Microsoft May 2013 Black Tuesday Overview

Published: 2013-05-14
Last Updated: 2013-05-15 00:12:31 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
7 comment(s)

Overview of the May 2013 Microsoft patches and their status.

# Affected Contra Indications - KB Known Exploits Microsoft rating(**) ISC rating(*)
clients servers
MS13-037 The usual monthly MSIE cumulative patch, adding fixes for 11 more vulnerabilities. All but one are use after free vulnerabilities. The odd one is about vbscript allowing read access to JSON data related to another domain.
Replaces MS13-028.
MSIE

CVE-2013-0811
CVE-2013-1297
CVE-2013-1306
CVE-2013-1307
CVE-2013-1308
CVE-2013-1309
CVE-2013-1310
CVE-2013-1311
CVE-2013-1312
CVE-2013-1313
CVE-2013-2551
KB 2829530 No publicly known exploits Severity:Critical
Exploitability:1
Critical Important
MS13-038 The anticipated IE8 fix.
Note that IE9 is listed as affected as well, but it's not given a rating "because the known attack vectors for the vulnerability discussed in this bulletin are blocked in a default configuration."
Note that this is not the cumulatieve IE patch, nor is the fix part of the cumulative patch this month. The bulletin states there is no need to uninstall the MSFT Fix-it released earlier for this vulnerability.
MSIE

CVE-2013-1347
KB 2847204 Publicly discussed and exploit code available. Security advisory 2847140 Severity:Critical
Exploitability:1
PATCH NOW Important
MS13-039 A vulnerability in the handling of HTTP headers in the HTTP stack allows a Denial of Service.
HTTP.sys

CVE-2013-1305
KB 2829254 No publicly known exploits. Severity:Important
Exploitability:3
Important Important
MS13-040 Incorrect validation of signed XML files allows for failing to detect changes in said files and an authentication bypass allowing unauthenticated access. The impact of these vulnerabilities high depends on what applications make use of these features.
Replaces MS10-041.
.NET

CVE-2013-1336
CVE-2013-1337
KB 2836440 Microsoft claims the vulnerability CVE-2013-1337 was publicly disclosed. Severity:Important
Exploitability:?
Important Important
MS13-041 A memory corruption vulnerability allows random code execution in the context of the current user.
Note the lync user level install of Lync 2010 Attendee is only available from the Microsoft Download Center - not via automatic updates.
Replaces MS12-066.
Lync

CVE-2013-1302
KB 2834695 No publicly known exploits. Severity:Important
Exploitability:2
Critical Important
MS13-042 A multitude of vulnerabilities in Publisher allow random code execution.
Replaces MS11-091.
Publisher

CVE-2013-1316
CVE-2013-1317
CVE-2013-1318
CVE-2013-1319
CVE-2013-1320
CVE-2013-1321
CVE-2013-1322
CVE-2013-1323
CVE-2013-1327
CVE-2013-1328
CVE-2013-1329
KB 2830397 No publicly known exploits Severity:Important
Exploitability:1
Critical Important
MS13-043 Incorrect handling of shape data in word allows random code execution with the rights of the logged on user.
Note that when word is used to read incoming email messages, it can be affected merely via previewing incoming emailed RTF data!
Word

CVE-2013-13335
KB 2830399 No publicly known exploits Severity:Important
Exploitability:2
Critical Important
MS13-044 A problem in handling XML files that references external files in Visio allows information leak and read access with the rights of the logged-on user.
Replace MS11-060 and MS13-023.
Visio

CVE-2013-1301
KB 2834692 No publicly known exploits. Severity:Important
Exploitability:3
Important Important
MS13-045 Windows Writer - part of the Windows Essentials package - is a client to manage blogs. The vulnerability allows overriding proxy settings and overwriting files accessible to the logged-on user.
Windows Essentials

