February 5, 2012

Very Simple Solaris Root Exploit

There is an incredibly simple root exploit for computers running the Solaris operating system with telnet enabled. While in general terms it is a bad idea to have telnet enabled and particularly so on a forward facing or internet connected machine, this exploit is so simple and Solaris boxes are popular for forward facing roles such as web servers, etc. In general we would not be concerned with Solaris exploits at Managed Solutions. However this particular exploit has ramifications for all of us. Anything that has the potential for a very successful internet worm has the potential to affect the general availability of services we rely on. It could also lead to a compromise of our personal information should one of the hosts that we might have made a credit card purchase through become compromised. We will continue to monitor activity of this worm and update this article of any significant details.

As of 2/28/2007 there is a worm circulating for this previously reported simple exploit. We are actually surprised it took this long for something to hit the wild. Hopefully most organizations patched the vulnerability. Unfortunately it seems like things like this are far too often dealt with in a reactive fashion.

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“Big Yellow” Worm Circulating

There is a new worm circulating tonight that is infecting machines that have vulnerable versions of Symantec Client Security (Ver 3) and Symantec Anti-virus Corporate edition (Ver 10). Once a machine is infected it downloads a package from an FTP server then begins to seek more vulnerable machines to infect. If you have a vulnerable version of these products you can protect yourself from this worm by downloading the patches available from Symantec.

It is not likely that this worm would infect smal networks behind a firewall or other NAT device but it is still advisable to patch any systems running these products anyway. Like with anything else of this nature, you should contact your IT department for more information or if you think your machine may be infected. If you’d like to learn more about the worm or this vulnerability the best resource right now that we are aware of is eEye.

Now for the technical types some additional information. I connected to the ftp server mentioned in the eEye article and discovered the following:

[21:38:45] 220-This Server is running since 2 days and 7:31 hours,
[21:38:45] 220-and has been accessed 91607 times, 325 in the last 24 hours.
[21:38:45] 220-There are now 1 users logged in, Max allowed : Unlimited.

It is possible that this worm has been downloaded by over 91,000 infected machines as of 9:38PM PST Friday December 15th, 2006. It does appear that the spread mysteriously slowed in the past 24 hours. It is possible that the .exe was modified to access a new FTP server and that variants already exist.

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