Security

The H-Online: As previously announced, Microsoft has released seven bulletins to close a total of 23 vulnerabilities on its May Patch Tuesday. The total number of bulletins belies the scope of the patches, however, as the combined update MS12-034 closes various holes in numerous products. The reason for this is a critical hole in the code for processing TrueType fonts that was exploited by the Duqu spyware last year. The hole was closed in the Windows kernel on the December Patch Tuesday; however, Microsoft has since used a code scanner to track down the vulnerable code in numerous other components; among them is the gdiplus.dll library, which is used by various browsers to render web fonts. ...

The H-Online: The updates to PHP versions 5.3.12 and 5.4.2 released on Thursday do not fully resolve the vulnerability that was accidentally disclosed on Reddit, according to the discoverer of the flaw. The bug in the way CGI and PHP interact with each other leads to a situation where attackers can execute code on affected servers. The issue remained undiscovered for eight years. The best protection at present is offered by setting up filter rules on the web server. However, the RewriteRule workaround described on PHP.net is also, according to security expert Christopher Kunz, inadequate. He suggests a slightly modified form of the rule as an alternative. ...

The H-Online: Adobe has released a security advisory relating to an object confusion vulnerability which allows an attacker to crash the player or take control of an affected system. Adobe says that there are reports of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild as part of targeted email-based attacks which trick the user into clicking on a malicious file; this exploit only targets Flash Player on Internet Explorer on Windows, though the vulnerability exists on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Android versions of the player. ...

The H-Online: Google has released a new update to the stable 18.x branch of its Chrome web browser to close a number of security holes found in the application. The update, labelled 18.0.1025.168, addresses a total of five vulnerabilities, three of which are rated as “high severity” by the company. These include use-after-free problems in floating point handling and the XML parser; all of these bugs were detected using the AddressSanitizer. As part of its Chromium Security Vulnerability Rewards program, Google paid a security researcher by the name of “miaubiz”, who is number three in the company’s Security Hall of Fame, $1,000 for discovering and reporting one of the float handling problems. Two medium risk problems related to IPC validation and a race condition in sandbox IPC have also been corrected. ...

The H-Online: According to a blog post, a modified version of the Skype VoIP software can be used to easily find out the IP address of any valid Skype user. No contact has to be made with the user in order to get the information. This IP could then be used to find out other personal details about the user, such as their location or even their employer. With a certain registry key, the manipulated version of Skype will create a log file with information including other users’ external and internal IP addresses. These IPs can be retrieved simply by opening up a user’s profile with the Skype client. In a test conducted by The H’s associates at heise Security, the log file always showed the correct IPs – and when a user was logged in with multiple clients, the IP addresses for all the clients were visible. ...

Cnet: Forrester’s CEO isn’t the only one spouting doom and gloom for Apple today. Now Eugene Kaspersky, the CEO of security firm Kaspersky Lab, says Apple is headed for a rough patch. However, this one’s in the world of computer security, and he says Apple is already getting into the thick of it. Speaking to Computer Business Review at Info Security 2012 show in London this week, Kaspersky said that when it comes to computer security, Apple’s Mac platform was a decade behind Microsoft‘s, and that it’s got some things to learn from its rival. ...

Facebook and security. Is it a marriage that has any legs? The social networking giant today announced its partnership with a number of security vendors. A Facebook blogger writes: Nothing is more important to us than the safety of the people who use Facebook, and the security of their data…That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the Antivirus Marketplace and welcome Microsoft, McAfee, TrendMicro, Sophos, and Symantec to the Facebook Security family. ...

The H-Security: The Ruby development team has published an update to the 1.9.3 series of its open source programming language to fix a vulnerability found in the RubyGems package management framework. The maintenance release of the scripting language, labelled 1.9.3-p194, updates RubyGems to close a security hole that caused SSL server verification to fail for remote repositories. This has been addressed by disallowing redirects from https to http connections and by enabling the verification of server SSL certificates in an updated version of RubyGems, 1.8.23; more details on these issues are provided in the latest RubyGems History file. The developers encourage those who use https source in .gemrc or /etc/gemrc to upgrade as soon as possible. ...

The H-Security: The developers of the popular open source blog engine WordPress have released a security update for the software. WordPress 3.3.2 fixes unspecified bugs in three external file upload libraries used in the software and other security problems with the application. The bugs affect both WordPress’s current file uploading library Plupload as well as the SWFUpload and SWFObject libraries; these were bundled with older versions of the application and might still be in use by certain plugins on the current versions of WordPress. The developers did not go into detail about the specifics of the security holes but thanked three people from the WordPress community for responsibly disclosing them. Three more fixes address a privilege escalation in the blog engine’s multi-site system and two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in the core components of WordPress. More details on all of these patches and also some additional smaller fixes can be found in the change log. ...

The H-Online: As expected, Apple has released an updated version of the Java implementation for its Mac OS X operating system that includes a removal tool for the Flashback trojan. According to the company, the update, labelled “Java for OS X 2012-003“, finds and removes the “most common variants” of the malware which had infected approximately 600,000 systems using flaws in the previous version of Java. Additionally, the new Java update for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion prevents Java applets from being automatically executed by disabling the Java web plugin by default. Users can re-enable the automatic execution of Java applets via the Java Preferences application (Applications ➤ Utilities ➤ Java Preferences). However, if the plugin detects that Java applets have not been run for “an extended period of time”, it will automatically disable applet support again. ...