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:

Securing a Linux Web Server - With the significant prevalence of Linux web servers globally, security is often touted as a strength of the platform for such a purpose. However, a Linux based web server is only as secure as its configuration and very often many are quite vulnerable to compromise. While specific configurations vary wildly due to environments or specific use, there are various general steps that can be taken to insure basic security considerations are in place.

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

(Jul 25)

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in OpenJDK, an implementation of the Oracle Java platform, resulting in the execution of arbitrary code, breakouts of the Java sandbox, information disclosure or denial of service. [More...]
(Jul 25)

A buffer overflow has been discovered in the Radius extension for PHP. The function handling Vendor Specific Attributes assumed that the attributes given would always be of valid length. An attacker could use this assumption to trigger a buffer overflow. [More...]
(Jul 18)

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Chromium web browser. CVE-2013-2853 [More...]
(Jul 18)

Two security issues have been found in the Tomcat servlet and JSP engine: CVE-2012-3544 [More...]
Mandriva: 2013:201: ruby (Jul 26)

A vulnerability has been discovered and corrected in ruby: A flaw was found in Ruby's SSL client's hostname identity check when handling certificates that contain hostnames with NULL bytes. An attacker could potentially exploit this flaw to conduct [More...]
Mandriva: 2013:200: ruby (Jul 26)

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in ruby: The safe-level feature in Ruby 1.8.7 allows context-dependent attackers to modify strings via the NameError#to_s method when operating on Ruby objects. NOTE: this issue is due to an incomplete fix for [More...]
Mandriva: 2013:199: squid (Jul 25)

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in squid: Due to incorrect data validation Squid is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack when processing specially crafted HTTP requests. This problem allows any trusted client or client script who can generate [More...]
Mandriva: 2013:198: libxml2 (Jul 24)

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in libxml2: A denial of service flaw was found in the way libxml2, a library providing support to read, modify and write XML and HTML files, performed string substitutions when entity values for external [More...]
Mandriva: 2013:197: mysql (Jul 23)

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in mysql: MariaDB 5.5.x before 5.5.30, 5.3.x before 5.3.13, 5.2.x before 5.2.15, and 5.1.x before 5.1.68, and Oracle MySQL 5.1.69 and earlier, 5.5.31 and earlier, and 5.6.11 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause [More...]
Red Hat: 2013:1103-01: ruby193-ruby: Moderate Advisory (Jul 23)

Updated ruby193-ruby packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat OpenStack 3.0 (Grizzly). The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate [More...]
Red Hat: 2013:1101-01: virtio-win: Important Advisory (Jul 22)

An updated virtio-win package that fixes one security issue is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Supplementary. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]
Red Hat: 2013:1100-01: qemu-kvm: Important Advisory (Jul 22)

Updated qemu-kvm packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]
Ubuntu: 1909-1: MySQL vulnerabilities (Jul 25)

Several security issues were fixed in MySQL.
Ubuntu: 1908-1: OpenJDK 6 vulnerabilities (Jul 23)

Several security issues were fixed in OpenJDK 6.