CVE-2013-0096
KB 2813707 No publicly known exploits Severity:Important
Exploitability:3
Critical Important
MS13-046 Multiple vulnerabilities in Kernel Mode Drivers allow privilege escalation.
Replaces MS13-036 and MS13-031.
Kernel Mode Drivers

CVE-2013-1332
CVE-2013-1333
CVE-2013-1334
KB 2840221 No publicly known exploits Severity:Important
Exploitability:1
Imporant Important
We will update issues on this page for about a week or so as they evolve.
We appreciate updates
US based customers can call Microsoft for free patch related support on 1-866-PCSAFETY
(*): ISC rating
  • We use 4 levels:
    • PATCH NOW: Typically used where we see immediate danger of exploitation. Typical environments will want to deploy these patches ASAP. Workarounds are typically not accepted by users or are not possible. This rating is often used when typical deployments make it vulnerable and exploits are being used or easy to obtain or make.
    • Critical: Anything that needs little to become "interesting" for the dark side. Best approach is to test and deploy ASAP. Workarounds can give more time to test.
    • Important: Things where more testing and other measures can help.
    • Less Urgent: Typically we expect the impact if left unpatched to be not that big a deal in the short term. Do not forget them however.
  • The difference between the client and server rating is based on how you use the affected machine. We take into account the typical client and server deployment in the usage of the machine and the common measures people typically have in place already. Measures we presume are simple best practices for servers such as not using outlook, MSIE, word etc. to do traditional office or leisure work.
  • The rating is not a risk analysis as such. It is a rating of importance of the vulnerability and the perceived or even predicted threat for affected systems. The rating does not account for the number of affected systems there are. It is for an affected system in a typical worst-case role.
  • Only the organization itself is in a position to do a full risk analysis involving the presence (or lack of) affected systems, the actually implemented measures, the impact on their operation and the value of the assets involved.
  • All patches released by a vendor are important enough to have a close look if you use the affected systems. There is little incentive for vendors to publicize patches that do not have some form of risk to them.

(**): The exploitability rating we show is the worst of them all due to the too large number of ratings Microsoft assigns to some of the patches.

--
Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

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Microsoft Security Advisory overview

Published: 2013-05-14
Last Updated: 2013-05-15 00:08:07 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 2)
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Malware Protection Engine

Microsoft released security advisory 2846338 indicating that they have update their Malware Protection Engine (used in a varierty of their anti malware products) to fix a vulnerability in said engine where an attacker would be able to execute random code in the context of LocalSytem. Micorosft claims the vulnerability was publicly disclosed as a DoS.

CVE: CVE-2013-1346

ActiveX killbits rollup

Microsoft released security advisory 2820197 describing the addition of killbits for Honeywell Enterprise Buildings Integrator: {0d080d7d-28d2-4f86-bfa1-d582e5ce4867} and SymmetrE and ComfortPoint Open Manager: {29e9b436-dfac-42f9-b209-bd37bafe9317}

IE10 - flash

Microsoft updated security advisory 2755801 to announce the availability of update Adobe Flash libraries. This corresponds with APSB13-14.

CVE-2013-1347 MSHTML Shim Workaround update

Microsoft updated security advisory 2847140 to reflect the release of MS13-08

--
Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

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CVE-2013-2094: Linux privilege escalation

Published: 2013-05-14
Last Updated: 2013-05-14 22:44:10 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
0 comment(s)

A vulnerability was discovered using fuzzing in linux kernels 2.6.37 till 3.8.9. The vulenrability requires the kernel to be compiled with PERF_EVENTS, but unfortunately that seems the case for quite some linux distributions. CentOS even backported the vulnerability to 2.6.32.

Impact is local privilege escalation, and exploit code is readily available.

More information: http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-2094

Hat tip: James for sending us some pointers to this.

--
Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

Keywords: kernel linux
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Firefox & Thunderbird released

Published: 2013-05-14
Last Updated: 2013-05-14 18:26:44 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
0 comment(s)

Mozilla decided to join the mayhem on Black Tuesday this month and released Firefox and Thunderbird.

