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.

(Nov 27)

James Clawson discovered that rssh, a restricted shell for OpenSSH to be used with scp/sftp, rdist and cvs, was not correctly filtering command line options. This could be used to force the execution of a remote script and thus allow arbitrary command execution. Two CVE were assigned: [More...]
(Nov 23)

Andy Lutomirski discovered that tcsd (the TPM userspace daemon) was missing a of input validation. Using carefully crafted input, it can lead to a denial of service by making the daemon crash with a segmentation fault. [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:175: libssh (Nov 29)

Multiple double free(), buffer overflow, invalid free() and improper overflow checks vulnerabilities was found and corrected in libssh (CVE-2012-4559, CVE-2012-4560, CVE-2012-4561, CVE-2012-4562). The updated packages have been upgraded to the 0.5.3 version which [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:174: libtiff (Nov 22)

Multiple vulnerabilities was found and corrected in libtiff: Heap-based buffer overflow in tif_pixarlog.c in LibTIFF before 4.0.3 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted TIFF image [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:1485-01: java-1.4.2-ibm: Critical Advisory (Nov 22)

Updated java-1.4.2-ibm packages that fix several security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary. This is the last update of these packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary. [More...]
(Nov 22)

New mozilla-thunderbird packages are available for Slackware 13.37, 14.0, and -current to fix security issues. [More Info...]
(Nov 22)

New seamonkey packages are available for Slackware 13.37, 14.0, and -current to fix security issues. [More Info...]
(Nov 22)

New mozilla-firefox packages are available for Slackware 13.37, 14.0, and -current to fix security issues. [More Info...]
Ubuntu: 1641-1: OpenStack Keystone vulnerabilities (Nov 28)

Keystone would allow unintended access to files over the network.
Ubuntu: 1640-1: libssh vulnerabilities (Nov 26)

linssh could be made to crash or run programs if it received speciallycrafted network traffic.
Ubuntu: 1639-1: unity-firefox-extension vulnerability (Nov 22)

unity-firefox-extension could be made to crash or run programs as yourlogin if it opened a malicious website.