SUMMARY

Symantec’s Altiris Deployment Solution is vulnerable to an elevation of privilege attack.

Severity
Medium

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ISSUES

Details
The Aclient process runs with local System privileges. By using the Log File Viewer, it is possible to open or execute files on the system with System privileges

SecurityFocus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned a Bugtraq ID(BID) to this issue for inclusion in the SecurityFocus vulnerability data base. The BID assigned is 25232 which can be found at http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/25232

MITIGATION

Symantec response
Symantec engineers have verified and removed this option. An update is now available for download.

Download and installation instructions:

1. Go to http://www.altiris.com/download.aspx and enter a valid email address
2. In the dropdown box, select "Deployment Solution for Clients 6.8 SP2"
3. Click Submit.
4. After downloading the file, execute and follow the installer instructions to upgrade Deployment Solution.

Best Practices
As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends:

• Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
• Restrict remote access, if required, 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 Mazin Faour of Information Risk Management for reporting this issue and for providing full coordination while Symantec resolved it.