Massive Oracle PWN@G3 At Black Hat

"In 2001, Larry Ellison brashly proclaimed in a keynote speech at the computing conference Comdex that his database software was "unbreakable." David Litchfield has devoted the last nine years to making the Oracle chief executive regret that marketing stunt.

"At the Black Hat security conference Tuesday afternoon, Litchfield unveiled a new bug in Oracle's 11G database software, a critical, unpatched vulnerability that would allow a hacker to take control of an Oracle database and access or modify information at any security level. `Anything that God can do on that database, you can do,` Litchfield [said] in an interview following his talk.

"The attack that Litchfield laid out for Black Hat's audience of hackers and cybersecurity researchers exploits a combination of flaws in Oracle's software. Two sections of code within the company's database application--one that allows data to be moved between servers and another that allows management of Oracle's implementation of java--are left open to any user, rather than only to privileged administrators. Those vulnerable subroutines each have their own simple flaws that allow the user to gain complete access to the database's contents.

"Litchfield says he warned Oracle about the flaws in November, but they haven't been patched. Oracle didn't immediately respond to a request for comment."

More at Forbes.com...

iPwn3d

"On Thursday, two researchers plan to reveal an unpatched iPhone bug that could virally infect phones via SMS.

"If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.

"That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they've found in the iPhone's handling of text messages, the researchers say they'll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone's functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking."

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Return Of The ActiveDead

"Send more PoCs!"

"Microsoft has been forced to issue emergency patches for its Windows operating system after researchers discovered a way to bypass a critical security mechanism in the Internet Explorer browser.

"During a Wednesday talk at this week's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, researchers Mark Dowd, Ryan Smith and David Dewey will show a way of bypassing the 'kill-bit' mechanism used to disable buggy ActiveX controls. A video demonstration posted by Smith shows how the researchers were able to bypass the mechanism, which checks for ActiveX controls that are not allowed to run on Windows. They were able to then exploit a buggy ActiveX control in order to run an unauthorized program on a victim's computer.

"Although the researchers have not revealed the technical details behind their work, this bug could be a big deal, giving hackers a way of exploiting ActiveX problems that were previously thought to have been mitigated via kill-bits."

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