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Researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in the widely deployed Ghostscript package that allows bad actors to remotely take control of vulnerable systems. There's no current patch available for the multiple flaws discovered.
Ghostscript is a suite of tools used by hundreds of software suites and coding libraries, which allows desktop software and web servers to handle Adobe Systems' PostScript and PDF page description languages.
Multiple bypass vulnerabilities, disclosed Tuesday, exist in the suite's optional -dSAFER feature, which is ironically supposed to prevent unsafe PostScript operations. By causing Ghostscript (or a program leveraging Ghostscript) to parse a specially-crafted malicious file, a remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the Ghostscript code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @06:57AM
This is probably already being exploited, alerting people as soon as possible allows those in sensitive positions to stop using the software, or at least use it in knowledge of the risk.
Doing otherwise exposes people to greater harm than releasing this information. Immediate public disclosure only hurts people who continue to use to software despite a publicized flaw. This is their choice, and often the correct one, but at the end of the day it's better to give users the choice than keep them vulnerable.
Fuck 'responsible disclosure', full disclosure only harms those who willingly or negligently expose themselves to the risk, whereas 'responsible disclosure' makes victims of responsible users who would have otherwise avoided or mitigated the risk.