Detections
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Ubuntu 4.10 / 5.04 / 5.10 : lynx vulnerability (USN-206-1)

high Nessus Plugin ID 20622

Synopsis

The remote Ubuntu host is missing a security-related patch.

Description

Ulf Harnhammar discovered a remote vulnerability in Lynx when connecting to a news server (NNTP). The function that added missing escape chararacters to article headers did not check the size of the target buffer. Specially crafted news entries could trigger a buffer overflow, which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running lynx. In order to exploit this, the user is not even required to actively visit a news site with Lynx since a malicious HTML page could automatically redirect to an nntp:// URL with malicious news items.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Solution

Update the affected lynx package.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 20622

File Name: ubuntu_USN-206-1.nasl

Version: 1.17

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 1/15/2006

Updated: 1/19/2021

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.7

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:5.10, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:lynx, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:4.10, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:5.04

Required KB Items: Host/cpu, Host/Ubuntu, Host/Ubuntu/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Patch Publication Date: 10/17/2005

Vulnerability Publication Date: 10/17/2005

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2005-3120

USN: 206-1