U.S. government, companies warn of critical Oracle
flaws
IDG News Service 9/2/04
Paul Roberts, IDG News Service, Boston Bureau
The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) and
software security companies have issued warnings about a number of security
vulnerabilities in versions of Oracle Corp.'s software.
US-CERT issued an alert Wednesday citing several security flaws in Oracle
products that could be used to shut down or take control of vulnerable
systems running the software or to corrupt or steal data from the Oracle
Databases, US-CERT said.
The security holes affect a number of Oracle products, including versions of its
8i, 9i and 10g Database, Application Server and Enterprise Manager software,
according to a bulletin posted Tuesday by Oracle, which also released a patch
for the vulnerabilities. (See:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/security/pdf/2004alert68.pdf.)
Few details of the vulnerabilities were available from Oracle or other
companies. Oracle said that the holes in its Database Server and Application
Server were rated "high" and that exploiting some required network access,
but not a valid database user account. Holes in the Enterprise Manager were
rated "medium," by Oracle and required both network access to the vulnerable
machine and a valid user account to take advantage of, Oracle said.
According to an alert issued by Next Generation Security Software Ltd. (NGSS),
the vulnerabilities include SQL injection attacks, in which attackers inject
malicious code into Web-based forms and other features that are used to
generate Web content dynamically, denial of service attacks and buffer
overflows, in which malicious code is placed on a vulnerable system by
exceeding an area of a vulnerable computer's memory that is allocated for use
by a software program.
NGSS is withholding details about the vulnerabilities for three months to give
Oracle database administrators the time to test and patch vulnerable systems.
(See: http://www.nextgenss.com/advisories/oracle-01.txt.)
Oracle "strongly" recommends that customers apply the patch, noting that
there is no work-around that addresses the new security vulnerabilities.
Paul F. Roberts is U.S. correspondent for the IDG News Service.
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Received on Tue Sep 07 2004 - 09:08:28 CDT
