Weekly Summary : Merdeka and Internet Explorer

Posted: September 8th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: IT Related | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

This week I’ll be writing on a short update related to Malaysia merdeka (independence) day and Internet Explorer MS12-052 bug.

It is almost like a tradition here, in Malaysia, to receive a massive number of system intrusion and website defacement on our merdeka (independence) day. Based on the data of the previous years, most of the attacks came from the foreign countries, and the messages left by them clearly reflect their political motive on performing the attack.

But in 2012, the incidents landscape on the merdeka day (week) shifted. The total number of system intrusion and website defacement reduced a lot compare to the same period of time in the previous years. This data can be verified by performing zone-h search, and you can cross check your findings with MyCERT monthly statistic by end of this month (or early next month).

One thing that is sad to be shared here is, it is not only the number that has shifted, the source of attack for this year is also showing some differences. Most of the defacement cases this year, that is related to .MY domain, or websites that are hosted in the IP range of Malaysia, were performed mostly by local attackers. Their messages are not clear, but a quick conclusion that I can make is, it was for fame.

Also in this week’s update, I’ll cover a bit on the “Internet Explorer Script Interjection Code Execution (updated)” that has been posted to Bugtraq mailing list. You can read the details part of the advisory in the “VULNERABILITY DETAILS” section. As of the writing of this update, there is no news yet on this vulnerability (MS12-052) has been used in the wild, and I’ve cross checked with Metasploit and confirmed that, it is not yet ported to Metasploit. However, with the detail explanation provided in the advisory, I don’t think it will take any longer for the working exploit to be made public.

You can use the following generic Yara rule to detect a malicious html/JS file exploiting this vulnerability:

rule MS12_052
{
        meta:
                author = "Adnan Mohd Shukor" 
                author_email = "adnan.shukor @ G!"
                ref = "MS12-052"
                ref_url = "http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2012/Sep/29"
                cve = "CVE-"
                version = "1"
                impact = 4
                hide = false
        strings:
                $ms12052_1 = /mailto\:.{2000,}/ nocase fullword
                $ms12052_2 = /\.getElements?By/ nocase
                $ms12052_3 = /\.removeChild\(/ nocase
                $ms12052_4 = /document\..*?= ?null/ nocase
        condition:
                $ms12052_1 and $ms12052_2 and ($ms12052_3 or $ms12052_4)
}

Thats all for this week.

Thanks