Remote Exim Exploit In the Wild
An anonymous reader sends word of a remote exploit in the wild against the Exim mail agent. The news comes on the exim mailing list, where a user posted that he had his exim install hacked via remote exploit giving the attacker the privilege of the mailnull user, which can lead to other possible attacks. A note up at the Internet Storm Center reminds exim users how to set up to run in unprivileged mode, and a commenter includes recompile instructions for Debian exim for added safety. The security press hasn't picked up on this story so far.
http://www.exim.org/lurker/message/20101210.071922.233697ac.en.html
"Paul Fisher and I have successfully run the exploit against a copy of
Exim running in a debugger on debian lenny, and we believe it utilizes
this bug:
http://bugs.exim.org/show_bug.cgi?id=787
It was fixed in 4.70, but not in the version currently in debian
stable.
James E. Blair
UC Berkeley"
It is to the four people who actually succeeded at getting exim to run.
Caveat Utilitor
Debian released patches this morning for it.
exim4 (4.69-9+lenny1) stable-security; urgency=high
* Non-maintainer upload by the Security Team.
* Fix SMTP file descriptors being leaked to processes invoked with ${run...}
* Fix memory corruption issue in string_format(). CVE-2010-4344
* Fix potential memory pool corruption issue in internal_lsearch_find().
-- Stefan Fritsch Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:25:07 +0100
Bet you never thought you'd read that in response to a security announcement. :)