Recently in Vulnerabilities Category

A busy week - in addition to Microsoft August's Patch Tuesday which delivers a record setting 15 bulletins covering 35 vulnerabilities, Adobe has just released a Flash update and will be releasing a patch for a Adobe Reader 0-day vulnerability published a few weeks ago at Black Hat security conference.To help with this challenging patch workload, we have ranked the Microsoft bulletins into three distinct groups of updates, which can be addressed on different schedules.

IT admins should first tackle the updates that represent the biggest attack potential: end-users and internet browsing are at the subject of six bulletins, all of them of critical severity and four of them with an exploitability rating of "1", indicating that working exploits are expected within 30 days. MS10-053 has six direct fixes for Internet Explorer, while the ZDI submitted MS10-055 and MS10-052 address issues in media-plugins: MS10-055 for the Cinepak codec and MS10-052 for the MP3 file format. MS10-060 patches a critical .NET framework issue that can be exploited through web browsing/Silverlight and MS10-051 addresses a vulnerability in the Internet Explorer MSXML ActiveX component. MS10-049 deals with a client side vulnerability of the HTTPS protocol that can be triggered by a malicious HTTPS site. This and the previous MSXML ActiveX component are the bulletins in the group that are rated "2" on the exploitability scale (= harder to exploit). All of these updates should be applied as soon as possible.

A second group of updates has its focus on file format vulnerabilities. The most critical is MS10-056, a vulnerability in the RTF format in Microsoft Word 2007 and older. An attacker can craft a malicious file that triggers a remote code execution when opened by Word on the target computer. Users of Outlook 2007 installations need to pay special attention, since the preview pane in Outlook is configured by default to use Word to render the RTF format. This makes Outlook 2007 susceptible to an attack that does not even require the opening of the e-mail. Apply this update as quickly as possible. MS10-057 and MS10-050 provide fixes for Excel 2003 and earlier and Windows Movie Maker (a default component in Windows XP) file format vulnerabilities. Both have an exploitability rating of "1" and should be addressed as soon as possible.

MS10-058 deals with an interesting vulnerability. It is a located in the new TCP/IP stack for IPv6 under Vista, Windows 7 and 2008R2. While we believe that currently very few publicly facing network infrastructures have IPv6 enabled, this bulletin is important for them, because it is remotely attackable and few mitigations exist. It is a reminder that new OS components and applications are apt to introduce new attack vectors into networks. MS10-054 is a vulnerability in the SMB protocol; it requires read access to a share as well as attacker-controlled data on the target machine. The exploit here will most likely manifest itself as a local escalation of privilege attack.

The remainder of the August updates all address local flaws of the Windows Operating system family and are rated important as the attacker needs to be present on the target system to make use of them. MS10-047 is a Windows Kernel flaw, MS10-048 a flaw in the win32k.sys driver and MS10-059 fixes a problem in the tracing component of Windows.

Last week Microsoft released a bulletin for the 0-day flaw using the LNK filetype. If you have not done so yet, apply MS10-046 together with the first group of patches as desktop systems are at the highest risk of attack using the LNK vulnerability.

References:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin
• Qualys Security Alert
  

Microsoft released an update today that addresses the LNK vulnerability. The update is rated as critical and applies to all currently supported Windows Operating systems.

We recommend applying the update as quickly as possible. Attacks using this 0-day vulnerability have been increasing.

The recently discontinued Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 are not covered by the patch. Users of these Windows 2000 and XP SP2 need to work on an upgrade strategy for these operating systems, as over time without patch support they will become increasingly susceptible to attacks from malware

Microsoft will issue an out-of-band update next Monday, August 2nd. The update will address the critical LNK vulnerability that applies to all versions of the Windows Operating system, from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 7.

Microsoft's decision to issue this upgrade before the normal Patch Tuesday on August 10 is due to reports of increasing number of attacks that use the LNK flaw.

Windows 2000 and XP SP2 users will not be covered and are now in a predicament that will become increasingly urgent. Attacks will continue to become more prevalent and their defensive options are limited. Microsoft's work-around in Advisory KB2286198 has a serious impact on the usability of the system as desktop icons are all replaced by standard generic representations and navigation is hampered. The best option for XP SP2 users is to upgrade to SP3 as soon as possible, Windows 2000 users need to migrate to a new OS alltogether.

