This item has been fixed on UNDHEP IBMs with the installation of
Netscape 4.06. - JMB, 10/7/98

 News    5505 in D0.GENERAL on node UNDHE9                      VaxNews 3.22

   Newsgroups: D0.GENERAL
         From: trippe ( Thomas Trippe )
      Subject: Security Advisory for Netscape & I.Explorer email users
         Date: 28-JUL-1998 12:05:48.24

         __________________________________________________________

                        The U.S. Department of Energy
                     Computer Incident Advisory Capability
                            ___  __ __    _     ___
                           /       |     /_\   /
                           \___  __|__  /   \  \___
              __________________________________________________________

                              ADVISORY BULLETIN

Mime Name Vulnerability in Outlook and Messenger

July 27, 1998 20:00 GMT                                           Number I-077
______________________________________________________________________________
PROBLEM:       A buffer overflow vulnerability has been identified in
                Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Netscape Messenger
                (Mail) that allows an e-mail or news message to contain
                malicious code in a mime header. That code is executed when the
                header is read by the e-mail/news reader. All of these
                e-mail/news readers are widely distributed with popular
                packages such as Internet Explorer, Windows 98, Windows 97,
                Office 97, and Netscape Communicator.
 PLATFORM:      Any platform that runs the vulnerable e-mail/news readers:
                Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Macintosh and Solaris.
 DAMAGE:        If exploited, this vulnerability allows a remote user to run
                arbitrary code on a users machine with the user's privileges.
                The remotely executed code could do anything from sending
                thousands of e-mails in the user's name to formatting the hard
                drive.
 SOLUTION:      Apply patches from Microsoft and Netscape.
 ______________________________________________________________________________
 VULNERABILITY  Risk is high. While we have not yet heard of anyone exploiting
 ASSESSMENT:    this vulnerability for malicious purposes, the ease with which
                it can be exploited, the wide distribution of vulnerable
                readers, and the potential for damage makes it a very serious
                problem.
 ______________________________________________________________________________

 Mime Name Vulnerability in Outlook and Messenger

 CIAC has received information about a vulnerability in the Microsoft and
 Netscape e-mail/news products: Outlook, Outlook Express, and Messenger (Mail).
 These e-mail/news programs improperly handle the mime name tags used to
 identify attachments to e-mail/news messages. An improper name tag can result
 in a buffer overflow condition when the program processes the attachment. As
 the reader generally processes the attachments when the user reads the
 message, the buffer overflow condition can be initiated, by simply reading the
 e-mail/news message.

 The buffer overflow condition can then be exploited to run any arbitrary code
 contained in the attachment. The code runs with the user's permissions to do
 anything the user can do such as re-send the e-mail to the users mailing list,
 change files, or format the hard drive.

 While at first glance this appears to the Good_Times hoax come to life (see
 http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html#goodtimes) this is not really the
 case. Good_Times was supposed to run itself on any system that downloaded and
 read the Good_Times message. This mime name vulnerability is caused by
 improperly handled mime headers in a few versions of some very popular e-
 mail/news readers. By replacing the vulnerable readers with properly patched
 versions, this vulnerability is eliminated.

 BACKGROUND
 ==========

 The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME is a protocol for sending
 non-ASCII text or multi-part documents as part of e-mail or news message.
 Users of the readers rarely see the mime headers since they are stripped out
 of the message as it is downloaded onto the user's machine. The mime headers
 tell the reader where the different parts of the message begin and end, what
 type of data is contained in the message part, what encoding is used to
 convert the message, what the name of the file is that was attached as a
 message part, and other information necessary for the successful transmission
 of the data.

 In the vulnerable readers, the headers are read into memory without checking
 their length. When the length of the header is longer than the buffer in
 memory where the reader tries to store it, data in the header beyond the
 length of the buffer overwrites other code and data in memory. This
 overwriting is the classic "buffer overflow" condition. If the overwritten
 piece of memory is part of the running program, the code from the header in
 the overwritten part is executed in place of the program's code.

 ASSESSMENT
 ==========

 As of the release date of this advisory, we have not heard of anyone
 exploiting this vulnerability but we believe it to be extremely serious. Users
 should take immediate action to patch vulnerable systems. We base this
 assessment on the ease with which the vulnerability can be exploited, the
 widespread use of the vulnerable e-mail/news readers, and the potential for
 doing serious damage to a computer.

 An additional, serious, long-term problem is the fact that these e-mail/news
 readers are automatically installed on many systems along with web browsers,
 office applications and operating systems. For example, Windows 98 comes
 preinstalled on many new systems and contains one of the vulnerable readers.
 As the installations are usually done from a CD-ROM, reinstalling a system in
 the future for any reason reinstalls the vulnerable readers. Users must insure
 that if they reinstall systems that they then replace the vulnerable readers
 with appropriately patched versions.

 VULNERABLE APPLICATIONS
 =======================

 Vulnerabilities in the following applications have been confirmed by the
 manufacturers:
   Outlook Express v4.72.2106.4 and v4.72.3110.1
   Outlook '98
   Netscape Messenger (Mail) v4.05, or 4.5b1
 Earlier versions of these applications are also likely to be vulnerable. The
 current version of Eudora does not appear to be vulnerable. Older e-mail
 readers that do not handle mime attachments are not vulnerable.

