Advisory on Insinuator.net - Bold Statements

Vulnerability Disclosure: Stealing Emails via Prompt Injections

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With the rise of AI assistance features in an increasing number of products, we have begun to focus some of our research efforts on refining our internal detection and testing guidelines for LLMs by taking a brief look at the new AI integrations we discover.

Alongside the rise of applications with LLM integrations, an increasing number of customers come to ERNW to specifically assess AI applications. Our colleagues Florian Grunow and Hannes Mohr analyzed the novel attack vectors that emerged and presented the results at TROOPERS24 already.

Security Advisory: Airoha-based Bluetooth Headphones and Earbuds

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Important note: Some media coverage on this topic falsely or inaccurately depicts the attack conditions. To be clear: Any vulnerable device can be compromised if the attacker is in Bluetooth range. That is the only precondition.

During our research on Bluetooth headphones and earbuds, we identified several vulnerabilities in devices that incorporate Airoha Systems on a Chip (SoCs). In this blog post, we briefly want to describe the vulnerabilities, point out their impact and provide some context to currently running patch delivery processes as described at this year’s TROOPERS Conference.

Disclosure: Multiple Vulnerabilities in X.Org X server prior to 21.1.17 and Xwayland prior to 24.1.7

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The X11 Window System has been used since September 1987 for Unix desktop systems, allowing applications to display their windows. Today, one of the server implementations of the protocol is the X.Org X server and XWayland, which both use the same codebase. While reviewing the X server, several legacy security issues were identified. These appear to originate from earlier design stages when security considerations were less prominent. Despite the project’s maturity and widespread use, some of these issues have persisted.

Disclosure: Input Validation Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Bookings

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent customer project, we discovered vulnerabilities in Microsoft Bookings, an online appointment scheduling tool integrated into Microsoft 365, allowing companies to have customers book meetings in available times themselves. The findings originate from insufficient input validation on the public meeting scheduling endpoint. Although Microsoft has largely mitigated this vulnerability, our analysis provides important insights into potential risks and areas for improvement.

Introduction & Context

Microsoft Bookings is a service that allows organizations to manage appointments and meetings via a web interface. With integration to services such as Microsoft Teams, the security of the booking process is critical. This blog post outlines our technical analysis of the vulnerability, including proof-of-concept details and an overview of the vendor response.

Full Disclosure: Multiple Rundeck Job Command Injections

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

During a red-teaming-style customer project, we managed to get access to an Rundeck API token. Rundeck is a job scheduler and runbook automation platform designed to automate routine IT tasks across multiple systems. At first, we were excited about this API token because if we could create new Rundeck jobs, we could execute arbitrary code on the Rundeck nodes and move laterally from there. However, it turned out that with this token we only had permissions to run existing jobs.

CVE-2024-11035: Minor Security Issues in VMware Carbon Black Cloud

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We recently conducted a security assessment of VMware Carbon Black Cloud, a unified SaaS solution that integrates endpoint detection and response (EDR), anti-virus, and vulnerability management capabilities. As part of our evaluation, we tested the solution’s ability to detect and prevent malicious activity on Windows and Linux systems. Our analysis focused on the Carbon Black agents for these platforms, and although we did not identify any critical vulnerabilities, we want to share some of the findings in this blog post.

Vulnerability Disclosure: Command Injection in Kemp LoadMaster Load Balancer (CVE-2024-7591)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While conducting security research, I identified a critical vulnerability in Kemp’s LoadMaster Load Balancer. This vulnerability is a Command Injection and allows full system compromise. It requires no authentication and can be exploited remotely by having access to the Web User Interface (WUI). Kemp found that all LoadMaster versions up to and including version 7.2.60.0 and also the multi-tenant hypervisors up to and including version 7.1.35.11 are affected.

Kemp LoadMaster is a widely used Load Balancing Application that can commonly be seen in customer engagements. Therefore, we decided to take a closer look as part of our regular research projects.

Security Advisory: Achieving PHP Code Execution in ILIAS eLearning LMS before v7.30/v8.11/v9.1

Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

During my Bachelor’s thesis, I identified several XSS vulnerabilities and a PHP Code Execution vulnerability via an insecure file upload in the learning management system (LMS) ILIAS. The XSS vulnerability can be chained with the code execution vulnerability so that attackers with tutor privileges in at least one course can perform this exploit chain.