Primary attack vectors for the LNK vulnerability are USB sticks and shared drives, ahe attack depends on a specially crafted LNK file and a custom DLL to function. Remote attacks through e-mail or websites are theoretically possible, but require multiple steps and user interaction. Nevertheless disabling SMB and WebDAV protocols in the outbound ruleset of internet facing firewalls is a measure that provides additional protection against the remote attack vector.

Yesterday Adobe Systems updated its Reader product to fix a total of eight vulnerabilities. Out of the eight vulnerabilities, six allow remote code execution and are critical. One of the flaws addressed was CVE-2009-4324, the 0-day vulnerability which has had exploits in the wild since December 14 2009, roughly a month ago. This vulnerability is exploited by including malicious code in a PDF document and triggered by executing an embedded JavaScript program. The PDF can be delivered through e-mail or downloaded from a website, making it a fairly easy attack to execute. Interestingly enough it seems that this particular flaw was used in against Adobe itself as pointed out by Elinor Mills at CNET.

Adobe has introduced two interesting security tools in the last two releases of the Reader product - one is an integrated update mechanism that will eventually default to automatic and silent updates. This mechanism is currently in beta and being tested with part of the installed base. The second tool is a internal blacklist that allows hackers to disable specific JavaScript functions. Adobe recently provided guidance on how to mitigate the December 0-day by using this tool. Both tools are in their initial stages but look very promising.

The fixed versions are now Reader v9.3 and v8.2 . What is important for Adobe Reader v7 users to know is that v7 is now out of support (as of 12/28/2009 - see: http://www.adobe.com/support/products/enterprise/eol/eol_matrix.html#86) and is not being updated anymore with Security fixes. However, it is impacted by the December 0-day. IT administrators should take inventory of their v7 users and upgrade them to the current standard of v9.

References:

• Original Adobe Advisory
• Qualys Advisory - QID 116768
• Adobe Blog post on breach

A new 0-day flaw in the Microsoft's SMB protocol implementation in Windows 7 and 2008/R2 was published by Laurent Gaffié on Wednesday of last week, one day after Microsoft's November Patch Tuesday. The flaw was acknowledged on Friday by Microsoft as KB977544.

The exploit involves tricking an end user to click on a link to a server with a malicious configuration, which causes the machine to become unresponsive requiring a reboot. The flaw is unrelated to the recent SMBv2 problem (MS09-050). The recommended workaround at the moment is to prohibit outgoing traffic for the ports used by SMB 139 and 445 with a firewall. This type of egress filtering is already considered a best practice, but such a configuration involves additional work and I doubt that it is consistently implemented.

However, the vulnerability is not very "useful" as it involves user interaction and "only" locks up the target machine. A typical attacker that goes through the work of tricking users to click on a link will use an exploit that allows him to control the target machine after execution. For Microsoft the vulnerability represents a trigger to review and improve the part of the SDL process that did not catch the flaw.

Laurent is doing excellent security research work here on Windows 7 just as 2 months ago, but the discussion on "full" vs. "responsible" disclosure will certainly be revived by his post. While we do not know the exact details for Laurent's exchange with Microsoft, we believe that "responsible disclosure" is the more productive mechanism to improve Internet security by fostering collaboration.

References:

• ISC blog post - great information
• Qualys ID 90569

Today Microsoft released patches for 6 security updates that address 15 individual vulnerabilities. Three patches were rated as critical and the other 3 are rates as important. Here is a recap of today's advisory:

• MS09-065 was rated as Critical due to the EOT (Embedded Open Type Font) vulnerability in which an attacker can execute arbitrary commands on the victim's computer. This can be achieved by enticing the victim to visit a web page with malicious EOT fonts or open an e-mail which contains malicious content. A proof of concept that causes the application to crash is publicly disclosed. All Windows operating systems except Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 are affected.
  We can expect working exploits soon and this is the most critical vulnerability to address - for users that cannot patch the vulnerability immediately Microsoft has provided also some workarounds in a detailed blog post including instructions on how to use GPOs to roll them out in an automated way.

