
If you've got Solaris with telnet running, you could be in for a big surprise. There is a fairly trivial
Solaris telnet 0-day exploit in the wild [.pdf].
"This was posted to Full-Disclosure. Remote root exploit in the Solaris 10/11 telnet daemon. It doesn't require any skill, any exploit knowledge, and can be scripted for mass attacks. Basically if you pass a '-fusername' as an argument to the l option you get full access to the OS as the user specified. In my example I do it as bin but it worked for regular users, just not for root. This combined with a reliable local privilege escalation exploit would be devastating. Expect mass scanning and possibly the widespread exploitation of this vulnerability."
Member since:
2005-07-08
Solaris does not allow root logins from remote consoles in the first place regardless of protocol. In order for this to be a remote root exploit, the /etc/default/login file would have to be changed to allow remote root logins.
Build 56 of Solaris Express disables telnet by default, and it is a trivial matter to disable telnet:
svcadm disable telnet
Or for the ultra paranoid:
pkgrm SUNWtnetc
pkgrm SUNWtnetd
pkgrm SUNWtnetr
According to a message sent out by David Comay Sun should be releasing an Interim Patch for this issue later today.