This updates to:

  • Firefox 21.0
  • Firefox ESR 17.0.6
  • Thunderbird 17.0.6
  • Thunderbird ESR 17.0.6

Release notes:

https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox.html

Security content o fthe updates:

 

--
Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

0 comment(s)

Adobe May 2013 Black Tuesday Overview

Published: 2013-05-14
Last Updated: 2013-05-14 18:08:19 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
0 comment(s) 0 comment(s)
ISC StormCast for Tuesday, May 14th 2013 http://isc.sans.edu/podcastdetail.html?id=3305

So what passwords are those ssh scanners trying?

Published: 2013-05-14
Last Updated: 2013-05-14 02:01:51 UTC
by Jim Clausing (Version: 1)
10 comment(s)

If you run an ssh server (especially if you still run it on the default port), you've no doubt had plenty of folks scan your machine and do password guessing attacks against it.  BTW, you'll never get in mine that way, I only allow public/private key authentication, but that is beside the point here.  I've done a couple of other reports analyzing passwords, and I really like pipal by Robin Wood for much of the analysis (you can grab it from here).  I've been running a kippo ssh honeypot for the day job for about 2 years and I've done a couple of reports on the password guesses for the ThreatTraq webcast, but then I discovered that in addition to firewall logs and the 404 logs, we also collect kippo logs here at the SANS Internet Storm Center.  Ooh, more data!!  If you'd like contribute, please grab https://isc.sans.edu/kipposcript.pl.  So, without further ado, here is what I've found in our kippo data (as of about 15 April 2013).  I should note here, though, that these are the guesses the bad guys are making.  They've developed their lists most likely based on what has worked for someone at some point, so they will be somewhat different from what you find in analyzing passwords from breaches like my analysis of last year's Yahoo breach.

The Basics

Total entries = 15415314
Total unique entries = 46840

 

The Results

Top 10 passwords
123456 = 167854 (1.09%)
password = 113640 (0.74%)
cacutza = 99492 (0.65%)
__--_-__-_ = 79153 (0.51%)
123 = 63557 (0.41%)
root = 61560 (0.4%)
1234 = 58103 (0.38%)
123456789 = 57270 (0.37%)
12345 = 53445 (0.35%)
test = 52231 (0.34%)

Okay, the first thing to note, is that the default password for kippo is 123456, so that may skew the above a bit.  The one I personally find most interesting is the 4th one, '__--_-__-_'.

Top 10 base words
password = 295354 (1.92%)
test = 192825 (1.25%)
pass = 127086 (0.82%)
root = 121704 (0.79%)
cacutza = 99492 (0.65%)
temp = 97145 (0.63%)
p@ssw0rd = 92650 (0.6%)
p4ssword = 88344 (0.57%)
changeme = 74842 (0.49%)
p4ssw0rd = 74329 (0.48%)

So, some variation on password (with or without substitutions).

Password length (count ordered)
6 = 2708563 (17.57%)
8 = 2275062 (14.76%)
7 = 1550776 (10.06%)
9 = 1394644 (9.05%)
10 = 1234997 (8.01%)
4 = 1143617 (7.42%)
5 = 1025693 (6.65%)
12 = 766462 (4.97%)
11 = 647696 (4.2%)
3 = 437702 (2.84%)

The password guesses varied in length from 1 (do people actually allow 1 character passwords?) to 70 characters in length.  The longest ones being shown below

56 = 4504 (0.03%)
57 = 180 (0.0%)
58 = 465 (0.0%)
60 = 17 (0.0%)
62 = 800 (0.01%)
63 = 69 (0.0%)
64 = 369 (0.0%)
70 = 9 (0.0%)
71 = 908 (0.01%)

The mix

One to six characters = 5463941 (35.44%)
One to eight characters = 9289779 (60.26%)
More than eight characters = 6125535 (39.74%)