• MS09-063 and MS09-064 are critical as well as they allow a remote un-authenticated attacker to send malicious packets to the affected systems to cause a remote code execution. MS09-063 is limited to attacks from the local subnet.

• MS09-067 and MS09-068 affect Microsoft Excel and Word. They are standard file format issues that affect consumers and enterprise users alike.

• Three of the six advisories (MS09-063, MS09-064 and MS09-066) have listening ports open which can be targeted for network based attacks.

The newer OS versions Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 were not affected by any of the bulletins released today, a good indication of the progress that Microsoft has made in securing the base Operating System.

In a similar way the security features included in the new Office 2010 would have prevented both MS09-067 and MS09-068. We saw a demo of these features the other day at BlueHat and the strict sandboxing imposed on files that are received through e-mail or Internet download should take care of 2 of the main attack vectors for this type of exploit.

References:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin
  
• Qualys Security Alert
  

This Monday proof of concept exploit code for a Microsoft IIS FTP vulnerability was posted to the milw0rm site. The code allows the attacker to take control of the machine that runs the vulnerable FTP server and can easily be automated and turned into a mass attack tool by combining it with a scanning tool. In order to be exploitable, the vulnerable FTP server need to allow write access and the creation of directories. Unfortunately, even anonymous write access is good enough to make the server vulnerable, but nevertheless this cuts down on the number of potential targets.

Microsoft acknowledged the vulnerability and published an advisory 975191 this afternoon and list 5.0, 5.1, 6.0 and also 7.0 as affected. The advisory suggests as work-arounds to either disable FTP altogether, limit access to only authorized and named users or use NTFS capabilities to prohibit the creation of directories on the server. The NTFS solution seems to be the way to go for users that cannot make a bigger change to their FTP services and has minimal impact, so it is a good interim solution until a real patch comes out. We don't expect this problem to be addressed in next week's Patch Tuesday release as the Development and QA time are too long; it makes sense to prepare for a longer period without a real solution. An alternate way of dealing with the problem is to evaluate whether a robust FTP server with more granular management capabilities can be deployed instead of the one built-in within IIS.

HD Moore ported the exploit code to his Metasploit project yesterday. This makes it even simpler for IT administrators to demonstrate the existence of the exploit and argue for the deployment of an alternative FTP server.

Updated to include IIS 7.0 as Microsoft amended their advisory on 9/3/2009

Although August is the month of vacations, it's certainly not the case for Microsoft which today announced 9 total patches as part of their monthly Patch Tuesday release cycle for August 2009.  There are 5 critical patches that can all be exploited remotely and 4 important ones that require direct access to the system for exploitation.  This release covers a variety of products with Windows as the main focus.

Highlights of the 5 critical patches covered in this release are:

• MS09-37: This is an MS Active template library patch that covers 5 vulnerabilities. It supersedes MS09-034 where a temporary fix was made available as a work around. This is a true patch and it covers a lot of Microsoft software on all versions of Windows including Outlook, MS media players, ActiveX and many others.
  
• MS09-038: Windows Media file processing patch where a malicious AVI can be posted on any media site for exploitation. All that's needed to be exploited is to click on a malicious link on a file-sharing site like MySpace or others. The malicious link can then take complete control of the user's computer.
  
• MS09-039: This is a patch for WINS and while critical WINS is not installed by default so it is likely not that relevant for most users. However, if WINS is enabled on a Windows system, someone can send a malicious packet to the running service and take control of user's machine.
  
• MS09-043: This is an Office patch for 4 vulnerabilities including one Zero-day.  Office is very prevalent and this vulnerability is fairly simple to exploit. All that's needed is to convince someone to view a malicious web page. There is already a Zero-day detection for it in the QualysGuard Knowledgebase (QID 110101) to address CVE-2009-1136.
  
• MS09-044: This is a patch to address a Remote Desktop vulnerability that is critical, but it requires the user to connect to a malicious server using Remote Desktop. Remote Desktop is typically used by an advanced user or system administrator.
  

