More Vulnerabilities Found; More Platforms Affected

Severity: High

26 October, 2007

Update:

On Monday 22 October, we published an alert about a serious vulnerability that affects RealPlayer 10.5 and RealPlayer 11 beta running on Windows. By enticing one of your users to a malicious Web site, an attacker can exploit this vulnerability to execute code on your user’s computer, with your user’s privileges. In the worst case scenario, the attacker could gain total control of the victim’s PC. RealNetworks released a patch to fix that problem. However, it appears that update marked just the beginning of RealNetwork security holes.

Late yesterday, RealNetwork released the second batch of security updates this week, this time fixing six serious vulnerabilities in their media player product line. Here’s what you need to know about the new flaws.

The new flaws affect many more products than the earlier flaw did, including products that run in OS X and Linux. The affected products now include:

• RealPlayer 8, 10, 10.5, 11 for Windows, Mac, and Linux
• RealOne Player v1 and v2 for Windows, and RealOne Player for Mac
• RealPlayer Enterprise
• Helix Player 10.0.x for Linux.

Though these new flaws differ from one another technically, they share many similarities. For example, all six flaws involve buffer overflow vulnerabilities triggered when RealPlayer

by Corey Nachreiner, CISSP, Network Security Analyst, WatchGuard Technologies

[Editor’s Note: This article supplements the list of attacks shown in Part 2 of the video series, Malware Analysis: Botnets. “Malware Analysis: Botnets, Part 2″ shows a small subset of botnet attacks in action. This article fills out that subset with more attacks commonly found in a bot herder’s arsenal. LiveSecurity subscribers can find the videos, free of charge, on our Video Tutorials page. –Scott]

You’ll often hear botnets described as a “hacker’s Swiss army knife.” Just as a Swiss army knife can come with a crazy variety of blades, scissors, and screwdrivers, bots come with numerous exploits and commands that allow bot herders to launch many different types of attacks.

Since coding up a bot client takes time and skill, most attackers buy bot code in the online underground. Popular malicious bots include Phatbot, Agobot, and the one shown in our video, Rxbot. These bot clients use modular code, so if a bot herder doesn’t love the array of commands his bot offers, he simply adds new ones. For examples, read on.

What pairs better than zombies and spam?

Bot herders commonly leverage their bots as huge spam relays. How huge? According to a recent study by Commtouch, 87% of all email sent over the Internet during 2006 was spam. This e-junk generated up to 1700 terabytes