[+]d'ZheNwaY's Blog[+]: Adobe to rush out Flash Player patch to ...

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Summary: Another in-the-wild zero-day attack prompts an urgent Flash Player patch from Adobe.

Adobe is planning to rush out a critical Flash Player patch later today (September 21, 2011) to fix security holes that are being used in targeted zero-day attacks.

According to Adobe, the Flash Player update will address critical security issues in the product as well as an importantuniversal cross-site scripting issue that is reportedly being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks.

The company is expected to fix at least 16 documented vulnerabilities, some critical enough to expose Windows and Mac users to code execution attacks via Flash files hosted on Web pages.

The Adobe patch comes a day after Google shipped a Chrome update that “includes an update to Flash Player that addresses a zero-day vulnerability.”
Details on the targeted zero-day attacks are not yet available but it’s clear these types of attacks are happening at a very high level.

Just this week at the United Security Summit, Adobe security chief Brad Arkin said the company’s main adversaries are state-sponsored actors.
From Threatpost’s Dennis Fisher:

“In the last eighteen months, the only zero days found in our software have been found by what Dave Aitel would call carrier-class adversaries,” Arkin said in his keynote speech at the United Security Summit here Tuesday. “These are the groups that have enough money to build an aircraft carrier. Those are our adversaries.”

Arkin said that when a new attack involving a zero-day bug in one of Adobe’s products starts, it typically will begin with attacks against a select group of high-profile organizations. That usually means defense contractors, government agencies or large financial services companies. Once the security teams at those organizations find and analyze the threat, Arkin said his team will begin getting a flurry of calls within an hour or two as the campaign hits.

From there, the attack will often then move down the ladder to other large enterprises and then smaller ones as the new exploit shows up in crimeware packs and automated attack tools. By that time, it’s likely an entirely different set of attackers using the exploit. But it’s the well-funder and highly skilled attackers who are doing the real heavy lifting in terms of finding new bugs and designing methods to exploit them.

“These samples trickle downhill really quickly and show up in crime packs,” Arkin said. “The actual exploits it turns out are very, very expensive and difficult to build. Finding the flaw is a lot easier than writing the exploit. If you want to defend against the carrier-class adversary, it’s a very different cost.”

In addition to Flash Player, Adobe’s PDF Reader and Acrobat software products are among the main targets for sophisticated attacks.

nb : zdnet

Source: http://dzhenway.blogspot.com/2011/09/adobe-to-rush-out-flash-player-patch-to.html

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[+]d'ZheNwaY's Blog[+]: Secure Boot in Windows 8 Worries ...

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Windows 8, like Windows 7 and Vista before it, is being touted as the most secure version of Windows ever. In past releases, many of the security improvements have come through exploit mitigations such as ASLR and DEP and better software security practices during development. In Windows 8, however, one of the major changes is the addition of UEFI, a BIOS replacement that will include a secure boot sequence to help prevent low-level malware infections. That change, however, is not sitting well with everyone.

The way that Windows 8 client machines will boot is going to be quite different from the way that current Windows PCs do. Instead of a BIOS, Windows 8 PCs will include an implementation of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which is more flexible and programmable than BIOS is. UEFI will sit between the firmware and the Windows operating system and Microsoft is reportedly going to require that any client machine that runs Windows 8 have a secure boot sequence enabled by default. That sequence will require that whatever software is loaded during boot be signed by one of the keys included in the firmware. If the firmware or software isn't signed by a trusted certificate authority, Windows 8 will not load it.

The impetus for this change in the boot process is that attackers have become proficient in recent years at finding methods to load malware into the BIOS and firmware that underlie the OS. In some cases, rootkits, bootkits and malware that infects the master boot record can not be removed from the machine without re-installing the operating system. Microsoft and security vendors have been trying to find ways defeat these attacks for several years now, and the move to UEFI and secure boot is one of the results of that effort.

It's been a long journey for Microsoft to arrive at this destination. The company has been pushing various versions of a hardware-based security system for nearly a decade now. An early version, originally known as the Windows Next Generation Secure Computing Base and later Palladium, generated quite a bit of controversy when it was first discussed. Many of the elements of the Palladium system are now included as part of some laptops and the Windows 8 UEFI implementation: hardware security modules, secure boot, signing of software, encrypted storage of files. While some portions of what Microsoft has implemented in Windows 8 won't require the use of a TPM (Trusted Platform Module), others will, including support for encrypted hard drives.

These security additions to Windows 8 have some benefits, but there also are some potential drawbacks that worry security and privacy advocates. Ross Anderson of the University of Cambridge worries that there is the potential for hardware-based lock-in included with the Windows 8 changes.

"The extension of Microsoft’s OS monopoly to hardware would be a disaster, with increased lock-in, decreased consumer choice and lack of space to innovate. It is clearly unlawful and must not succeed," Anderson said in a blog post.
There also has been concern in the open-source community that the changes in Windows 8 will prevent users from loading alternate operating systems on Windows-based PCs. There may be some ways for users to circumvent the UEFI implementation and find a method for loading a separate OS, but it would likely be difficult.

"There's no indication that Microsoft will prevent vendors from providing firmware support for disabling this feature and running unsigned code. However, experience indicates that many firmware vendors and OEMs are interested in providing only the minimum of firmware functionality required for their market. It's almost certainly the case that some systems will ship with the option of disabling this. Equally, it's almost certainly the case that some systems won't. It's probably not worth panicking yet. But it is worth being concerned," wrote Matthew Garrett, a developer at Red Hat, in a blog post on the Windows 8 changes.

nb : threatpost

Source: http://dzhenway.blogspot.com/2011/09/secure-boot-in-windows-8-worries.html

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