Samba Reports Severe Security Flaw in All Existing Versions

Developers of Samba have warned that every edition of Samba has severe vulnerability, which cyber-criminals can abuse without difficulty. The flaw makes all Samba versions till as early as 3.0 vulnerable. Incidentally, the 3.0 version was launched over 5 years back. Meanwhile, it was Andrew Bartlett an employee of Cisco and developer of Samba who discovered the flaw while an audit was going on internally.

It's worth noting that Samba helps to re-execute a number of networking protocols for free. Fundamentally, the software is utilized for sharing prints and files between Windows computers and Unix-based PCs, including every Solaris, Linux, BSD and AIX edition, along with Mac OS X systems of Apple.

Moreover, with the discovery of the flaw detected as CVE-2010-3069, security researchers associated with Samba issued a patch on September 14, 2010. It's been warned that attackers may exploit the above flaw for executing malware remotely on computers having the file-sharing software active.

Evidently, Samba's fresh update, Version 3.5.5 remedies the vulnerability, which occurs due to heap overflow within a utility utilized for computing the Windows Security ID (SID), a specific numerical which helps to recognize security entities inside Windows. Attackers who exploit this flaw via harmful client software can cause the Samba 'Server Message Block Daemon (SMBD) server to crash through the dispatch of an SID, which summons the flawed utility as also makes the stack buffer to overflow.

Stated Chief Security Officer HD Moore of Rapid7, who's also the creator of The Metasploit Project, one probable medium through which the vulnerability could be abused was to make the user hunt file shares based on that file's SID. Threatpost.com published this on September 14, 2010.

Moore further stated that the flaw could be exploited solely if attackers gained access to the root or administrative setup of the flawed system.

He, however, advised users running Samba to disable the software till they've upgraded it. That implies for all users of Mac OS X using file-sharing utility as well as all "Network-Attached Storage" tools associated with some printers, Linux etc., Moore explained. Softpedia.com published this on September 14, 2010.

Related article: Samba Vulnerability Could Allow Harmful Code Injection

» SPAMfighter News - 9/24/2010