Hackers exploit critical IE bug; Microsoft promises patch

Microsoft today said that hackers are exploiting a critical, but unpatched, vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), and that its engineers are working on an update to plug the hole.

As it often does, the company downplayed the threat.

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"There are only reports of a limited number of targeted attacks specifically directed at Internet Explorer 8 and 9, although the issue could potentially affect all supported versions," Dustin Childs, a manager in the Trustworthy Computing group and its usual spokesman, said in a blog post Tuesday morning.

"We are actively working to develop a security update to address this issue," Childs added.

According to Childs and the security advisory Microsoft also published today, the vulnerability affects all supported versions of IE, from the 12-year-old IE6 to the not-yet-officially-released IE11, the browser that will accompany Windows 8.1 when it ships Oct. 18.

"There is no escaping this one," said Andrew Storms, director of DevOps at cloud security vendor CloudPassage, referring to the bug affecting all versions of Microsoft's browser. "IE zero-days are never a good thing, especially when they affect every version," Storms added.

Although Microsoft's advisory did not put it in these terms, the vulnerability can be exploited using classic "drive-by" attack tactics. That means hackers need only lure victims running IE to malicious sites -- or legitimate websites that have previously been compromised and loaded with attack code -- to hijack their browser and plant malware on their Windows PCs.

Until Microsoft produces a patch, the company offered customers several options to protect themselves, including advice on configuring EMET 4.0 and running one of its "Fixit" automated tools to "shim" the DLL that contains the IE rendering engine.

EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit) is a tool designed for advanced users, primarily enterprise IT professionals, that manually enables anti-exploit technologies such as ASLR (address space layout randomization) and DEP (data execution prevention) for specific applications.

But the Fixit route will be easiest for individual users: Microsoft's posted a link to the Fixit tool on its support site, and customers need only click the icon marked "Enable." Microsoft has used the shim approach before when faced with unexpected attacks against IE.

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vBulletin users warned of potential exploit

IDG News Service - The developers of the popular vBulletin commercial Internet forum software are investigating a potential exploit and advised users to delete the "install" directory from their deployments as a precaution.

"A potential exploit vector has been found in the vBulletin 4.1+ and 5+ installation directories," Wayne Luke, technical support lead at vBulletin Solutions, the company that develops the software, announced this week on the vBulletin community forum. "Our developers are investigating this issue at this time. If deemed necessary we will release the necessary patches."

Luke advised users to delete the 'install' directory from their vBulletin installations in order to mitigate the issue that hasn't yet been disclosed. The directory that should be deleted is "/install" for vBulletin 4.1.x versions and "/core/install" for the 5.x versions.

This directory normally contains the scripts and files used during the original installation process and subsequent upgrades.

In the "Cleaning up after Install" section of the vBulletin manual users are advised to delete all files and subdirectories from the "install" directory as a security precaution. However, they are not advised to delete the directory itself.

It's not clear what the exploit currently being investigated would allow potential attackers to do, but the fact that it prompted an advance warning from the developers suggests that it might have serious implications.

Luke declined to disclose information about the nature of the exploit.

"I am sorry but in the interest of security for our customers, we can not discuss this issue at this time," he said Thursday via email.

"Going back to our logs, we dont see any specific scans for /core/install, but we see constant discovery requests for /install," said Daniel Cid, chief security officer at Sucuri, a company that provides website security monitoring and malware clean-up services, in a blog post. "We dont yet know if that is related to vBulletin or other CMSs [content management systems]."

Attackers are constantly trying to exploit vulnerabilities in popular content management systems in order to break into websites, and while vBulletin does not power as many websites as WordPress, Joomla or some other general-purpose CMS software, it is one of the most popular applications for setting up Internet discussion forums.

According to vBulletin Solutions, over 100,000 community websites are running on vBulletin, including some operated by Zynga, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures, NASA, Valve Corporation and other well known companies.

In July, hackers broke into UbuntuForums.org, a community website for the Ubuntu Linux distribution with over 1.8 million registered accounts, and managed to access information about users, including email addresses and password hashes. The site was using vBulletin.

"In summary, the root cause was a combination of a compromised individual account and the configuration settings in vBulletin, the Forums application software," Canonical, the company that operates the site, said in a blog post following the incident.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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vBulletin Internet forum software users warned of potential exploit

The developers of the popular vBulletin commercial Internet forum software are investigating a potential exploit and advised users to delete the “install” directory from their deployments as a precaution.

