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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

COLLECTED BY Arthur Bot - NEEDS EDITING

Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] has found the following story [arstechnica.com]:

A bug in an obscure but widely used email program may be putting as many as 400,000 servers around the world at risk of serious attack until they install an update.

A single byte of data resulting from an exploit "overwrites some critical data when the string fits some specific length," the researchers, from Devcore Security Consulting, wrote. "In addition, this byte is controllable, which makes exploitation more feasible. Base64 decoding is such a fundamental function, and therefore this bug can be triggered easily, causing remote code execution."

For their part, developers of Exim wrote in an advisory [exim.org]: "Currently, we're unsure about the severity" of the vulnerability. "We *believe* an exploit is difficult. A mitigation isn't known."

The Devcore researchers said as many as 400,000 servers are at risk. Queries on the Shodan computer search engine identified a large number of servers that reported running vulnerable versions. The developers published a fix with version 4.90.1, which was released on February 10. Any organization that uses Exim should ensure it's using the latest version.

Original Submission