The Latest in IT Security

In the last month of the year, MySQL has been flooded by a set of zero-day exploits. This set was revealed by Kingcope and he has published proof-of-concept (POCs) for all these vulnerabilities.

The newly discovered set of 0-days affects MySQL in multiple ways, such as application crash/denial of service, privilege escalation, authentication bypass, remote root on Windows systems, and heap/stack overrun. These vulnerabilities have been acknowledged by the vendor and assigned to CVE ids CVE-2012-5611, CVE-2012-5612, CVE-2012-5613, CVE-2012-5614, and CVE-2012-5615 respectively.

Two of the critical security issues, ExploitDB: 23073 & 23083 in MySQL allow remote authenticated attackers to get the shell of a Windows system by sending specially crafted requests.

Below are the rest of the critical issues:

• (CVE-2012-5611). This is triggered by sending an overly long argument to GRANT FILE command, which in turn leads to stack buffer overflow. It permits remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or may even cause database crash. However, to exploit this vulnerability valid username and password are required.
• (CVE-2012-5612). A heap buffer overflow vulnerability caused by a series of crafted commands like USE, SHOW TABLES, DESCRIBE, CREATE TABLE, DROP TABLE, ALTER TABLE, DELETE FROM, UPDATE, SET PASSWORD, etc. If exploited, it allows a remote, authenticated attacker with low privileges to change a current user’s password to an undefined value.
• (CVE-2012-5614). This leads to a service crash via SELECT command with an UpdateXML command containing XML with a large number of unique, nested elements. The successful exploitation of this vulnerability also needs to be authenticated by a valid username and password.
• (CVE-2012-5614). Enumeration vulnerability exists in MySQL which lets remote attackers to learn all valid usernames based on the error messages generated.
• (CVE-2012-5613). This is not considered as a security bug since it’s a result of misconfiguration, however, it can lead to remote authenticated users gaining administrator privileges. In this case, an attacker with ‘FILE’ privilege is leveraged to create a new user that has full access similar to the MySQL administrator.

MySQL Database is famous for its high performance, high reliability and ease of use. It runs on both Windows and many non-Windows platforms like UNIX, Mac OS, Solaris, IBM AIX, etc. It has been the fastest growing application and the choice of big companies such as Facebook, Google, and Adobe among others. Given its popularity, cybercriminals and other attackers are definitely eyeing this platform.

To help users address these issues, Trend Micro Deep Security has released an update 12-032 with new set of DPI rules. Users are recommended to apply the following DPI rules released in the update.

*Out-of-box Coverage – These vulnerabilities are covered by our existing DPI rules.

Trend Micro’s DPI rules can protect users against all known exploits so far. As of this writing, we haven’t seen any attacks leveraging these POC exploits.