All aboard! Welcome to another ride on themonthly Microsoft patch train. We’ve got quite a few stops this monthand most are client-side vulnerabilities, meaning that an end user hasto take specific actions (typically by obtaining and then openinghostile content). Unless otherwise stated, the privilege granted to theattacker for all of the below vulnerabilities is the privilege level ofthe victim user. Most were publicly disclosed for the first time today,but the exceptions are noted. They are listed below in the order ofmost to least critical for the fabled “typical” network.

Vulnerability in SNMP Could Allow Remote Code Execution MS06-074 / KB926247

This vulnerability seems almost old-fashioned in the modern securitylandscape – a common buffer overflow in a service....

Bonjour! Carrying on from my previous blog post, here is some more information on Windows CE/Mobile 5 security.

Shatter

Windows CE and Mobile, like its desktop cousin, can suffer “shatter attacks” across processes. This includes processes running at different levels of trust (please see my previous blog post and the section on One-tier versus Two-tier). For those of you unfamiliar with what shatter attacks are, there is a Microsoft TechNet bulletin that addresses the original assertion that the shatter attack condition can exist.

There are some complexities...

Besides the obvious inconvenience of time wasted clicking through and deleting spam email messages, what are some of the negative effects of spam? To the average user, it’s as simple as having better things to do than hunt through their email accounts for ”real” messages – messages they want to receive. For businesses, it is money spent paying employees for work they aren’t doing because they’re spending work hours picking through emails.

Then we have the hapless user who falls into a phish trap. To this user the problem can include a financial hit, not to mention the endless hours spent trying to get their money back or pursuing legal action. This often leads to a long lasting fear of future dealings with the company that was phished. This scenario also has a negative impact on said company because they may lose a customer do to fear of recurrence. In fact, they may lose several customers if word spreads on the Internet. We call this “negative brand image...

"A browser" – that’s all we were led to believe the next generation would need to create office applications or engineering applications. Now, the focus on security has begun to divert in that direction. Statistics from the first half of 2006 showed that 69 percent of exploitable vulnerabilities were from Web applications. Web application vulnerabilities usually get mixed up with server vulnerabilities, although the two are distinctly different. Web developers who design Web sites are not usually security gurus. The developers will often leave behind various security holes in the Web application because of bad coding practices and a lack of security reviews.

On one hand, there are many security experts around the world who fuzz Web servers with variations in order find another zero-day. The end result is that the gap between popular Web servers and exploitable vulnerabilities within them is increasing. It has been a long time since we have seen a...