The Bachelor’s thesis was motivated by the ever-increasing number of compromised universities in Germany¹^(,)²^(,)³^(,)⁴^(,)⁵. The thesis analyzed the importance of LMS systems in that context, as those services are often exposed to the internet.

Lua-Resty-JWT Authentication Bypass

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was writing some challenges for PacketWars at TROOPERS22. One was intended to be a JWT key confusion challenge where the public key from an RSA JWT should be recovered and used to sign a symmetric JWT. For that, I was searching for a library vulnerable to JWT key confusion by default and found lua-resty-jwt. The original repository by SkyLothar is not maintained and different from the library that is installed with the LuaRocks package manager. The investigated library is a fork of the original repository, maintained by cdbattags in version 0.2.3 and was downloaded more than 4.8 million times according to LuaRocks.

Jenkins – Groovy Sandbox breakout (SECURITY-1538 / CVE-2019-10393, CVE-2019-10394, CVE-2019-10399, CVE-2019-10400)

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I discovered a sandbox breakout in the Groovy Sandbox used by the Jenkins script-security Plugin in their Pipeline Plugin for build scripts. We responsibly disclosed this vulnerability and in the current version of Jenkins it has been fixed and the according Jenkins Security Advisory 2019-09-12 has been published. In this blogpost I want to report a bit on the technical details of the vulnerability.

Description

The groovy sandbox transforms some AST nodes of the script to add security checks. For example

Security Advisories for Cisco ACI

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Again, Cisco released security advisories for their software-defined networking (SDN) solution called Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). As before (see blog post here), the published advisories originated from research performed in our ACI lab.

The following advisories have been published:

Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches ACI Mode Fabric Infrastructure VLAN Unauthorized Access Vulnerability
https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190703-n9kaci-bypass
CVSS Base Score: 7.4

Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller REST API Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190703-ccapic-restapi
CVSS Base Score: 7.2

Multiple Vulnerabilities in Nexus Repository Manager

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, we identified security issues in the Nexus Repository Manager software developed by Sonatype. The tested versions were OSS 3.12.1-01 and OSS 3.13.1-01.

The following issues could be identified:

Multiple Cross-Site Scripting (CVE-2018-16619)
Missing Access Controls (CVE-2018-16620)
Java Expression Language Injection (CVE-2018-16621)

The vulnerabilities are fixed in version 3.14.0. See the release notes and security advisories for further information.

We identified a Java Expression Language Injection in the role and user creation function. In order to exploit this issue, the attacker needs to be authenticated with high privileges, the standard anonymous user is not sufficient.

Security of Busch-Jaeger IP Gateway

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

IoT is everywhere right now and there are a lot of products out there. I have been looking at an IP Gateway lately and found some serious issues. The Busch-Welcome IP-Gateway from Busch-Jaeger is one of the devices that bridges the gap between sensors and actors in your smart home and the network/Internet. It enables the communication to a door control system that implements various smart home functions. The device itself is offering an HTTP service to configure it, which is protected by a username and password. Some folks even actually expose the device and its login to the Internet. I tried to configure one of these lately and stumbled upon some security issues that I would like to discuss in this blog post.

Security Advisory for VMware vRealize Automation Center

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

During a recent customer project we identified several vulnerabilities in the VMware vRealize Automation Center such as a DOM-based cross-site scripting and a missing renewal of session tokens during the login. The vulnerabilities have been disclosed to VMware on November 20th, 2017. A security advisory for the vulnerabilities has been made available here on April 12th, 2018.

Just a few words regarding the cross-site scripting vulnerability. This vulnerability is present within a GET request to the URL /vcac/gadgets/ifr because of certain URL parameters whose values are directly passed to an eval function call. The vulnerable parameters are gwt:onLoadErrorFn and gwt:onPropertyErrorFn. It seems that these parameters are actually never used by the application and we only found them by looking at the source code.

Follow-Up on CVE-2016-1409 – IPv6 NDP DoS Vulnerability

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest post from Jed Kafetz.

After seeing Christopher’s post I decided to create a proof using GNS3 and Virtualbox.
The aim is to perform the exact attacking using Antonios Atlasis’ Chiron tools and run a Wireshark packet capture to prove the hop limit drops below 255.

The following topology is used in GNS3:

The routers used are Cisco C372 and the machine labled Ubuntu is running 14.04 LTS Ubuntu Desktop, default installation. F0/0 is on the right and F0/1 is on the left.

Jenkins Remoting RCE II – The return of the ysoserial

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins is a continuous integration server, widely used in Java environments for building automation and deployment. The project recently disclosed an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability discovered by Moritz Bechler. Depending on the development environment, a Jenkins server can be a critical part of the infrastructure: It often creates the application packages that later will be deployed on production application servers. If an attacker can execute arbitrary code, s/he can easily manipulate those packages and inject additional code. Another scenario would be that the attacker stealing credentials, like passwords, private keys that are used for authentication in the deployment process or similar.

Some infos about SAP Security Note 2258786

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

On the 8th of March SAP released the security note for a vulnerability we reported during an assessment of a SAP landscape. The issue affects the SAP NetWeaver Web Administration Interface. By knowing a special URL a malicious user can acquire version information about the services enabled in the SAP system as well as the operating system used. We wanted to share some details on the issue.

The vulnerability is a bypass of the HTTP Basic Authorization for the SAP Web Administration Interface. It discloses version information about the system respectively operating system, a brief SAP patch level overview and running services including their corresponding ports.

CVE-2016-1409 – IPv6 NDP DoS Vulnerability in Cisco Software

Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Dear readers,

As you may have already noticed, Cisco released an urgent security advisory describing an IPv6 Neighbor Discovery DoS Vulnerability in several flavors of Cisco’s operating systems. Currently IOS-XR, XE and NX-OS are affected while ASA and “classic” IOS are under investigation. At first glance, it might look like yet another IPv6 DoS vulnerability. Looking closer, Cisco is mentioning an unauthenticated, remote attacker due to insufficient processing logic for crafted IPv6 NDP packets that are sent to an affected device. Following the public discussion about the vulnerability, it seems that these packets will reach the, probably low rate-limited, LPTS filter/queue on IOS XR devices “crowding” out legitimate NDP packets resulting in a DoS for IPv6 traffic, or in general a high CPU load as these packets will be processed by the CPU. More details are currently not available, but this might indicate the affected systems aren’t doing proper message validation checks on NDP packets (in addition to the LPTS filter/queue problem).

WPAD Name Collision Vulnerability (TA16-144A)

Tue, 24 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday the US-CERT released a Technical Alert (TA16-144A) about the recently found WPAD Name Collision Vulnerability. We will give you a summary about the vulnerability as well as the basic mechanisms here.

WPAD

The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol is used to auto-configure the proxy for web browsers. So when joining the according network the browser can use DHCP and DNS methods to find a specific configuration file (typically named wpad.dat), which is loaded and applied to the browser’s settings. Therefore, there is no need to configure each browser in your environment individually/manually.

BMC BladeLogic Vulnerabilities PoCs

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone!

A quick update: earlier in our blog we released BMC BladeLogic: CVE-2016-1542 and CVE-2016-1543 vulnerabilities. Now the exploits are also available in our github if you want to check your systems 😉

Have a nice week,
Olga

BMC BladeLogic: CVE-2016-1542 and CVE-2016-1543

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

Hope those of you who attended Troopers16 enjoyed it as much as we did! In this post I want to summarize my Troopers16 talk and provide you with some details about freshly assigned CVE-2016-1542 and CVE-2016-1543 related to BMC BladeLogic software.

To start with, BMC Software Inc. is an American company specializing in business service management software; they develop software used for multiple functions, including IT service management, data center automation, performance management, virtualization lifecycle management and cloud computing management. Among other products they have developed a BladeLogic suite that includes Database Automation, Middleware Automation, Server Automation, and Network Automation tools. The one under our focus was BladeLogic Server Automation (BSA).

Xen XSA 155: Double fetches in paravirtualized devices

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my research on the security of paravirtualized devices, I reported a number of vulnerabilities to the Xen security team, which were patched today. All of them are double fetch vulnerabilities affecting the different backend components used for paravirtualized devices. While the severity and impact of these bugs varies heavily and is dependent on a lot of external factors, I would recommend patching them as soon as possible. In the rest of this blog post I’ll give a short teaser about my research with full details coming out in the first quarter of 2016 .

