SUMMARY

Symantec’s SecurityExpressions Audit and Compliance Server is susceptible to a cross-site scripting and HTML injection vulnerability.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

Note: Customers running versions of Symantec SecurityExpressions Audit and Compliance Server prior to 4.1 should upgrade to the latest release and apply all available updates.

ISSUES

Severity

Medium

BID 36570 is assigned to the cross-site scripting issue 
BID 36571 is assigned to the HTML Injection issue 
 

CVE-2009-3029 to the cross-site scripting issue 
CVE-2009-3030 to the HTML Injection issue

MITIGATION

Details

Symantec was notified of a cross-site scripting issue present in the Security Expression Audit and Compliance Server. The console fails to properly filter/ validate external client input from users with authorized access to the console. Error messages may be susceptible to unauthorized manipulation to generate potentially malicious scripts being directed to unsuspecting users. 

Additionally, some response error messages are not properly encoded which could allow the potential for malicious HTML content to be injected into the returned response to a user. These issues could result in unauthorized access to other users’ sessions or to other systems on the internal network as well as unauthorized information disclosure.

Symantec Response

Symantec product engineers have released a hot fix for these issues in affected product versions. Symantec recommends all customers apply the latest available update to protect against threats of this nature. 

Symantec is not aware of any exploitation of or adverse customer impact from these issues. 

Symantec recommends that all customers apply Hotfix 1 as described in Symantec KB Article 49452 to protect against potential attempts to exploit these issues. Symantec KB Article 49452 with Hotfix 1 for affected products is available from the following location: https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=49452&p=1

Mitigation

If customers are unable to move to the latest release of Symantec SecurityExpressions Audit and Compliance Server or apply HotFix1 at this time, Symantec recommends ensuring console access is restricted to privileged users only until the upgrade can be applied.

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends: 

• Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
• Disable remote access or restrict it to trusted/authorized systems only.
• Run under the principle of least privilege where possible to limit the impact of exploit by threats.
• Keep all operating systems and applications updated with the latest vendor patches.
• Follow a multi-layered approach to security. Run both firewall and anti-malware applications, at a minimum, to provide multiple points of detection and protection to both inbound and outbound threats.
• Deploy network and host-based intrusion detection systems to monitor network traffic for signs of anomalous or suspicious activity. This may aid in detection of attacks or malicious activity related to exploitation of latent vulnerabilities

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Symantec would like to thank Nate Roberts with Wipfli, LLP for reporting these issues and coordinating with us while Symantec resolved them.

REFERENCES

BID: Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned a Bugtraq ID (BID) to these issues for inclusion in the Security Focus vulnerability database. 

CVE: These issues are candidates for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems. The CVE initiative has assigned