SUMMARY

Symantec's Client Intrusion Detection System (CIDS) driver may cause a system crash when interacting with a specifically-crafted Portable Executable file.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ISSUES

MITIGATION

Details

Symantec was notified of a system crash, Denial of Service (DoS) in the CIDS engine driver when interacting with a specifically-crafted portable-executable (PE) files. A malicious individual would first need to entice an authorized user to download a malformed PE file either through opening an email attachment, downloading a malicious document or application or by enticing the user to visit a web site where a malicious file could be downloaded to their system. Once downloaded, the malicious file must be manipulated on the targeted system hard drive to interact with the vulnerable CIDS engine.

Sufficiently malformed, the code would execute at the kernel-level with system privileges causing memory corruption resulting in a system crash.

Symantec Response

Symantec engineers have addressed this in the latest CIDS engine update release effective 7/7/2016 delivered to customers via LiveUpdate with normal definition and signature updates.

Update Information

Norton Security and SEP products that ship with the CIDS engine and regularly launch and run either automatic or manual LiveUpdate should already have received an updated CIDS engine version addressing this issue. However, to ensure all available updates have been applied, users should manually launch and run LiveUpdate in Interactive mode as follows:

To perform a manual update using Symantec LiveUpdate, users should:

• Access LiveUpdate in the product

• Run LiveUpdate until all available updates are downloaded and installed

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

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends the following:

• Restrict access to administrative or management systems to authorized 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 potential exploit.

• Keep all operating systems and applications current with vendor patches.

• Follow a multi-layered approach to security. At a minimum, run both firewall and anti-malware applications 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 the detection of attacks or malicious activity related to the exploitation of latent vulnerabilities.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Discovered by Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos. Symantec would like to thank Cisco Talos for reporting this to us and working with us as we addressed the issue.

REVISION

8/23/2016 - Added Def build info to SEP Solutions for clarification