[ Via the suse-security-announce mailing list… ]
A security hole was discovered in the package mentioned above.
Please update as soon as possible or disable the service if you are
using this software on your SuSE Linux installation(s).
Other Linux distributions or operating systems might be affected
as well, please contact your vendor for information about this
issue.
Please note, that that we provide this information on as “as-is”
basis only. There is no warranty whatsoever and no liability for
any direct, indirect or incidental damage arising from this
information or the installation of the update package.
1. Problem Description
Several buffer overflows have been found in proftpd which have
been verified to be exploitable from an remote attacker.
The fixing and finding of new holes is going on for over 2 weeks
now, and there is no end in sight.
Even with all known fixes, proftpd is still vulnerable to remote
vulnerablilities.
2. Impact
A remote attacker can gain root access to the system from
remote.
3. Solution
Deactivate, or better, Deinstall the proftpd package.
proftpd will be dropped from current distributions until there
can be put trust in this package.
We will provide an update, once a completely fixed version is
out.
Until then, please use a secure ftpd server.
If you only need to provide readonly anonymous ftp access, we
encourage you to get the anon-ftpd from Bernstein from ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/anonftpd.html
Otherwise, we recommend to run the stock ftpd which comes by
default with SuSE and is derived of OpenBSD.
Webpage for patches:
http://www.suse.de/patches/index.html
or try the following web pages for a list of mirrors:
http://www.suse.de/ftp.html
http://www.suse.com/ftp_new.html