Oh jeez, that’s not good. This was posted to Full-Disclosure. Remote root exploit in the Solaris 10/11 telnet daemon. It doesn’t require any skill, any exploit knowledge, and can be scripted for mass attacks. Basically if you pass a “-fusername” as an argument to the –l option you get full access to the OS as the user specified. In my example I do it as bin but it worked for regular users, just not for root. This combined with a reliable local privilege escalation exploit would be devastating. Expect mass scanning and possibly the widespread exploitation of this vulnerability.
And example of the command line is
telnet -l "-fbin" target_address
Please disable telnet on Solaris at this time. The HEV for this will be shipping to ErrataSec customers within the hour.
UPDATE: There seems to be some conflicting reports about this vulnerability working with the root account. This does not work on a default install of Solaris 10. By default a variable is set in /etc/default/login called CONSOLE. If this variable is set then root is not allowed to login from anywhere but the console. Commenting this variable out allows root to login from anywhere and allows this vulnerability to take advantage of the telnet exploit. Below is a pic of my trying it with console set then with console commented out.
http://blog.erratasec.com/2007/02/trivial-remote-solaris-0day-disable.html#.WSxAPOvyuds
And example of the command line is
telnet -l "-fbin" target_address
Please disable telnet on Solaris at this time. The HEV for this will be shipping to ErrataSec customers within the hour.
UPDATE: There seems to be some conflicting reports about this vulnerability working with the root account. This does not work on a default install of Solaris 10. By default a variable is set in /etc/default/login called CONSOLE. If this variable is set then root is not allowed to login from anywhere but the console. Commenting this variable out allows root to login from anywhere and allows this vulnerability to take advantage of the telnet exploit. Below is a pic of my trying it with console set then with console commented out.