SUMMARY

Symantec’s Ghost Solution Suite is susceptible to memory corruption issues that could result in an application denial of service or possibly arbitrary code execution.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ISSUES

MITIGATION

Details

Symantec was notified of a memory corruption issue in Symantec’s Ghost Solution Suite caused when attempting to open a maliciously formatted backup file.  Successful exploitation could potentially result in execution of arbitrary code outside of memory boundaries or cause unexpected performance issues.  A failed attempt may result in an application crash.

In a normal installation, the Symantec Ghost Solution Suite should only be accessible within the networked environment.  However, an authorized but unprivileged malicious user could attempt to insert a maliciously formatted backup file in the appropriate path on a targeted system that would result in the application attempting to open and read the malicious file. An external attacker able to successfully leverage network access or to entice an authorized user to download a malicious backup file to their system could attempt to exploit this vulnerability.

Symantec Response

Symantec engineers verified the reported issue and have released an update addressing it. Symantec engineers continue to review functionality to further enhance the overall security of Symantec Ghost Solution Suite.

Symantec is not aware of exploitation of or adverse customer impact from this issue.

Update information

Instructions to download Symantec Solution Suite patch GSS25x_b2620 are available through  normal support channels per KB197839,  www.symantec.com/docs/TECH197839

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends:

• Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
• Disable remote access if not required or restrict it to trusted/authorized systems only.
• Where possible, limit exposure of application and web interfaces to trusted/internal networks only.
• 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 Jeremy Brown at Microsoft working through the Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR) team for submitting this issue and coordinating with us as we resolved it.

REFERENCES

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

CVE: Thos issue is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems.