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A series of posts on ExploitDB by an author signing as “King Cope” reveal a new set of MySQL vulnerabilities – along with one issue that could just be a configuration issue.
The vulnerabilities, which emerged on Saturday, include a denial-of-service demonstration, a Windows remote root attack, two overrun attacks that work on Linux, and one privilege escalation attack, also on Linux.
The overflow bugs crash the MySQL daemon, allowing the attacker to then execute commands with the same privileges as the user running MySQL. “King Cope” also demonstrated a user enumeration vulnerability.
The privilege escalation vulnerability, in which an attacker could escalate themselves to the same file permissions as the MySQL administrative user, has provoked some to-and-fro on the Full Disclosure mailing list, with one writer stating that “CVE-2012-5613 is not a bug, but a result of a misconfiguration, much like an anonymous ftp upload access to the $HOME of the ftp user.”
Red Hat has assigned CVEs to the vulnerabilities, but at the time of writing, Oracle has not commented on the issues. ®
