Debian DLA-623-1 : tomcat7 security update

high Nessus Plugin ID 93545

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Synopsis

The remote Debian host is missing a security update.

Description

Dawid Golunski from legalhackers.com discovered that Debian's version of Tomcat 7 was vulnerable to a local privilege escalation. Local attackers who have gained access to the server in the context of the tomcat7 user through a vulnerability in a web application were able to replace the file with a symlink to an arbitrary file.

The full advisory can be found at

http://legalhackers.com/advisories/Tomcat-Debian-based-Root-Privilege- Escalation-Exploit.txt

In addition this security update also fixes Debian bug #821391. File ownership in /etc/tomcat7 will no longer be unconditionally overridden on upgrade. As another precaution the file permissions of Debian specific configuration files in /etc/tomcat7 were changed to 640 to disallow world readable access.

For Debian 7 'Wheezy', these problems have been fixed in version 7.0.28-4+deb7u6.

We recommend that you upgrade your tomcat7 packages.

NOTE: Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the DLA security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Solution

Upgrade the affected packages.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 93545

File Name: debian_DLA-623.nasl

Version: 2.9

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Debian Local Security Checks

Published: 9/16/2016

Updated: 1/23/2026

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Critical

Score: 9.5

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.2

Temporal Score: 6.3

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2016-1240

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 7.5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:H/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:tomcat7-user, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:tomcat7-examples, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:libtomcat7-java, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:7.0, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:tomcat7-admin, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:tomcat7-docs, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:tomcat7, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:libservlet3.0-java, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:tomcat7-common, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:libservlet3.0-java-doc

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/Debian/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 9/15/2016

Exploitable With

Metasploit (Apache Tomcat on Ubuntu Log Init Privilege Escalation)

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2016-1240

Detections

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