Security Alerts

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There is a flaw in Microsoft's Outlook e-mail, calendar and contacts program which would allow an attacker to run malicious software on a vulnerable computer. Microsoft has upgraded this security risk from "important" to "critical", meaning that users should download and install a patch to correct the problem as quickly as possible. "This change is based on information concerning a new attack scenario discovered after the bulletin's original release on March 9th," Microsoft said in a statement. Click here for the latest Microsoft security update.

Witty Worm Attacks Black Ice and Real Secure Internet Firewalls

W32.Witty.Worm is a new virus which attacks computers equipped with Black Ice or Real Secure Internet firewall products, causing the drives to fail and making it impossible to restart the PCs. Unlike recent worms that arrive as e-mail attachments, it spreads automatically to vulnerable computers without any action on the part of the user.

At least 50,000 computers have been infected so far, according to Reston, Va.-based computer security firm iDefense and the Bethesda, Md.-based SANS Institute.

The firewalls were developed by Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems. Chris Rouland, vice president of the company's X-Force research and development division, said that as many as 32,000 corporate computers could be infected. The company does not know how many home computers are infected. Click here for the ISS patch.

Macromedia Studio MX 2004 and Contribute 2 are prone to a local privilege escalation vulnerability. This issue has been reported to affect only the version of the software designed for Apple Macintosh OS X. The vendor has released an advisory dealing with this issue and may be referenced for more information. Click here for Macromedia's patch.

Protecting Domain Names from Spoofing

Microsoft’s technical proposal to help deter spoofing is a suggested next step on the road to addressing the escalating problem of unwanted, unsolicited e-mail. Microsoft’s approach entails publishing outbound IP addresses to create a mechanism analogous to “caller ID” for e-mail messages. Click here to download Microsoft's documentation.

Apache Vulnerability

A vulnerability has been reported in Apache that may allow a local attacker to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable host. The issue is reported to exist due to a lack of bounds checking by the software, leading to a buffer overflow condition. The problem is reported to exist in the mod_alias and mod_rewrite modules when a regular expression is configured with more the 9 captures using parenthesis.

This issue may allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to a vulnerable host. Successful exploitation of this issue may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the web server in order to gain unauthorized access to a vulnerable system.

Users are advised to download the fixed version of the software, which is 1.3.29