Thank you for reading the Linux Advisory Watch Security Newsletter. The purpose of this document is to provide our readers with a quick summary of each week's vendor security bulletins and pointers on methods to improve the security posture of your open source system. Vulnerabilities affect nearly every vendor virtually every week, so be sure to read through to find the updates your distributor have made available.

LinuxSecurity.com Feature Extras:

Password guessing with Medusa 2.0 - Medusa was created by the fine folks at foofus.net, in fact the much awaited Medusa 2.0 update was released in February of 2010. For a complete change log please visit

Password guessing as an attack vector - Using password guessing as an attack vector. Over the years we've been taught a strong password must be long and complex to be considered secure. Some of us have taken that notion to heart and always ensure our passwords are strong. But some don't give a second thought to the complexity or length of our password.

(Feb 29)

The file type identification tool, file, and its associated library, libmagic, do not properly process malformed files in the Composite Document File (CDF) format, leading to crashes. [More...]
(Feb 29)

Several security issues have been fixed in Moodle, a course management system for online learning: CVE-2011-4308 / CVE-2012-0792 [More...]
(Feb 28)

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in OpenJDK, an implementation of the Oracle Java platform. CVE-2011-3377 [More...]
(Feb 27)

Two vulnerabilities were discovered in Puppet, a centralized configuration management tool. CVE-2012-1053 [More...]
(Feb 27)

Several local vulnerabilities have been discovered in PostgreSQL, an object-relational SQL database. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems: [More...]
(Feb 25)

It was discovered that the last security update for F*X, DSA-2414-1, introduced a regression. Updated packages are now available to address this problem. [More...]
(Feb 23)

It was discovered that Notmuch, an email indexer, did not sufficiently escape Emacs MML tags. When using the Emacs interface, a user could be tricked into replying to a maliciously formatted message which could lead to files from the local machine being attached to the outgoing [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:028: libxslt (Mar 1)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in libxslt: libxslt allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read) via unspecified vectors (CVE-2011-3970). [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:027: postgresql8.3 (Feb 29)

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in postgresql: Permissions on a function called by a trigger are not properly checked (CVE-2012-0866). [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:026: postgresql (Feb 29)

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in postgresql: Permissions on a function called by a trigger are not properly checked (CVE-2012-0866). [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:025: samba (Feb 28)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in samba: Heap-based buffer overflow in process.c in smbd in Samba allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a Batched (aka AndX) request that triggers [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:024: ruby (Feb 28)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in ruby: Ruby (aka CRuby) before 1.8.7-p357 computes hash values without restricting the ability to trigger hash collisions predictably, which allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:023-1: libvpx (Feb 28)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in libvpx: VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx) before 1.0.0 Duclair allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via (1) unspecified corrupt input or (2) by starting decoding from a P-frame, which [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:023: libvpx (Feb 27)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in libvpx: VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx) before 1.0.0 Duclair allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via (1) unspecified corrupt input or (2) by starting decoding from a P-frame, which [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:022: mozilla (Feb 23)

Security issues were identified and fixed in mozilla firefox and thunderbird: An integer overflow in the libpng library can lead to a heap-buffer overflow when decompressing certain PNG images. This leads to a crash, [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:0333-01: kernel-rt: Important Advisory (Feb 23)

Updated kernel-rt packages that fix multiple security issues and various bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.1. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:0332-01: samba: Critical Advisory (Feb 23)

Updated samba packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Long Life, and 5.6 Extended Update Support. [More...]
SuSE: 2012-001: systemd (Feb 29)

systemd-logind, part of the systemd package, keeps track of user logins and sessions. Upon login it creates dedicated files inside the /run/user/ directory in an insecure manner. This allows local attackers to create symlinks inside arbitrary directories. Further exploitation steps allow local attackers to gain root access. [More...]
Ubuntu: 1380-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities (Feb 28)

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.
Ubuntu: 1379-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities (Feb 28)

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.
Ubuntu: 1378-1: PostgreSQL vulnerabilities (Feb 28)

Several security issues were fixed in PostgreSQL.
Ubuntu: 1377-1: Ruby vulnerabilities (Feb 27)

Several security issues were fixed in ruby1.8.
Ubuntu: 1376-1: libxml2 vulnerability (Feb 27)

libxml2 could be made to cause a denial of service by consuming excessiveCPU resources.
Ubuntu: 1375-1: httplib2 vulnerability (Feb 27)

httplib2 could be made to expose sensitive information over the network.
Ubuntu: 1374-1: Samba vulnerability (Feb 24)

Samba could be made to crash or run programs if it received speciallycrafted network traffic.
Ubuntu: 1373-1: OpenJDK 6 vulnerabilities (Feb 24)

Multiple OpenJDK 6 vulnerabilities have been fixed.
Ubuntu: 1372-1: Puppet vulnerabilities (Feb 23)

Puppet could be made to overwrite files and run programs with administratorprivileges.