VMware did it again: vCenter Remote Code Execution

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday 7Elements released the description of a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in VMware vCenter. The information came in at a good point as I’m at the moment drafting a follow-up blogpost for this one which will summarize some of our approaches to virtualization security. The vCenter vulnerability is both quite critical and particularly interesting in several ways:

Once there is proper network isolation & restriction, the vulnerability should not be exploitable from the overall corporate network (or maybe even the Internet — a quick inaccurate shodan search for “vcenter” returned about 1800 results and at random checks actually revealed vCenter systems). It should also not be exploitable from ESXi hosts managed through the vCenter: ESXi hosts need to be able to connect to the vCenter for heartbeat messages, however “only” on ports 443 and 902 — the vulnerability exploits a service running on TCP ports 9875 – 9877.
It is questionable whether the exploited Java RMI functionality is really required for the operation of VMware infrastructures. This blogpost provides further detail on the known type of vulnerability in Java applications. VMware had a similar issue back in 2010, where their workaround to fix a vulnerability was to just disable the affected component, resulting in the impression that it wasn’t even required in the first place. Let’s see whether the future will bring up more vulnerabilities which could have been prevented by implementing more thorough hardening of all components (e.g. following the minimal machine principle). Furthermore in 2011 there was a similar 3^(rd) party component vulnerability in vCenter which we covered in this blogpost. The totality of our posts on VMware security can be found here.
For high-security environments we have been recommending for some time to use a dedicated vCenter per hypervisor cluster (i.e. if you have two hypervisor clusters, one for internal and one for DMZ systems, you should use two separate vCenter systems). Vulnerabilities like these illustrate the need for that, given that the ESXi hosts need to be able to access the vCenter on the network level.

Happy patching & stay tuned,

General Pr0ken Filesystem – Hacking IBM’s GPFS

Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a short wrap-up of our Troopers talk about the research we did on IBM’s General Parallel File System. If you are interested in all the technical details take a look at our slides or the video recording. We will also give an updated version of this talk at the PHDays conference in Moscow next month.

The IBM General Parallel File System is a distributed file system used in large scale enterprise environments, high performance clusters as well as some of the worlds largest super computers. It is considered by many in the industry to be the most feature rich and production hardened distributed file system currently available. GPFS has a long and really interesting history, going back to the Tiger Shark file system created by IBM 1993.

XML External Entity (XXE) Injection in Apache Batik Library [CVE-2015-0250]

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

During one of our latest web application code review projects I came across a vulnerability for which I think it is worth to speak about. It is an injection based attack against XML parsers which uses a rarely required feature called external entity expansion. The XML specification allows XML documents to define entities which reference resources external to the document and parsers typically support this feature by default. If an application parses XML input from untrusted sources and the parsing routine is not properly configured this can be exploited by an attacker with a so called XML external entity (XXE) injection. A successful XXE injection attack could allow an attacker to access the file system, cause a DoS attack or inject script code (e.g. Javascript to perform an XSS attack).

Revisiting Xen’s x86 Emulation: Xen XSA 123

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In my last blog post, I gave an overview about recent vulnerabilities discovered in the x86 emulation layer of Xen. While both of the discussed vulnerabilities only allow for guest privilege escalation, the complexity of the involved code seemed to indicate that even more interesting bugs could be discovered. So I spent some time searching for memory corruption issues and discovered a very interesting bug that resulted in XSA 123 . This post gives an overview about the root cause of the bug and a short description of exploitation challenges. A follow-up post will describe possible exploitation strategies in more detail.

The Dangers of x86 Emulation: Xen XSA 110 and 105

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Developing a secure and feature rich hypervisor is no easy task. Recently, the open source Xen hypervisor was affected by two interesting vulnerabilities involving its x86 emulation code: XSA 110 and XSA 105. Both bugs show that the attack surface of hypervisors is often larger than expected. XSA 105 was originally reported) by Andrei Lutas from BitDefender. The patch adds missing privilege checks to the emulation routines of several critical system instructions including LGDT and LIDT. The vulnerable code can be reached from unprivileged user code running inside hardware virtual machine (HVM) guests and can be used to escalate guest privileges. XSA 110 was reported by Jan Beulich from SUSE and concerns insufficient checks when emulating long jumps, calls or returns.