Although this is a big release, there are no surprises in it as it addresses an outstanding public Zero-day vulnerability and it includes an official patch for the out-of-band patch released in July for MS09-034. As always users are urged to review these critical patches carefully against their environment and apply them as soon as possible. QualysGuard users are advised to scan systems in their environment to identify affected Windows machines and patch them accordingly. 

References:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for August 2009
• Qualys Security Alert
  

My interview with SearchSecurity.com discussing Laws 2.0 findings presented at Black Hat 2009.

Recorded Panel Session from Black Hat USA 2009 >
Laws 2.0 White Paper >
Laws 2.0 Power Point Presentation >

Microsoft's July Security Bulletin does not have any surprises due to the intense pre-release activity around the 3 zero-day advisories that came out in the last 6 weeks. Microsoft had already announced that they would address 2 advisories with patches MS09-028 and MS09-032 for DirectShow and Microsoft Video respectively. Yesterday's zero-day is left for later and users should apply the work-around published in KB973472. The 3rd critical vulnerability addressed is MS09-029 OpenType Font Engine which applies to all versions of Windows, Vista and 2008 included.These 3 advisories should be addressed immediately as they allow the attacker to fully control the victim's computer.

Microsoft proxy server ISA 2006 has a vulnerability rated as "important" that allows remote unauthenticated users to access the server. However paired with a knowledge of the administrators user name attackers can take full control of the server. As administrator usernames are often easy to guess this vulnerability deserves special attention, if IT organizations are using ISA with the Radius configuration. This vulnerability is covered in MS09-031. The ISA blog has some more in depth information.

MS09-030 is an advisory for the Publisher component in the MS Office 2007 suite is rated as "important" as well, but can be used to take full control of the system if the victim is logged in as administrator. If an organization uses Publisher or has it installed as part of Office 2007, this should be treated as "critical" as well.

Microsoft also provided patches for their virtualization product VPC and Virtual Server on all versions (MS09-033) preventing an elevation of privilege in the guest operating system. This is classified as "important" because local access to the guest OS is required. This bulletin is interesting because this vulnerability is introduced by the fact that the OS is running under a virtual environment and allows the user to access to privileged kernel mode.

In addition we are working on the Oracle CPU patch release and are monitoring the Firefox 3.5 zero-day.

References:

• Qualys Security Alert
  

We just released our QID 110101 which detects the Microsoft Office Web Components ActiveX zero-day vulnerability that Microsoft released today as KB973472. Similar to last weeks zero-day vulnerability Microsoft is providing a workaround using their Fixit program.

The main attack vector is again Internet Explorer, a user can be infected by browsing a website that hosts the exploit without further interaction with a so called "drive-by" exploit. There have been a number of sightings already, which have prompted Microsoft for this out-of-band release - for more information take a look at SANS.

QualysGuard will not raise the vulnerability if you have the described workaround applied which inhibits the OWC10 and OWC11 classids that are susceptible to the attack. We will be enhancing the detection as more information about workarounds and patches becomes available. Due to the timing we do not expect this vulnerability to be addressed tomorrow at Patch Tuesday.

I am delighted to present the Laws 2.0 research at Black Hat and with new data that compares the progress of patching across multiple critical industries. The focus on this talk will be on zero-days vulnerabilities and how organizations deal with them. I will discuss this topic with a panel of leading CISOs and security experts that includes Richard Bejtlich from General Electric, Ed Bellis from Orbitz, Paul Griffiths from Goldman Sachs, Kris Herrin from Heartland Payment Systems and Mark Weatherford from the State of CA. Please join us if you are attending Black Hat USA 2009. I am personally looking forward to the event and participating in all the Black Hat discussions and festivities. More details about this talk here.

Microsoft released advisory KB972890 yesterday for a zero-day vulnerability found by ISS, warning of an attack on an ActiveX control for Microsoft Video. The main attack vector is for the user to browse a website that has the exploit installed with Internet Explorer- further interaction is not necessary, the attack is of the type called "drive-by". This makes the attack very dangerous as there is very little that Internet Explorer users can do to defend themselves. Security news here and here report that thousands of websites have started serving the exploits already, which is supported by the in-depth information that we are getting from our iDefense feed which has a long list of sites that are serving the exploits.

