Microsoft released a long list of updates for Microsoft software today. The most interesting appear to be those patching Internet Explorer and the kernel software vulnerabilities. In all, ten critical "use-after-free" vulnerabilities are patched in IE along with one important Information Disclosure vulnerability, and three elevation of privilege vulnerabilities are being patched as well. Almost all of these IE vulnerabilities were reported by external security researchers working through HP's Zero Day Initiative.

The recent Internet Explorer 8 0day implemented with ROP to work across ASLR-protected Windows 7, hosted on the compromised Department of Labor website and others, was used as a part of a targeted attack watering hole campaign suggested to be run by known threat actor "DeepPanda". This IE 0day was reported by the guys over at FireEye and iSight Partners. It is being patched with Security Bulletin MS13-038. The others may not have been actively used by threat actors, but as always, it is very important for all Internet Explorer users to update these asap and avoid being a victim of the more common financially motivated mass-exploitation schemes.

A bit less sexy but very important for organizations to update are the three "Important" kernel escalation of privilege vulnerabilities. While these have not yet been known to be publicly exploited, EoP are actively deployed for post-exploitation purposes and are a significant part of any infiltration exercise. All three of these problems were reported by external security researchers, to whom Microsoft extended a "thanks".

Organizations should also be aware that Http.sys in Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows 2012 is vulnerable to denial of service attacks, but exploiting this bug appears to be very difficult. Accordingly, they are rating it "Important".

Other client side apps are being patched with "Important" rated updates as well, including Word, Publisher, and more. More information on all of these updates can be found over at Microsoft's summary.

Also today, Adobe's PSIRT pushed several important updates in ColdFusion (in the crosshairs for persistent attackers on organizations) and both of their big client side apps Flash and Reader/Acrobat.

Microsoft released two Bulletins this month patching 3 critical vulnerabilities. Along with these immediate issues, they released five other Bulletins rated "Important". It appears that the two critical Bulletins address use-after-free vulnerabilities that can all be attacked through Internet Explorer.

For the Windows workstation environments, all versions of Internet Explorer need to be patched asap, including v10 preview running on Windows RT. The patch for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows RT is available at the "Windows Update" site.

In addition to the privately reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer code itself, the Remote Desktop Connection v6.1 Client and Remote Desktop Connection v7.0 Client ActiveX components on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 are vulnerable. Microsoft's SRD team expects to see exploits available within 30 days targeting CVE-2013-1296.

Of the "Important" vulnerabilities, interesting to note is a privately reported Elevation of Privilege issue CVE-2013-0078, which is a bug in the Windows Defender anti-malware engine running on Windows 8 and Windows RT. This vulnerability could be used by an insider or determined adversary to gain further access, and not a type of vulnerability usually hit by mass exploitation kits. Within organizations, this is something to quickly address, but generally individuals do not need to urgently address this type of issue.

See Microsoft's Security Bulletin Summary for April 2013 for the full list of this month's Bulletin releases.

Microsoft releases nine March Security Bulletins. Four of the Bulletins are rated critical, but of the 20 vulnerabilities being patched, 12 are rated critical and enable remote code execution and elevation of privilege. Microsoft software being patched with critical priority include Internet Explorer, Silverlight, Visio Viewer, and SharePoint. So, pretty much everyone running Windows, and lots of Microsoft shops, should be diligently patching systems today.

Pwn2own attracted top offensive security talent to Cansecwest and awarded a half million in prizes for fresh 0day this year, but the event didn't force much Microsoft fix development for this Bulletin release. Adobe, Java, Firefox and Chrome were all hit this year along with two Internet Explorer 10 0day for full compromise on Windows 8 on a Windows Surface Pro tablet.
Instead, MS013-021 is one giant "Internet Explorer Use-After-Free patch", addressing the longest list of IE use-after-free vulnerabilities in a single monthly Bulletin to date. Knowing that only one of these vulnerabilities was disclosed publicly, it almost looks as though they fixed a fuzzer in their own labs or someone stepped up development of their own.

MS013-022 addresses a memory pointer check in Silverlight component HTML rendering - an unusual problem known as "double de-referencing". The interesting thing here is that this client side RCE enables exploitation across not only all of its supported Windows systems, but across Apple's Mac OS X systems. In the light of OS X mass exploitation this past year and the recent slew of OS X-enabled targeted attacks, this patch is important to folks lugging around systems running OS X.