GitHub Enterprise 2.0.0 Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Recently we had the pleasure to take a look at GitHub’s Enterprise appliance. The appliance allows one to deploy the excellent GitHub web interface locally to host code on-site. Besides the well known interface, which is similar to the one hosted at github.com, the appliance ships with a separate interface called the management console, which is used for administrative tasks like the configuration of the appliance itself. This management interface is completely decoupled from the user interface.

How to Own a Router – Fritz!Box AVM Vulnerability Analysis

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The below post was originally written on February 9th as a little educational exercise & follow-up to my BinDiff post. (This research was actually triggered by a relative asking about that strange Fritz!Box vulnerability he heard about on the radio). Once we realized the full potential of the bug we decided against publishing the post and contacted several parties instead. Amongst others this contributed to the German BSI press release. Given the cat is out of the bag now anyway, we see no reason to hold it back. We will further take this as an opportunity to lay out our basic vulnerability disclosure principles in a future post. This topic will also be discussed in the panel “Ethics of Security Work & Research” at Troopers

Analyzing a CVE-2013-3346/CVE-2013-5065 Exploit with peepdf

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest post from Jose Miguel Esparza (@EternalTodo)

There are already some good blog posts talking about this exploit, but I think this is a really good example to show how peepdf works and what you can learn if you attend the workshop “Squeezing Exploit Kits and PDF Exploits” at Troopers14. The mentioned exploit was using the Adobe Reader ToolButton Use-After-Free vulnerability to execute code in the victim’s machine and then the Windows privilege escalation 0day to bypass the Adobe sandbox and execute a new payload without restrictions.

XSS in SAP Netweaver

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We just got credits for a flaw we found in SAP Netweaver. The issue is a reflected Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). It can be triggered in the administrative interface for the Internet Communication Manager (ICM) and Web Dispatcher. This means that the targets for this XSS will definitely be users with administrative privileges. This makes it especially juicy for an attacker.

SAP rated the vulnerability with CVSS and a Base Score of 4.3 having a Base Vector of AV:N/AC:M/AU:N/C:N/I:P/A:N. Which again opens the discussion on how to rate the impact of XSS by using CVSS. CVSS states that XSS “should be scored with no impact to confidentiality or availability, and partial impact to integrity“, which is clearly arguable. Especially when thinking of the impact on confidentiality. As you might know by now, we tried to tackle the problem of rating vulnerabilities ourselves with the ERNW Rapid Rating System (ERRS) and it was not an easy task. 😉 However, SAP states that this is a correction with high priority, so you should apply the patches as soon as possible.

Exploiting Hyper-V: How We Discovered MS13-092

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

During a recent research project we performed an in-depth security assessment of Microsoft’s virtualization technologies, including Hyper-V and Azure. While we already had experience in discovering security vulnerabilities in other virtual environments (e.g. here and here), this was our first research project on the Microsoft virtualization stack and we took care to use a structured evaluation strategy to cover all potential attack vectors.
Part of our research concentrated on the Hyper-V hypervisor itself and we discovered a critical vulnerability which can be exploited by an unprivileged virtual machine to crash the hypervisor and potentially compromise other virtual machines on the same physical host. This bug was recently patched, see MS13-092 and our corresponding post.

Analysis of Rails XML Parameter Parsing Vulnerability

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post tries to give an overview about the background and impact of the new Rails XML parameter parsing vulnerability patched today.

The bug

The root cause of the vulnerability is Rails handling of formatted parameters. In addition to standard GET and POST parameter formats, Rails can handle multiple different data encodings inside the body of POST requests. By default JSON and XML are supported. While support for JSON is widely used in production, the XML functionality does not seem to be known by many Rails developers.

