Microsoft Issues Workaround For Serious SharePoint Vulnerability

While not a complete patch, the software maker has issued guidance detailing how to mitigate a serious vulnerability that places corporate data at-risk to snooping and theft.On Thursday, the Swiss security company High-Tech Bridge published a security note that detailed a cross-site scripting vulnerability in SharePoint 2007, which makes it possible for attackers to insert and execute JavaScript code of their choice on a system through a browser. The security firm also published proof-of-concept code that demonstrates the vulnerability - so expect attacks to quickly follow.

Because SharePoint servers are used for internal corporate collaboration, they make an ideal target for anyone trying to gain entry to sensitive information.

Today, Microsoft provided a short-term work-around that requires running a number of commands from the command prompt to shut down access to the at-risk part of the system. More detail on the work-around is available here.

On the company's Security, Research and Defense blog, they described the most likely way the vulnerability would be attacked:

"The most likely attack scenario, then, is that an attacker sends a malicious link to a user who is logged into their Sharepoint server. If the user clicks the link, the javascript created by the attacker and embedded in the link would execute in the context of the user who clicked the link."

Best advice: apply the workaround, and hope that Microsoft is able to provide a patch for this issue by within month's scheduled patch update, May 11.

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