February 7, 2015 :: CVE-2015-0235 (GHOST) Vulnerability for Red Hat and CentOS

[Jason]

All of our servers were patched and rebooted tonight to enable a security-related patch:

A vulnerability found in the glibc library, specifically a flaw affecting the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() function calls, that allows a remote attacker to potentially execute arbitrary code. CentOS 5, CentOS 6, and CentOS 7 are potentially affected, thus we want to highlight the following information.

Red Hat describes the issue as follows:

    A heap-based buffer overflow was found in glibc's __nss_hostname_digits_dots() function, which is used by the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() glibc function calls. A remote attacker able to make an application call either of these functions could use this flaw to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the application.

Further information on CVE-2015-0235 is available from the Red Hat.

Given the implications of the compromise I chose not to schedule and/or provide advanced notice of the reboots tonight so as not to further compromise our configurations.

Regards,
Jason