The described work arounds involve disabling 40+ classids in the registry, which should be scriptable by IT administrators. The Microsoft support website has a FixIt link which individual users can use to apply those changes to the registry.

QualysGuard detects this zero-day vulnerability as QID 90510, but does not raise it if you have the described workaround applied. We will be enhancing the detection as more information about workarounds and patches becomes available.

How do you deal with ActiveX controls, do you disable them in your default builds ? Let me know by sending feedback. We also will discuss this issue on our upcoming panel at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas with the present industry experts.

Microsoft's May Security Bulletin contains a single advisory for PowerPoint in Microsoft Office (MS09-017). It addresses 14 distinct vulnerabilities, including the 0-day vulnerability that was identified in the beginning of April 2009. While the vulnerabilities rank only as important on most versions of Microsoft Office, they all categorized as "remote code execution" and have a low exploitability index, meaning exploits are relatively easy to write and can be expected to be used soon in attacks.

One of the mentioned workarounds for CVE-2009-0556 , the 0-day vulnerability patched in this advisory is installing MOICE (KB937696). MOICE stands for "Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment," a toolset that sanitizes Office documents when opened through browsing and email by removing potentially dangerous code. It has been available since May 2007 and is cited as a work-around in eight of Microsoft's 78 advisories in 2008. MOICE is an interesting tool, used to reduce the risk produced by the increasing number of file format vulnerabilities. Its limitation is that it only works with Office 2003 and 2007; Office 2000 and Office XP are not supported.

In addition to the Microsoft patches both Adobe and Apple released their equivalent of "Patch Tuesday" advisories. Adobe fixed a recent critical 0-day vulnerability in their Acrobat and Reader product lines. Compared to their February patch for a known 0-day, this time around they reacted much faster and published patches for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix simultaneously. Adobe software is widely installed and according to statistics from F-Secure PDF based file exploits are on the rise - 49% for the first 4 months of 2009 compared to 28% in 2008.

Apple's patches address a variety of critical issues in OS X and the Safari browser. The advisory for OS X addresses over 40 vulnerabilities and the Safari advisory applies to both OS X and Windows.

References:

• Qualys Security Alert
  

For the 2nd time in 2009 Adobe has to deal with a 0-day announcement. Securityfocus BID 34736 has the exploit code, which should be straightforward for attackers to incorporate into their existing "outreach" mechanisms. Once again the JavaScript implementation in Adobe Reader is the culprit and Adobe officially recommends turning off JavaScript as a work-around, until a patch becomes available. While I expect that attacks will focus on the Windows platform, the vulnerability is truly cross-platform and affects Windows, Macs and Linux. File format vulnerabilities of this kind represent a significant attack vector, but they continue to be neglected by IT administrators. Our ongoing analysis of the previous Adobe vulnerability APSA09-01 (released February 2009, patch available on March 10 as shown by the red line in the graph) shows no significant reduction in the number of exploitable machines.



If this trend continues to persist for the Adobe Reader vulnerabilities, which it has in all 2008 and as demonstrated in Laws 2.0, attackers don't need to rush anymore, they can take their time in figuring out the best way to get an infected PDF file into their victims.

View Full Size: http://icvdm.vo.llnwd.net/o10/Qualys/presentations/laws_infosecurity09_850x480.mov

Today we declared at the RSA Conference the new Laws of Vulnerabilities 2.0 with focus on 5 critical industry segments. The findings are very interesting and the research shows that most industries are still slow in their patching and remediation efforts. Summary of the new Laws:

Half-Life--The half-life of critical vulnerabilities remained at 30 days across all industries. Comparing individual industries, the Service industry has the shortest half-life of 21 days, Finance ranked second with 23 days, Retail ranked third with 24 days and Manufacturing ranked last with a vulnerability half-life of 51 days.

Prevalence--Sixty percent of the most prevalent and critical vulnerabilities are being replaced by new vulnerabilities on an annual basis.

