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40 Windows Apps Said To Contain Critical Bug
CWmike writes "About 40 different Windows applications contain a critical flaw that can be used by attackers to hijack PCs and infect them with malware, says HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and creator of the open-source Metasploit penetration-testing toolkit. Gregg Keizer reports that the bug was patched by Apple in its iTunes software for Windows four months ago, but remains in more than three dozen other Windows programs. Moore did not reveal the names of the vulnerable applications or their makers, however. Each affected program will have to be patched separately. Moore first hinted at the widespread bug in a message on Twitter on Wednesday. 'The cat is out of the bag, this issue affects about 40 different apps, including the Windows shell,' he tweeted, then linked to an advisory published by Acros, a Slovenian security firm."
Only 40? That's definitely an improvement over the 7 year old Linux exploit that was only just fixed where any GUI app could gain root access.
So there are forty unknown applications with an unknown flaw that results in code execution. This sounds like it includes web browsers (given the references to 'viewing a web page' in the article), but it doesn't specify which. It also doesn't specify what sort of file(s) (except in the case of iTunes -- a 'media file') are affected.
So what're we supposed to do? There's no detail here, not even cursory detail, on what filetypes or applications to avoid. I'm fine with no details on the innermost workings of this exploit being widely disseminated, but why announce it with such fanfare if there's not even a way to avoid exposing yourself (i.e., listing these supposed '40 applications')?
Exactly... I am dubious on Windows security, but I use Windows boxes all the time without issue due to basic security precautions and basic common sense.
(Yes I realize most users do not have either)
A lot of people need to learn the phrase : "Common sense is not so common".
Or Joe Sixpack visits a website with a Flash applet, and there happens to be a vulnerability in Flash player that allows those applets to issue requests directly to the X server. Or, Joe Sixpack opens a PDF file using acroread, and there is a vulnerability in acroread. Or any number of other vulnerabilities; all an attack needs is to be able to issue requests directly to the X server.
It really was not a trivial, uninteresting bug. It was a serious security problem for desktop Linux users that had been around for years.
Palm trees and 8
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/i686/kernel26/
Patched on 8/13, new kernel package on 8/14. I'm not concerned. And slower-updating distros generally have a security team to patch these kinds of things into their current kernel release.
Don't run X as root. Who does that these days?
KMS, bitches.
You misunderstand. The Xorg bug doesn't require a malicious GUI app; it just requires a perfectly normal GUI app with an exploitable vulnerability. So if OpenOffice.org (or Acrobat Reader, or Firefox, or any other document viewer) has a flaw which can be exploited by a malicious document, the Xorg bug turns that into a privilege-escalation vulnerability, circumventing not only the normal permission mechanisms but also tools such as SELinux sandboxes (which protect against malicious code running in the sandboxed user application, not the X server).
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I'd say that putting any OS on the Internet without a reasonable firewall is a poor idea, the exception being a laptop [1] just out of necessity. Yes, most operating systems are hardened, but what brings the bugs are the applications that run on them. This is why having a hardened machine with as little running on it as possible is essential between the general purpose computers and the rest of the Internet.
[1]: I have seen tiny embedded Linux adapters just bigger than an Ethernet plug. Why can't laptop makers build a tiny firewalling router into one of those and mount it on the motherboard? This way, it doesn't matter what OS is, attacks from remote will be minimized, and one could configure it to disallow outgoing ports (such as port 25) that the laptop shouldn't ever need to go out on. I'm sure similar functionality can be done for Wi-Fi. As an added bonus, if a machine gets DoS-ed, it won't be the main CPU that has to sort out the offending packets, but the one on the built in firewall.
What you're saying is that Linux is totally bulletproof, as long as you run it as much as possible like an iPhone -- trusting only applications that your OS provider says are okay, and that it's not reasonable to examine it in a situation where that's not the case.
How is installing applications from the repos anything like using an iPhone? With Linux, I can install any application I want from anywhere I want as long as it's compatible (just like most other OS's). I can compile from source, write and run my own code on it, whatever floats my boat. I and most other Linux users get most of our software from the repositories because 99 percent of anything you'd want to install is in there and the packages in the repos are generally well tested to work with the system you are using. It would be foolish to not use them. With the iPhone, unless you jailbreak it, you're locked in. That's a walled garden. No Linux distro I've ever used has worked like that at all.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.