Along with their more critical updates, Microsoft released a security bulletin describing flaws in their FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (that is a mouthful of a product name). If you haven’t heard of FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, it’s essentially an enterprise search platform for SharePoint and your intranet. My guess is only a small subset of Microsoft customer use it.
Anyway, the FAST Search Server 2010 suffers from the same Oracle Outside In vulnerabilities that we’ve described in previous Exchange alerts. These vulnerabilities include both code execution and Denial of Service (DoS) issues. Though remote code execution flaws sound pretty severe, there are a number of factors which significantly reduce the severity of these issues:
- I suspect few organizations use FAST Search Server 2010 with Sharepoint
- You are only affected by this flaw if you’ve enabled the Advanced Filter Pack (it’s disabled by default).
- The attacker needs access to SharePoint resources to upload a malicious file to leverage this flaw.
In a nutshell, I don’t think these FAST Search vulnerabilities will affect many people in the real-world, and likely pose little risk to most organizations. However, that’s not an excuse to skip the update. If you are one of the few that do use FAST Search Server 2012, you should apply Microsoft’s update at your earliest convenience, but give today’s early updates a higher priority. — Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)