Only lowercase alpha = 5126974 (33.26%)
Only uppercase alpha = 140773 (0.91%)
Only alpha = 5267747 (34.17%)
Only numeric = 1906165 (12.37%)

First capital last symbol = 135964 (0.88%)
First capital last number = 958843 (6.22%)


One to six characters = 5463941 (35.44%)
One to eight characters = 9289779 (60.26%)
More than eight characters = 6125535 (39.74%)

Only lowercase alpha = 5126974 (33.26%)
Only uppercase alpha = 140773 (0.91%)
Only alpha = 5267747 (34.17%)
Only numeric = 1906165 (12.37%)

First capital last symbol = 135964 (0.88%)
First capital last number = 958843 (6.22%)


Last digit
3 = 1621502 (10.52%)
1 = 1394507 (9.05%)
0 = 620126 (4.02%)
4 = 593100 (3.85%)
6 = 548727 (3.56%)
2 = 478758 (3.11%)
5 = 420699 (2.73%)
9 = 407320 (2.64%)
8 = 318715 (2.07%)
7 = 303304 (1.97%)


Last 3 digits (Top 10)
123 = 1156095 (7.5%)
456 = 380369 (2.47%)
234 = 340074 (2.21%)
345 = 234638 (1.52%)
321 = 212258 (1.38%)
789 = 192424 (1.25%)
678 = 166984 (1.08%)
567 = 154030 (1.0%)
001 = 146204 (0.95%)
111 = 91160 (0.59%)


Character sets
loweralpha: 5126974 (33.26%)
loweralphanum: 4803721 (31.16%)
numeric: 1906165 (12.37%)
loweralphaspecialnum: 803707 (5.21%)
mixedalphanum: 768137 (4.98%)
mixedalphaspecialnum: 641067 (4.16%)
loweralphaspecial: 344881 (2.24%)
upperalphanum: 181283 (1.18%)
mixedalpha: 151523 (0.98%)
special: 149786 (0.97%)
upperalpha: 140773 (0.91%)
upperalphaspecialnum: 133340 (0.86%)
mixedalphaspecial: 91536 (0.59%)
upperalphaspecial: 81044 (0.53%)
specialnum: 66165 (0.43%)


Character set ordering
allstring: 5419270 (35.16%)
othermask: 3833967 (24.87%)
stringdigit: 2622232 (17.01%)
alldigit: 1906165 (12.37%)
stringdigitstring: 478523 (3.1%)
digitstring: 446101 (2.89%)
stringspecial: 184687 (1.2%)
allspecial: 149786 (0.97%)
stringspecialstring: 117368 (0.76%)
digitstringdigit: 114141 (0.74%)
stringspecialdigit: 101918 (0.66%)
specialstring: 25205 (0.16%)
specialstringspecial: 15951 (0.1%)

 

Some final thoughts

Okay, there is some interesting stuff there and if you are interested in the pieces of the standard pipal report that I didn't include there, I've put the full report up on my handler page.  One of the other thing I took a look at was how many in the mix satisfy the standard definition of a "complex" password [lower case, upper case, digits, special characters] (choose 3) and length >= 8.  620413 (4.02%) of the passwords satisfy this definition of complex.  However, when you look at unique passwords, only 1286 (2.75% of the 46840 unique ones) are complex.  So, at least one takeaway is that the more complex you make your crucial passwords the less likely you are to fall victim to this type of password guessing attack.  Of course, 173 of those 1286 were some variation on 'password' with subsitutions or digits and/or special characters tacked on the end.  So, what do you think?  Is there some other aspect of the passwords that I should have looked at?  Let us know in the comment section below or via our contact form.

---------------
Jim Clausing, GIAC GSE #26
jclausing --at-- isc [dot] sans (dot) edu

The opinions expressed here are strictly those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of SANS, the Internet Storm Center, the author's spouse, kids, or pets (except maybe the ornery cat).

Keywords: passwords
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