Security flaws haunt Ghostscript
For the third year in a row, researchers have found exploitable flaws in the open source software Ghostscript, a PDF and PostScript interpreter used by hundreds of programs on all major platforms. While the software includes a sandbox protection option, researchers have now identified a series of sandbox bypass vulnerabilities. For a bad actor to take advantage of the flaw, he or she would only need to send their victim a specially modified file in a format that triggers interaction with Ghostscript (PDF, PS, EPS, or XPS). Doing so would grant the malware’s C&C remote code execution privileges on the infected system, thereby allowing them to essentially take it over. No patch is available yet, so experts are advising that Linux distributions disable PS, EPS, PDF, and XPS coders in ImageMagick’s policy.xml, as the image processing library seems to be the most affected project by the flaw.