Persistence--The Laws 2.0 declared that the lifespan of most, if not all vulnerabilities is unlimited and a large percentage of vulnerabilities are never fully fixed.

Exploitation--Eighty percent of vulnerability exploits are now available within single digit days after the vulnerability's public release.

Full findings are included in the PDF on the side.
Link to Press Release.

Microsoft's Security bulletin for April brought a total of 8 advisories covering 23 (21 distinct, 2 are covered in multiple advisories) vulnerabilities in Windows and Office. The most interesting part of the bulletin is the elevated number of vulnerabilities that have known exploits. 6 vulnerabilities have already been used by attackers and 4 have a proof of concept or attack plan published. For IT administrators this means that their window to patch is rapidly shrinking, when before weeks were an acceptable timeframe, now days seems more adequate.

The most urgent patches to apply are the advisories that have working exploits - MS09-009 for Office/Excel, MS09-010 for Windows/Office and MS09-012 for Windows. Microsoft's Internet Explorer cumulative patch MS09-014 has proof of concept code available for at least one its covered vulnerabilities and thus has a high exploitability index of 1 (consistent exploit code likely). All, but MS09-012 are rated as critical on all of Microsoft's operating systems, meaning that the attacker can gain complete control over the affected systems and apply even to Microsoft newer OS versions such as Vista and Server 2008.

Users who have updated already to Internet Explorer 8 are not affected by MS09-014, another indicator of the significant amount of work Microsoft has invested into this new browser and an incentive to move towards that version of IE as quickly as possible.

The vulnerability addressed by MS09-016 is the only one that is remotely exploitable. It affects Microsoft's ISA product used in securing and proxying companies' internet connections. As it is limited to a denial of service condition it was rated as Important. Further its exploitability index has the lowest value of 3 (Functioning exploit code unlikely), meaning that it is difficult to write a successful and consistent exploit

References:

• More details on the MSFT release process
• Interesting look into the making of one of the bigger patches today
• Qualys Security Alert
  

Yesterday started great, the weather was excellent, looked like a continuation of a calm weekend - then Dan Kaminsky called...

Researchers in Germany had come up with a way to remotely detect the Conficker worm. His idea was to get that knowledge out to as many scanner vendors as possible and see if we could implement the check ASAP. This new detection method allows IT administrators to remotely detect the Conficker virus directly on the infected machines without needing credentials or an agent installed. For many large enterprises, this represents an opportunity to perform a quick and non-intrusive audit of their patching efforts. We quickly assembled a team to take a look at the code that Felix Leder and Tillman Werner from the University of Bonn had made available in Python and saw no problem in implementing the detection in the QualysGuard scanner. After finishing the development proof-of-concept, we started formalizing the project, creating the necessary branches in our source code system, checking in the new code and started a new build and acceptance testing cycle. Late on Sunday QA had a production grade package that could be used for basic functional testing and then put it through our nightly regression testing cycle. After reviewing the regression results earlier today we released the code to our production systems around 3PM PDT. Qualys press release.


Thanks to Rich Mogull and Dan Kaminsky for bringing this to us. Many Thanks also to Felix and Tillman, excellent work, looking forward to reading your paper on the subject when I regain my breath. Also, special thanks for David Watson and Jose Nasario who helped us by providing Conficker samples for testing.

Reference URLs:

• University of Bonn Conficker page - excellent Conficker reading with lots of interesting approaches
• SRI writeup on Conficker - great technical detail

Qualys estimates that about 30 percent of Windows-based computers remain vulnerable to infection because they have not been updated with the patch.

Methodology
In December 2008, Qualys' customers performed scans on over 9 Million IP addresses. There is some duplication as some customers scan multiple times in a given month, but the majority of customers are on a 30 day cycle in their scan schedules. The majority of these scans are against Windows machines as they are the most prevalent in our customers' networks. It is safe to say that data is based on Millions of IP addresses scanned.