Microsoft recommends that EMET helps mitigate both the Internet Explorer and the Silverlight issues.

On the server side, altogether different from the client side memory corruption issues above, we see a web service vulnerability in Sharepoint, a pretty widely distributed service in organizations. The eye popper here includes an EoP enabled by an XSS flaw that provides remote users with a method to issue Sharepoint commands in the context of an administrative user on the site. These Sharepoint flaws were all privately reported by an outside researcher, but no public disclosure is known. At the same time, a denial of service and buffer overflow issue is being addressed in the Sharepoint code.

MS012-023 addresses vulnerable code in Visio Viewer 2010, but the vulnerable code also is delivered in components within Microsoft Office. The odd thing is that there is no known code path traversal through the vulnerable code within Microsoft Office. And, Microsoft maintains four or five versions of Visio Viewer, a widely used piece of software for organizations to distribute diagrams and charts of all types. However, this vulnerability only affects one version - Microsoft Visio Viewer 2010. Nonetheless, Microsoft is leaning towards addressing any and all security issues (including unknown future issues), and patching the code everywhere it resides including Microsoft Office, whether or not it is traversed at runtime within Office.

Of the lesser rated vulnerabilities, the kernel mode USB descriptor issue seems the most interesting. And yes, the title of this post is out-of proportion and fairly ridiculous. I don't expect another Stuxnet to rise up simply because of this vulnerability. But, in a flashback to Stuxnet exploit vectors, it provides another vector of delivery for arbitrary code to be executed in kernel mode simply by inserting a USB device into a system.
To clarify, the danger here does not lie in the immediate potential for another Stuxnet. The immediate danger lies in the availability of attack surface demonstrated by Stuxnet to enable highly secured, air gapped industrial environments to be infiltrated with Pearl Harbor style surprise and effectiveness.

Today's February Microsoft Security Bulletin release patches a long list of vulnerabilities. However, only a subset of these vulnerabilities are critical. Four of them effect client side software and one effect server side - Internet Explorer, DirectShow media processing components (using web browsers or Office software as a vector of delivery), OLE automation components (APT related spearphish), and one effecting the specially licensed "Oracle Outside In" components hosted by Microsoft Exchange that could be used to attack OWA users. These critical vulnerabilities all potentially enable remote code execution, as does the Sharepoint server related Bulletin rated "important" this month. The other vulnerabilities enable Elevation of Privilege and Denial of Service attacks. Several of the vulnerabilities have been publicly disclosed, and at least one is known to be publicly exploited. A large number of the CVE being patched are in the kernel code, so this month most everyone should expect to manage a reboot.

The long list of CVE patched by MS-13-016 all address race conditions that were privately reported in win32k.sys, which all enable non-trivial EoP attacks. This lessens the severity of the issue, as evidenced by the recent RDP vulnerability that attracted so much attention at the end of this past year.

So, we should focus immediate efforts on the handful of critical RCE this month.

The Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Incubator program updated their Flash Platform runtime beta program to version 5, delivered as Flash Player version 11.2.300.130. It includes a "sandboxed" version of the 32-bit Flash Player they are calling "Protected Mode for Mozilla Firefox on Windows 7 and Windows Vista systems". It has been over a year since Adobe discussed the Internet Explorer ActiveX Protected Mode version release on their ASSET blog, and the version running on Google Chrome was sandboxed too.

Adobe is building on the successes that they have seen in their Adobe Reader X software. Its sandbox technology has substantially raised the bar for driving up the costs of "offensive research", resulting in a dearth of Itw exploits on Reader X. As in "none" in 2011. This trend reflects 2011 targeted attack activity that we’ve observed. 2011 APT related attacks nailed outdated versions of Adobe Flash software delivered as "authplay.dll" in Adobe Reader v8.x and v9.x and the general Flash component "NPSWF32.dll" used by older versions of Microsoft Office and other applications. Adobe X just wasn't hit. IE Protected Mode wasn't hit. Chrome sandboxed Flash wasn't hit. If there are incident handlers out there that saw a different story, please let me know.

mwcollectd v4, a next-generation low-interaction malware collection honeypot, has just been released. It's written in C++, but the easy integration of additional Python modules means that malware researchers around the world can easily extend the honeypot with new protocols and features.

We're happy to be sponsoring this project, which was mainly developed by Georg Wicherski (one of our virus analysts in Germany) and Mark Schloesser, from RWTH Aachen University. It's published under the LGPL license. If you want to take a look at mwcollectd, it's here, and libemu, which is used by mwcollectd, is here.

