Despite the huge advantages that containers offer in application portability, acceleration of CI/CD pipelines and agility of deployment environments, the biggest concern has always been about isolation. Since all the containers running on a host share the same underlying kernel, any malicious code breaking out of a container can compromise the entire host, and hence all the applications running on the host and potentially in the cluster.

That fear of container isolation failing to hold up turned out to be true yesterday when a vulnerability in runC was announced. runC is the key and most popular software component that most container engines rely on for spinning up containers on a host. The announced vulnerability allows an attacker to break out of the container isolation through a well-crafted attack (technical details of the vulnerability and the exploit are at https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2019/q1/119) and compromise the entire host. The vulnerability is particularly nasty because it is not covered by the default AppArmor or SELinux kernel-enforced sandboxing policies.

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A new remote code execution vulnerability in Apache Struts 2, CVE-2018-11776, was disclosed yesterday. While this vulnerability does not exist with a default configuration of Struts, it does exist in commonly seen configurations for some Struts plugins.

Update August 24, 2018: A dashboard for this vulnerability is now available to download.

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In order to determine the impact of Spectre/Meltdown and track remediation progress across your entire environment, it is important to visualize vulnerability detections in a dynamic dashboard. For more information on Spectre and Meltdown, please see our previous blog.

Using Qualys AssetView, we have created a dashboard with preloaded widgets that can help track remediation progress as you patch against Spectre and Meltdown. These widgets were built with out-of-the-box functionality, and can be imported into any Qualys subscription.

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UPDATE 1/4/2018: Qualys has released several QIDs for detecting missing patches for these vulnerabilities.
UPDATE 1/5/2018: Pre-built AssetView dashboards to visualize impact and remediation progress.

Vulnerabilities potentially impacting all major processor vendors were disclosed today by Google Project Zero. These vulnerabilities have been named Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 & CVE-2017-5715). Organizations should inventory their systems by processor type, apply vendor patches as they become available, and track their progress. This article describes how Qualys can help in all three areas.

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On Wednesday, the Samba Team patched a vulnerability that exists in all versions of Samba including and after version 3.5.0. Exploitation of this vulnerability could result in remote code execution on the affected host.

Samba is used to provide SMB and CIFS services for Linux systems, and is pervasive in both enterprise and consumer products. While the Samba Team is providing patches for the latest versions (4.4.x and higher), some Linux vendors, such as RedHat and Ubuntu, are providing patches for older versions of Samba if they are used in a supported version of the OS. The Samba Team may also release patches for older versions of Samba.

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On Friday, a hacker group known as The Shadow Brokers publicly released a large number of functional exploit tools. Several of these tools make use of zero-day vulnerabilities, most of which are in Microsoft Windows. Exploiting these vulnerabilities in many cases leads to remote code execution and full system access.

Both end-of-support and current Windows versions are impacted, including Windows 2003, XP, Vista, 7, 2008, 8, and 2012. Microsoft has released patches for each vulnerability across all supported platforms, but will not be releasing patches for end-of-support versions of Windows. It is highly recommended that any end-of-support Windows systems be replaced or isolated, as these systems will often be impacted by new vulnerabilities, without the availability of a patch.

For zero-day vulnerabilities in Operating Systems, you can use your existing asset inventory information from Qualys AssetView, and search for any OS to determine how many vulnerable assets are deployed. This can be done without additional scanning if the data is relatively fresh.

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A new zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2017-7269) impacting Microsoft IIS 6.0 has been announced with proof-of-concept code. This vulnerability can only be exploited if WebDAV is enabled. IIS 6.0 is a component of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (including R2.) Microsoft has ended support for Server 2003 on July 14, 2015, which means that this vulnerability will most likely not be patched. It is recommended that these systems be upgraded to a supported platform. The current workaround is to disable the WebDAV Web Service Extension if it is not needed by any web applications.

The Qualys Cloud Platform can help you detect the vulnerability, track and manage Server 2003 Assets, as well as block exploits against web-based vulnerabilities like this one.

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A number of security researchers recently discovered that Dell laptops come pre-installed with an additional root certificate call eDellRoot. Since the private key is also available on the machine this exposes their customers to the risk of a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack. In a MITM attack, the attacker sits on the network between server and client and uses the eDellRoot certificate to intercept and manipulate HTTPS connections. This vulnerability leaves anyone using these Dell laptops at risk for sensitive data exposure and even infections with malicious payload, all under the cover of a trusted connection.

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Here’s a short story about a simple vulnerability that was easy to fix, but nonetheless could have had serious consequences.

Imagine an attacker, who doesn’t even have root access, being able to:

-  Get source code from the community of Pebble watch developers

-  Replace their binaries with malicious ones

-  Deploy the malicious binaries to the developers’ watches when they click the ‘Remote Deployment’ button.

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Would you buy a cellphone with a hardcoded password? Definitely not. I wouldn’t either.

But as is sometimes the case with non-mass-market devices, security can be overlooked in favor of convenience, even if in retrospect it’s clearly a mistake to do so. Fortunately, this story has a happy ending, thanks to responsible disclosure and quick vendor response.

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