TippingPoint Threat Intelligence and Zero-Day Coverage – Week of May 28, 2018

I ended up at an urgent care clinic earlier this week and found out I have strep throat. The doctor who examined me asked me what medicine I had taken prior to my visit to help alleviate my throat pain, to which I replied, “I took a multi-symptom liquid medicine because the pain was keeping me awake.” To my amazement, he said, “You’re over 21 years old, right? You would have been better off with some good alcohol and ibuprofen because what you took is the same thing.” I thought he was joking (he wasn’t), but while I didn’t know what I had at the time, I was just looking for the quick fix for lack of sleep and throat pain, realizing I wasn’t solving the root issue that would end up being a bacterial infection.

Speaking of diagnosing a root cause, Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) vulnerability researcher Abdul-Aziz Hariri published a blog this week detailing a buffer overflow vulnerability in Adobe Acrobat. ZDI has seen an increase in Adobe vulnerability submissions in the past couple of years, especially in the Acrobat Reader product line. Abdul-Aziz explores the root cause of the buffer overflow that affected the setIntent Optional Content Groups (OCG) JavaScript function. JavaScript is an attractive hotbed for attackers and the JavaScript engine within Acrobat is no exception. You can read the full blog here to learn how Adobe tried to patch the vulnerability, only to be faced with a patch evasion within hours, and how they eventually corrected the issue.

Microsoft Zero-Day Published

Earlier this week, the ZDI published details of a Microsoft Windows vulnerability in accordance with its disclosure policy. The flaw exists in Windows’ JScript component that can allow an attacker to execute malicious code on vulnerable systems. More specifically, the flaw exists within the handling of Error objects in JScript. According to ZDI, Microsoft is working on a patch, and at the time of this blog posting, no known exploits exist. You can get more details on the vulnerability here.

Zero-Day Filters

There are 17 new zero-day filters covering five vendors in this week’s Digital Vaccine (DV) package. A number of existing filters in this week’s DV package were modified to update the filter description, update specific filter deployment recommendation, increase filter accuracy and/or optimize performance. You can browse the list of published advisories and upcoming advisories on the Zero Day Initiative website. You can also follow the Zero Day Initiative on Twitter @thezdi and on their blog.

Adobe (8)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (1)

Microsoft (2)

Trend Micro (1)

WECON (5)

Missed Last Week’s News?

Catch up on last week’s news in my weekly recap.