What class of virus is it and have you seen something like it before?
This worm is a sophisticated piece of software, beyond exploiting MS08-067 it uses a number of other techniques to propagate, i.e. network shares and removable media such as USB thumb drives. It has a variety of interesting mechanisms to trick the user into executing it, such as changing the icon and message in the autorun dialog. It also uses an innovative way to assure that its control channel, where it receives its commands from, is not shutdown. It contacts a large number of dynamically named URLs for commands, making it harder to shut down the worm down. It is definitely a intelligently designed worm, demonstrating that worm writers are constantly innovating to keep their business moving.
 
Why is it so pervasive when the vector was supposedly patched by Microsoft?
Our scanning data indicates that many machines are not patched yet, even 2 months after the release of the patch by MSFT. We derive our numbers from enterprise customers and SMB, but in areas where non-licensed machines are in use the ratio of unpatched machines must significantly higher due to the difficulty of getting and installing patches and the fear of detection.
 
Is the security community responding fast enough to the threat?
The security community is doing excellent work around that vulnerability and the exploiting worm. But overall IT is not reacting fast enough, as our data reveals and as can be seen by the extent of the damage that the worm is doing. Patch cycles have to be accelerated. Machines that require longer patch cycles (due to their criticality) need to have additional security settings and/or technologies installed that can help mitigate the effects.

In general, we suggest providing general comments to the above questions hinting towards the patching data only to substantiate your claims since the last comments we provided him were very data specific.

During the year-end slowdown Qualys analyzed anonymous data captured by us during our global vulnerability scans. The analysis focuses on critical Microsoft patches published in the second half of 2008 to reduce the initial dataset.
 
Within the 20+ patches we can clearly see three distinct groups with different occurrence profiles:
 

• The first group contains the major Windows operating system and Microsoft Office vulnerabilities, with Office being the clear leader with a frequency of up to 25 % more than Windows OS patches.
  
• The second group are less frequently installed components in both Windows and Office, such as Office document filters (i.e. MS08-044) or VB runtime components (MS08-070) - they have less than 30% of the occurrence frequency of the first group.
  
• At a distant third, we see vulnerabilities in specialized parts of the operating system - the SNA communications connector (MS08-059) and the Windows Media encoder (MS08-053). These make up less than 2% of the overall mix.
  
• As a general trend, after about 30 days the majority of systems have the patches applied and the fix rate then slows down. This applies to all groups, even the comparatively low frequency group three follows this pattern of initial activity.
  
• On a side note group three also contains the only vulnerability that was limited to Windows Vista - MS08-075 - giving us an indication of the low numbers of deployed Vista installations in enterprises.

In our statistical data for MS08-067 we see it being patched at about the same rate as other critical patches. Over 50% of all machines are patched after approximately 30 days. After that period we see the patch rates go down and the overall number of machines that are attackable only slowly diminishing.  Unfortunately this leaves enough machines to be exploited by the "Conficker" worm types even today, over 45 days later.

We would have liked to see a faster reaction by the computer users given the significance of the patch but there still seems to be a barrier to reach everybody and make them understand the urgency of patching.

This vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server product is highly critical as it allows the attacker to remotely control the database and the underlying server. DBAs should immediately review the work-arounds provided in the advisory and implement them as soon as possible. MS SQL-Server is a highly popular product as we have seen in April of this year, when a SQL-Injection vulnerability that specifically targeted MS-SQL server driven websites was used to redirect users to websites serving malware. The effects of this attack are still out on the internet, as we can still see sites that have fallen victim to the attack and that have not been restored to an exploit free state.

The potential exists for leakage of private data and major disruptions in critical MS SQL driven applications, such as e-commerce and HR. On the positive side we believe that companies have aggressively firewalled off their MS SQL server from being accessible directly on the internet after the traumatic Slammer worm in 2003 which should provide some protection from direct attacks. However a smart attacker can easily pair this exploit with another attack mechanism such as phishing to get behind the corporate firewalls and then attack all accessible MS SQL server installations.

We expect that Microsoft is currently working on patch and will release it out of band. Differently from the recent release of the Internet Explorer patch the deployment will be slow. MS SQL is part of the core server infrastructure of many enterprise companies and is subject to lengthy patch and testing cycles and before any such fix can be deployed.