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Linux Advisory Watch: April 29th 2005
Source: LinuxSecurity.com Contributors - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
This week, articles were released for squid, gaim, evolution, junkbuster,
samba, cvs, kdelibs, libtiff, mc, dia, cyrus, ImageMagik, openMosixview, kimgio,
convert-UUlib, kernel, shareutils, and mozilla. Distributors include Conectiva,
Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Red Hat, and SuSE.
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Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Part I
By: Erica R. Thomas
Looking at the integrity and accountability of financial reporting has become
headline news. Widely publicized financial scandals have caused damage to investor,
employee, and customer confidence. Government and regulatory agencies have enacted
and are starting to enforce new regulations for corporate governance to restore
confidence and trust. The response from the United States government regarding
the Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco accounting scandals of the late 1990's was the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (The Act) of 2002. It establishes standards for maintaining
and preserving electronic and paper records in addition to the accountability
of corporate executives, employees, and auditors. The Act contains11 titles
and also established new standards for corporate accountability and penalties
of fines and imprisonment. Under the act, companies must validate financial
statements, maintain auditing practices, report on the effectiveness of the
internal controls, and assure integrity and timeliness of data.
The main purpose of the legislation is to make organizations and their executives
be held responsible for the validity of corporate reporting. The reporting requires
all companies with public interests to require executives to attest to the accuracy
of the financial conditions and disclosure of internal weaknesses. An article
written by Guardian Digital Inc. says that, "As mandated by SOX (the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act), corporations can accommodate these regulations through the design, implementation,
and maintenance of efficient and effective internal controls."
There are many sections to the SOA that President Bush signed. According to
Mathew Bender in the book, "The Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 with Analysis", SOA
contains two provisions requiring CEOs and CFOs to certify certain SEC filings.
The first section requires them to certify that annual and quarterly reports
have been reviewed by themselves, does not contain any untrue statement or omit
to state a material fact, information fairly represents the situation, and they
must disclose any deficiencies or changes to the internal controls. The second
section requires that when a report is filed, the CEO or CFO must have a written
statement saying that fully complies with the requirements and that it fairly
represents the financial and operational results. If they certify the report
knowing that it is false, they can face criminal penalties.
Part II, May 6th 2003
LinuxSecurity.com
Feature Extras:
Getting
to Know Linux Security: File Permissions - Welcome to the first
tutorial in the 'Getting to Know Linux Security' series. The topic explored
is Linux file permissions. It offers an easy to follow explanation of how
to read permissions, and how to set them using chmod. This guide is intended
for users new to Linux security, therefore very simple. If the feedback is
good, I'll consider creating more complex guides for advanced users. Please
let us know what you think and how these can be improved.
The
Tao of Network Security Monitoring: Beyond Intrusion Detection
- To be honest, this was one of the best books that I've read on network security.
Others books often dive so deeply into technical discussions, they fail to
provide any relevance to network engineers/administrators working in a corporate
environment. Budgets, deadlines, and flexibility are issues that we must all
address. The Tao of Network Security Monitoring is presented in such a way
that all of these are still relevant.
Encrypting
Shell Scripts - Do you have scripts that contain sensitive information
like passwords and you pretty much depend on file permissions to keep it secure?
If so, then that type of security is good provided you keep your system secure
and some user doesn't have a "ps -ef" loop running in an attempt to capture
that sensitive info (though some applications mask passwords in "ps" output).
Take advantage of our Linux Security discussion
list! This mailing list is for general security-related questions and comments.
To subscribe send an e-mail to security-discuss-request@linuxsecurity.com
with "subscribe" as the subject.
Thank you for reading the LinuxSecurity.com
weekly security newsletter. The purpose of this document is to provide our readers
with a quick summary of each week's most relevant Linux security headline.
Conectiva
Conectiva: squid Fixes for multiple squid
vulnerabilities
27th, April, 2005
Squid[1] is a full-featured web proxy cache. This announcement
upgrades Squid from 2.5STABLE5 to 2.5STABLE9 in order to fix bug #13718[2]
and also fixes the two following vulnerabilities.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118996
Conectiva: gaim Fixes for gaim's vulnerabilities
27th, April, 2005
Gaim[1] is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client. This
announcement fixes three denial of service vulnerabilities that were encountered
in Gaim.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118997
Conectiva: evolution Fix for Evolution
vulnerability
27th, April, 2005
Evolution[1] is the GNOME mailer, calendar, contact manager
and communications tool. This announcement fixes an issue[2] in Evolution
which caused it to crash when displaying certain message types.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118999
Debian
Debian: New junkbuster packages fix several
vulnerabilities
Several buffer overflow bugs were found in cyrus-imapd. It is
possible that an authenticated malicious user could cause the imap server
to crash. Additionally, a peer news admin could potentially execute arbitrary
code on the imap server when news is received using the fetchnews command.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/119000
openMosixview and the openMosixcollector daemon are vulnerable
to symlink attacks, potentially allowing a local user to overwrite arbitrary
files.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118944
Gentoo: CVS Multiple vulnerabilities
22nd, April, 2005
The initial version did not fix several DoS vulnerabilities
and one instance of arbitrary code execution. The arbitrary code execution
was only possible under very specific circumstances. The updated sections
appear below.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118953
Updated firefox packages that fix various security bugs are
now available. This update has been rated as having Important security
impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118941
RedHat: Important: kernel security update
22nd, April, 2005
Updated kernel packages that fix several security issues in
the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 kernel are now available. This security
advisory has been rated as having important security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team. The Linux kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118961
RedHat: Important: openoffice.org security
update
26th, April, 2005
Updated openoffice.org packages are now available. This update
has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security
Response Team.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118974
RedHat: Moderate: cvs security update
26th, April, 2005
An updated cvs package that fixes security bugs is now available.
This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118975
Updated mozilla packages that fix various security bugs are
now available. This update has been rated as having Important security
impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/118982
SuSE
SuSE: Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla various
27th, April, 2005
Several problems have been fixed with the security update releases
of the Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3 web browser and the Mozilla Suite 1.7.7.
