This vulnerability is dedicated to my mother, who passed away on April 7, 2003. Mom, may God be with you. Avaya, a manufacturer of telecommunications products, makes a voicemail system called Intuity Audix. This system is based on a Novell licensed version of Unixware v2.1.3 by SCO. The one used here comes with remote management capabilities over IP. This is not truly a 100% remote shell vulnerability, due to the fact that the user must either know the "sa" user password, or must be able to sniff the network that the Intuity Audix machine is on. This will also work with the "vm" user, or any other user who wishes to authenticate over the network via telnet. Initially, one might scan for open ports, or use an SNMP browser, such as that commercially offered by Solarwinds, and discover many open ports on the machine. Using SNMP, the default community name of "public" is used. The services of interest are snmp, http, exec, and telnet. Since telnet is running, and the Avaya ASA GUI-based admin piece uses port 23 as a default for the voicemail, we now know that authentication is done in the clear. Using a network analyzer that filters text (the one used here was the Win32 port of dsniff), and being able to sniff the network that the box is on, one would hopefully obtain a username and password quickly. Now using rexec (for purposes here, since the Win32 port of dsniff was used, we will use command line rexec on Windows 2000 Professional) we type as follows: rexec -l(username) move /mtce/login/(username)/.profile /mtce/login/(username)/.profile2 for example: rexec 192.168.0.1 -lsa move /mtce/login/sa/.profile /mtce/login/sa/.profile2 This will get us out of the restricted menu when telnetting into the box. If the user is root or admin, the game is over. If the user is sa, vm, or the ever guarded craft account (which oddly, does not have root privileges), then a vulnerable build of Apache server is on the machine. If your version is patched, or does not appear to be vulnerable, then there are many more services running on this machine. root is just an exploit away. Fixes: Simple.... do not use SNMP v1, block access to SNMP, or just don't use it at all. Do not use exec, telnet, or shell. Have the user authenticate over SSH2. Patch the web server portion, even if it's just a DoS to the machine. Since this is a proprietary system, Avaya will have to come up with a fix. Make sure the shell is restricted, and there is no way to exit the menu. Greets, Cushman This is a shortened version of the original posting. The full post can be seen at: http://www.securitynerds.org/html/resources/research/audix.html