On January 13th we raised the alert level for the Kido family to orange: moderate risk. It's been quite a while since an 'old school' network worm has caused such a stir - Kido's managed it by not only relying on critical Windows SMB vulnerabilities to spread but it also bruteforces weak passwords in order to gain access to other machines in a local network.

Because of this (along with a few other things) Kido can be very painful to get rid of. That's why we've decided to release a free tool which can be used to clean infected machines.

You can grab our KidoKiller tool here.

Feel free to give it a try.

Our previous blog on Gpcode said we'd managed to find a way to restore files in addition to those files that can be restored using the PhotoRec utility.

It turns out that if a user has files that are encrypted by Gpcode and versions of those same files that are unencrypted, then the pairs of files (the encrypted and corresponding unencrypted file) can be used to restore other files on the victim machine. This is the method that the StopGpcode2 tool uses.

Where can these unencrypted files be found? They may be the result of using PhotoRec. Moreover, these files may be found in a backup storage or on removable media (e.g., the original files of photographs copied to the hard disk of a computer that has been attacked by Gpcode may still be on a camera’s memory card). Unencrypted files may also have been saved somewhere on a network resource (e.g., films or video clips on a public server) that the Gpcode virus has not reached.

We can't guarantee that files will be restored, as the method used relies not only on the user having unencrypted versions of the affected files but also on the characteristics of the infected machine. All the same, the results we achieved during testing (80% of encrypted files were restored) suggest that it's worth doing if you need to recover your files.

The more pairs of files that can be found the more data that can be restored.

Detailed instructions on the use of the StopGpcode2 tool can be found in the description of Virus.Win32.Gpcode.ak.

Currently, it's not possible to decrypt files encrypted by Gpcode.ak without the private key. However, there is a way in which encrypted files can be restored to their original condition.

When encrypting files, Gpcode.ak creates a new file next to the file that it intends to encrypt. Gpcode writes the encrypted data from the original file data to this new file, and then deletes the original file.

It's known that it is possible to restore a deleted file as long as the data on disk has not been significantly modified. This is why, right from the beginning, we recommended users not to reboot their computers, but to contact us instead. We told users who contacted us to use a range of utilities to restore deleted files from disk. Unfortunately, nearly all the available utilties are shareware – we wanted to offer an effective, accessible utility that could help restore files that had been deleted by Gpcode.

What did we settle on? An excellent free utility called PhotoRec, which was created by Christophe Grenier and which is distributed under General Public License (GPL).

The utility was originally created in order to restore graphics files (presumably that's why it's called PhotoRec, short for Photo Recovery). Later, the functionality was extended, and the utility can currently be used to restore Microsoft Office documents, executable files, PDF and TXT documents, and also a range of file archives.

You can find a full list of supported formats here. The official PhotoRec utility site is here. The PhotoRec utility is part of the TestDisk package, and you can find the latest version of TestDisk, including PhotoRec here.

It should be stressed the PhotoRec excels at the task it was designed for: restoring file data on a specific disk. However, it has difficulty in restoring exact file names and paths. In order to address this issue, we've developed a small, free program, called StopGpcode.

If you've fallen victim to GpCode, don't pay the author of the virus to restore your data. Use PhotoRec instead – if you want, you can make a donation to the developer of the program.

The description of Gpcode contains detailed instructions on how to manually restore files attacked by the virus using PhotoRec and Stopgpcode.

Exactly two years ago we introduced our extended databases.

These databases protect against AdWare, RiskWare and PornWare. Some people like to refer to the extended databases simply as anti-spyware protection, but we actually detect much more than just that with the help of these databases, most notably RiskWare programs.

Back then we still had cumulative updates and the extended databases consisted of three components: advware.avc, riskware.avc and pornware.avc.

Later two of those names changed to adware.avc and obscene.avc. Since the beginning of this year we simply have combined them into extxxx.avc database, where the x stands for a decimal figure. However, we've actually been detecting these types of threats for much longer than two years.

Before we introduced the extended databases the detection of AdWare etc. was included in x-files.avc.

Two years ago it was special to have a separate option to cover such threats, now it is a much more common feature for antivirus programs.

You can select the extended databases by going to KAV's settings, clicking on Threats and exclusions, and then selecting the extended database.

Be sure to read the pop-up message when choosing a database from the dropdown list.