SQL Injection in Cisco MeetingPlace

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Cisco has released a security advisory for a vulnerability we discovered last year.
For comparison here is our original advisory to cisco:

Security Advisory for Cisco Unified Communications Solution

Release Date: 11/8/2012 Author: Daniel Mende

1 SUMMARY Multiple critical SQL injections exist in Cisco unified meeting place.

2 AFFECTED PRODUCTS The following Products have been tested as vulnerable so far: Cisco Unified Meetingplace with the following modules: • MeetingPlace Agent 7.1.1.9 • MeetingPlace Audio Service 7.1.1.8 • MeetingPlace Gateway SIM 7.1.1.2 • MeetingPlace Replication Service 7.1.1.9 • MeetingPlace Master Service 7.1.1.8 • MeetingPlace Extension 7.1.1.8 • MeetingPlace Authentication Filter 7.1.1.8

3 DETAILS The following parameters are affected: http://$IP/mpweb/scripts/mpx.dll [POST Parameter wcRecurMtgID]

4 VULNERABILITY SCORING The severity rating based on CVSS Version 2: Base Vector: (AV:N / AC:L / Au:S / C:P / I:P / A:P) CVSS Version 2 Score: 6.5 Severity: Low

SessionID=A40490A1-AB17-4C1E-BA4A-E3C5C90F62CA.1ED59E5C-A774-4546-8683- AEB15D6FBD0D.55931857-6296-48ec-9434-3231c683c47d.ADadfjadlkeNmFhmplaihgkdDg &wcMeetingID=&wcRecurMtgID=‘ or 1=1 —&URL0=wcBase.tpl&TXT0=Startseite&URL1=& TXT1=&URL2=&TXT2=&URL3=&TXT3=&URL4=&TXT4=&URL5=&TXT5=&MtgCatToSearch= %28all%2Bcategories%29&ML_PublicPosted=Yes&MtgIDToSearch=0000007&SchedulerID= &wcRequest=&wcHash=&FormType=listmeetings&wcState=3&STPL=wcFindMtg.tpl&FTPL= wcFindMtg.tpl&ML_List=MT_Today&ML_EndTime_Month=&ML_EndTime_Day=&ML_End Time_Year=&ML_ShowContMtgs=Yes&SP_VLanguage=lang999i00

Update: Microsoft Advisory 2757760 Windows Internet Explorer Vulnerability

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft takes this vulnerability quite serious and was acting fast. The Microsoft Security Response Center announced the availability of a fix last night in the MSRC Blog.

The fix will be available via Windows Update on friday, the 21st of september. So it’s time to get ready for this update ;-).

Have a nice day
Michael

Microsoft Advisory 2757760: Windows Internet Explorer Zero-Day Vulnerability

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Actually a Windows Vulnerability (Microsoft Advisory 2757760) related to the Internet Explorer Version 7, 8 and 9 is in the news. Microsoft is aware of the problem, but there’s no patch available yet. We call this a 0-Day :-). Making the problem even worse, on monday reliable exploit code was released within the Metasploit project, so exploit code is already in the wild.

Basically Microsoft suggests two workarounds:

Usage of EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit)
Disabling Active X and Active Scripting in the Internet Settings

But both of them have some impact: EMET must be deployed before any usage (btw. EMET can be configured via Group Policies) and disabling Active X and Active Scripting might break some business relevant web sites (that can be added to the “Trusted Sites” Zone, but might produce major operational effort).

VMSA-2011-0005: VMware vCenter Orchestrator remote code execution vulnerability

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Reading this advisory I’m quite tempted to emit another rant on the relationship of heavy use of 3rd party components, lack of (security) quality assurance and services running at times where they’re not needed (see second workaround here). I’ll refrain from that for today. Just wanted to let you know that the underlying vulnerability in Struts2 was initially discovered by Meder Kydyraliev who gives this talk at Troopers in two weeks. He’ll certainly describe the inner workings of this one, and others… 😉

MS10-063, Prevention

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One of the four vulnerabilities rated “critical” from yesterday’s MS patchday, that is MS10-063, has an interesting “Workarounds” section as for MS Internet Explorer. There it’s stated:

“Disabling the support for the parsing of embedded fonts in Internet Explorer prevents this application from being used as an attack vector.”

which, according to the advisory, should/can be done by setting the “Font Downloading” parameter to “Disable”.

Which is exactly what this document suggests. So taking a preventive approach, once more, might have saved some concerns (“Will we be targeted by this one”) and patch/testing time…

Just a Quick Note on the Library Loading / Binary Planting Stuff

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

For those of you who missed it: Microsoft released the associated advisory yesterday, together with a hotfix introducing a new registry key that allows users to control the DLL search path algorithm. For a detailed explanation of the problem we refer to the excellent article on Ars Technica.

For the record: no, AV (anti-virus software) will – in most cases – not protect you from security problems related to this one. And, no, there is no easy patch for this one either.