“A potential exploit vector has been found in the vBulletin 4.1+ and 5+ installation directories,” Wayne Luke, technical support lead at vBulletin Solutions, the company that develops the software, announced this week on the vBulletin community forum. “Our developers are investigating this issue at this time. If deemed necessary we will release the necessary patches.”

Luke advised users to delete the ‘install’ directory from their vBulletin installations in order to mitigate the issue that hasn’t yet been disclosed. The directory that should be deleted is “/install” for vBulletin 4.1.x versions and “/core/install” for the 5.x versions.

This directory normally contains the scripts and files used during the original installation process and subsequent upgrades.

In the “Cleaning up after Install” section of the vBulletin manual users are advised to delete all files and subdirectories from the “install” directory as a security precaution. However, they are not advised to delete the directory itself.

It’s not clear what the exploit currently being investigated would allow potential attackers to do, but the fact that it prompted an advance warning from the developers suggests that it might have serious implications.

Luke declined to disclose information about the nature of the exploit.

“I am sorry but in the interest of security for our customers, we can not discuss this issue at this time,” he said Thursday via email.

“Going back to our logs, we dont see any specific scans for /core/install, but we see constant discovery requests for /install,” said Daniel Cid, chief security officer at Sucuri, a company that provides website security monitoring and malware clean-up services, in a blog post. “We dont yet know if that is related to vBulletin or other CMSs [content management systems].”

Attackers are constantly trying to exploit vulnerabilities in popular content management systems in order to break into websites, and while vBulletin does not power as many websites as WordPress, Joomla or some other general-purpose CMS software, it is one of the most popular applications for setting up Internet discussion forums.

According to vBulletin Solutions, over 100,000 community websites are running on vBulletin, including some operated by Zynga, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures, NASA, Valve Corporation, and other well known companies.

In July, hackers broke into UbuntuForums.org, a community website for the Ubuntu Linux distribution with over 1.8 million registered accounts, and managed to access information about users, including email addresses and password hashes. The site was using vBulletin.

“In summary, the root cause was a combination of a compromised individual account and the configuration settings in vBulletin, the Forums application software,” Canonical, the company that operates the site, said in a blog post following the incident.

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Cybercriminals add new exploit for recently patched Java vulnerability to their arsenal

Cybercriminals were quick to integrate a newly released exploit for a Java vulnerability patched in June into a tool used to launch mass attacks against users, an independent malware researcher warned.

The exploit targets a critical vulnerability identified as CVE-2013-2465 that affects all Java versions older than Java 7 Update 25 and can enable remote code execution. The vulnerability was patched by Oracle in its June Critical Patch Update for Java.

The exploit was released Monday by security research group Packet Storm Security, which originally acquired it through its bug bounty program as a zero-day exploit—an exploit for an unpatched vulnerability—from a researcher whose name was not disclosed. Packet Storm publishes the exploits it acquires 60 days after it receives them, with permission from their authors, so other security professionals can use them to perform penetration tests and security risk assessments.

Two days after its release, the CVE-2013-2465 exploit was already integrated into so-called exploit kits, attack tools that infect computers with malware by exploiting vulnerabilities in outdated software when users visit compromised websites.

An independent malware researcher who uses the online alias Kafeine found a live installation of the Styx exploit kit, previously known as Kein, that is using the exploit.

From an attacker’s perspective the exploit for CVE-2013-2465 is better than the exploit for CVE-2013-2460, another Java vulnerability also patched in June, that was recently integrated into a different attack toolkit called the Private Exploit Pack, Kafeine said Thursday in a blog post. That’s because CVE-2013-2465 affects both Java 7 and Java 6 installations, while CVE-2013-2460 only affects Java 7, he said.

Oracle ended its public support for Java 6 in April and will no longer release security updates for it to all users. Despite this, Java 6 is still widely used, especially in enterprise environments.

A recent study by security firm Bit9 showed that more than 80 percent of Java-enabled enterprise computers have Java 6 installed on them. The most widely deployed Java version on those systems was Java 6 Update 20.

The latest publicly available version of Java 6 is Java 6 Update 45, which is also affected by CVE-2013-2465. The vulnerability was patched in Java 6 Update 51, but this version is only available to users who have extended support contracts with Oracle.

The fact that an exploit for CVE-2013-2465 is publicly available and has already been integrated in mass attack toolkits suggests that this vulnerability will soon see widespread exploitation. Users who have yet to upgrade to Java 7 Update 25 might want to do so as soon as possible.

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