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.

(Apr 13)

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in puppet, a centralized configuration management system. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems: [More...]
(Apr 12)

It was discovered that Samba, the SMB/CIFS file, print, and login server, contained a flaw in the remote procedure call (RPC) code which allowed remote code execution as the super user from an unauthenticated connection. [More...]
(Apr 12)

It was discovered that sqlalchemy, an SQL toolkit and object relational mapper for python, is not sanitizing input passed to the limit/offset keywords to select() as well as the value passed to select.limit()/offset(). This allows an attacker to perform SQL injection attacks against [More...]
(Apr 9)

It was discovered that a heap-based buffer overflow in InspIRCd could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted DNS query. For the stable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:058: curl (Apr 13)

Multiple vulnerabilities has been found and corrected in curl: curl is vulnerable to a SSL CBC IV vulnerability when built to use OpenSSL for the SSL/TLS layer. A work-around has been added to mitigate the problem (CVE-2011-3389). [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:057: freetype2 (Apr 12)

Multiple flaws were found in FreeType. Specially crafted files could cause application crashes or potentially execute arbitrary code (CVE-2012-1126, CVE-2012-1127, CVE-2012-1128, CVE-2012-1129, CVE-2012-1130, CVE-2012-1131, CVE-2012-1132, CVE-2012-1133, CVE-2012-1134, CVE-2012-1135, CVE-2012-1136, CVE-2012-1137, [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:056: rpm (Apr 12)

Multiple flaws were found in the way RPM parsed package file headers. An attacker could create a specially-crafted RPM package that, when its package header was accessed, or during package signature verification, could cause an application using the RPM library to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code (CVE-2012-0060, [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:055: samba (Apr 11)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in samba: The RPC code generator in Samba 3.x before 3.4.16, 3.5.x before 3.5.14, and 3.6.x before 3.6.4 does not implement validation of an array length in a manner consistent with validation of array memory [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:054: libtiff (Apr 5)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in libtiff: An integer overflow was discovered in the libtiff/tiff_getimage.c file in the tiff library which could cause execution of arbitrary code using a specially crafted TIFF image file (CVE-2012-1173). [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:0478-01: samba: Critical Advisory (Apr 13)

Updated samba packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Extended Life Cycle Support. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having critical [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:0468-01: libtiff: Important Advisory (Apr 10)

Updated libtiff packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:0469-01: acroread: Critical Advisory (Apr 10)

Updated acroread packages that fix multiple security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 Supplementary. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having critical [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:0467-01: freetype: Important Advisory (Apr 10)

Updated freetype packages that fix multiple security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:0466-01: samba3x: Critical Advisory (Apr 10)

Updated samba3x packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 Extended Update Support. [More...]
Red Hat: 2012:0465-01: samba: Critical Advisory (Apr 10)

Updated samba packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Long Life; and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6, 6.0 and 6.1 Extended Update Support. [More...]
Ubuntu: 1423-1: Samba vulnerability (Apr 12)

Samba could be made to run programs as the administrator if it receivedspecially crafted network traffic.
Ubuntu: 1422-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities (Apr 12)

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.
Ubuntu: 1421-1: Linux kernel (Maverick backport) vulnerabilities (Apr 12)

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.
Ubuntu: 1419-1: Puppet vulnerabilities (Apr 11)

Several security issues were fixed in puppet.
Ubuntu: 1418-1: GnuTLS vulnerabilities (Apr 5)

The GnuTLS library could be made to crash under certain conditions.
Ubuntu: 1417-1: libpng vulnerability (Apr 5)

libpng could be made to crash or run programs as your login if it opened aspecially crafted file.