In today’s ever expanding virtualized data center it’s critical to ensure hypervisors/host systems are properly secured and patched to prevent bleed over into often dense populations of the corporate infrastructure. According to a recent blog post on Threatpost, French research firm VUPEN security has revealed exploit code that takes advantage of a vulnerability in Xen 4.1.2 based on advisory CVE-2012-0217. Although the vulnerability was reported in June there are many firms that may have not implemented the patch or worse haven’t identified whether or not they are vulnerable yet. There are currently 5 audits (as it relates to Xen Server) in our Retina vulnerability scan engine to assist in closing a security vulnerability that can enable an attacker to gain control of the hosting hypervisor system (CVE-2012-0217). These audits have been released with Retina Network Community and the commercial version of Retina Network. Users can include these checks in a general vulnerability scan, or can create a targeted scan to specifically look for these specific vulnerabilities using the following Retina audits:
  • Audit ID 16582 - SUSE-SU-2012:0730: xen - SUSE 11 SP2
  • Audit ID 16583 - SUSE-SU-2012:0730: xen - SUSE 11 SP1
  • Audit ID 16584 - SUSE-SU-2012:0730: xen - SUSE 10 SP4
  • Audit ID 16585 - SUSE-SU-2012:0730: xen - SUSE 10 SP3
  • Audit ID 16586 - SUSE-SU-2012:0730: xen - SUSE 10 SP2
Retina has 3 additional audits dealing with other operating systems (FreeBSD, Red Hat Linux and Windows) affected by the advisory.
  • Audit ID 16587 - FreeBSD-SA-12:04: sysret
  • Audit ID 16579 – Redhat Kernel vulnerabilities (20120612) – RHEL 5
  • Audit ID 16553 – Microsoft Windows Kernel Privilege Escalation (2711167)
If you have concerns of the security posture of your virtualized environments feel free to download and try out our community version to discover, assess and gain remediation guidance in our simple to use standalone scanner. In addition to standard assessment of patches, insecure configurations and zero-days, the Retina solutions also provides in-depth credentialed VMWare scanning (VMWare vCenter, ThinApp and Offline scanning) https://www.beyondtrust.com/products/vm-comparison/ across your enterprise. We should also mention that we have a new version of our Retina Network scanner planned for later this month that includes a complete user interface overhaul and allows users to select from a list of built-in profiles to align the product to your specific job function. Stay tuned…
Photograph of Scott Lang

Scott Lang, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at BeyondTrust

Scott Lang has nearly 20 years of experience in technology product marketing, currently guiding the product marketing strategy for BeyondTrust’s privileged account management solutions and vulnerability management solutions. Prior to joining BeyondTrust, Scott was director of security solution marketing at Dell, formerly Quest Software, where he was responsible for global security campaigns, product marketing for identity and access management and Windows server management.

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