 PATCHES
 =======

 Information is available from Microsoft at:

 http://www.microsoft.com/ie/security/oelong.htm

 Patched versions of Outlook and Outlook Express are available from Microsoft
 at the URL:

 Outlook 98
   http://support.microsoft.com/support/msfe
   Request the patch OLMIME from Microsoft Support

 Outlook Express
   First update to Internet Explorer 4.01 at:
   http://www.Microsoft.com/ie

   Then obtain the patch from:
   http://www.microsoft.com/ie/security/oelong.htm

   Patches for Macintosh and Solaris versions of Outlook Express will be
   available soon at:
   http://www.Microsoft.com/security

 Version 4.06 of Netscape Communicator is due out around August 7 and will
 contain a patched version of the e-mail reader. Patches will be available
 through their Smart Update web page:

   http://home.netscape.com/download/su1.html
 ______________________________________________________________________________

 A special thanks goes to Ari Takanen and Marko Laakso of the University of
 Oulu in Finland and Russ Cooper the Owner/Moderator of the NTBugtraq mailing
 list for finding and verifying this vulnerability.
 ______________________________________________________________________________

 CIAC, the Computer Incident Advisory Capability, is the computer
 security incident response team for the U.S. Department of Energy
 (DOE) and the emergency backup response team for the National
 Institutes of Health (NIH). CIAC is located at the Lawrence Livermore
 National Laboratory in Livermore, California. CIAC is also a founding
 member of FIRST, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams, a
 global organization established to foster cooperation and coordination
 among computer security teams worldwide.

 CIAC services are available to DOE, DOE contractors, and the NIH. CIAC
 can be contacted at:
     Voice:    +1 925-422-8193
     FAX:      +1 925-423-8002
     STU-III:  +1 925-423-2604
     E-mail:   ciac@llnl.gov

 For emergencies and off-hour assistance, DOE, DOE contractor sites,
 and the NIH may contact CIAC 24-hours a day. During off hours (5PM -
 8AM PST), call the CIAC voice number 925-422-8193 and leave a message,
 or call 800-759-7243 (800-SKY-PAGE) to send a Sky Page. CIAC has two
 Sky Page PIN numbers, the primary PIN number, 8550070, is for the CIAC
 duty person, and the secondary PIN number, 8550074 is for the CIAC
 Project Leader.

 Previous CIAC notices, anti-virus software, and other information are
 available from the CIAC Computer Security Archive.

    World Wide Web:      http://www.ciac.org/
                         (or http://ciac.llnl.gov -- they're the same machine)
    Anonymous FTP:       ftp.ciac.org
                         (or ciac.llnl.gov -- they're the same machine)
    Modem access:        +1 (925) 423-4753 (28.8K baud)
                         +1 (925) 423-3331 (28.8K baud)

 CIAC has several self-subscribing mailing lists for electronic
 publications:
 1. CIAC-BULLETIN for Advisories, highest priority - time critical
    information and Bulletins, important computer security information;
 2. SPI-ANNOUNCE for official news about Security Profile Inspector
    (SPI) software updates, new features, distribution and
    availability;
 3. SPI-NOTES, for discussion of problems and solutions regarding the
    use of SPI products.

 Our mailing lists are managed by a public domain software package
 called Majordomo, which ignores E-mail header subject lines. To
 subscribe (add yourself) to one of our mailing lists, send the
 following request as the E-mail message body, substituting
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 E-mail to       ciac-listproc@llnl.gov or majordomo@tholia.llnl.gov:
         subscribe list-name
   e.g., subscribe ciac-bulletin

 You will receive an acknowledgment email immediately with a confirmation
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 If you include the word 'help' in the body of an email to the above address,
 it will also send back an information file on how to subscribe/unsubscribe,
 get past issues of CIAC bulletins via email, etc.

 PLEASE NOTE: Many users outside of the DOE, ESnet, and NIH computing
 communities receive CIAC bulletins.  If you are not part of these
 communities, please contact your agency's response team to report
 incidents. Your agency's team will coordinate with CIAC. The Forum of
 Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) is a world-wide
 organization. A list of FIRST member organizations and their
 constituencies can be obtained via WWW at http://www.first.org/.

 This document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an
 agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States
 Government nor the University of California nor any of their
 employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any
 legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or
 usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process
 disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately
 owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial products,
 process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or
 otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement,
 recommendation or favoring by the United States Government or the
 University of California. The views and opinions of authors expressed
 herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States
 Government or the University of California, and shall not be used for
 advertising or product endorsement purposes.

 LAST 10 CIAC BULLETINS ISSUED (Previous bulletins available from CIAC)

 I-067: AutoStart 9805 Macintosh Worm Virus
 I-068: File Access Issue With Internet Information Server
 I-069: Buffer overflows in some POP servers
 I-070: Distributed DoS Attack Against NIS/NIS+ Networks
 I-071: OpenVMS loginout Vulnerability
 I-072: SunOS Solaris Vulnerabilities (libnsl, SUNWadmap)
 I-073: multiscan ('mscan') Tool
 I-074: Buffer Overflow in Some Implementations of IMAP Servers
 I-075: Microsoft Office 98 Security Vulnerability
 I-076: SGI IRIX ioconfig(1M) and disk_bandwidth(1M) Vulnerability