targetted attack is not really what people care about when talking about general desktop security, is it? Nobody is targetting your mother's Windows machine, specifically. Her machine gets infected because trojans, viruses, and other malware is absurdly easy to pick up on the Windows platform just by going about her day to day work.
The thousands of exploits and vectors documented in Windows are of far more consequence to the average user than a focussed attack by a dedicated hacker deliberately trying to get into that specific machine. pwn2own demonstrates the latter threat, which is of no real concern to most users. It says nothing about the former threat, by far the more dangerous.
A Windows machine is more likely to be compromised, but that's because of market share.
This is such a tired argument. There are millions of LAMP stacks out there sitting on fat pipes. You think hackers and spammers wouldn't love to get their hands on those? The ones under my control get hammered all day, every day.
"Market Share" has nothing to do with the primary vector I notice plagues users either: Getting new apps. In any modern "desktop" disto, you get software out of a respository, which has been examined, vetted, and verified. If something's wrong with the package it won't get into the repo, and if it does, someone's going to notice quickly. It's not 100% foolproof but it's pretty damned great.
But Windows users don't have that option. Instead they scour the web looking for software which might do what they want, sift through the crippled versions, the trial versions, etc, and download a compeltely unknown binary from an unknown source, and run it. BIG SURPRISE, many of these come bundled with little extras -- trojans, adware, toolbars, and other party favors. Next thing you know the hapless Windows user is calling you to complain about how slow their computer is...
This is not a marketshare issue, it is one of many fundamental differences in the approach and structure of Windows versus Linux. If some genie made it such that Ubuntu had 90% marketshare tomorrow, that 90% of users would still be using Synaptic, and the 10% Windows users would still be downloading random executables from the web.
1) This vulnerability exists on OSX, Windows, and Linux.
As far as I can tell it exists on any platform where Flash is installed. It's not really an OS problem (though this is debatable, I guess), but an application problem. Though, the Zealot in me just has to point out that this is what happens when you deal with closed software. Now we're all waiting around twiddling our thumbs hoping Adobe will get off their butts and do something about this, because nobody else can.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.