29 October 2007, 22:09

Buffer overflows remedied in Nagios plug-ins

A buffer overflow in the check_snmp plug-in for the Nagios network monitoring tool can reportedly be exploited to cause a server to crash and even inject and launch code remotely. According to a Sourceforge security advisory, all attackers need to do is return SNMP-GET replies containing more than 17,000 characters to the server. The module contained in Nagios plug-ins 1.4.10 is affected, as previous versions probably also are. A patch (download link) has been released to remedy the flaw.

Just recently, a flaw was reported in Nagios plug-ins 1.4.9 that allowed attackers to inject arbitrary code into a monitoring system. The attack was made possible by a buffer overflow in the file check_http.c in the handling of location header information from other Web servers. However, attackers would have had to get control of a Web server for that attack to succeed.