BugTraq summary, week of 12 oct 1998.

aol can die when receiving email
If you send someone an HTML email with a background image that has a name longer than 255 characters, and they're using AOL 4.x to read the email, their AOL "client" will crash.  As far as I could tell, this is a Windows thing.  (Possibly AOL clients only exist for Windows?)

mac can be syn flooded
Any MacOS including 8.x is vulnerable to syn flooding.  Not sure why this is considered newsworthy but I'll dutifully report it.

cert reports on linux mountd
This looks like the same mountd buffer overflow from last month.  I think CERT waited for all the Linux distributions to upgrade their packages before making the announcement.  It only affects Linux boxes that are running NFS.

hpux omniback ii has flaw
I don't know what it is, but HP OpenView OmniBack II has had a patch released for it.  Apparently you could gain root through it, though they don't explain how.  It sounds like this might be some tool used by Windows clients that makes HP appear to be a Windows machine.  Does anyone use this?

nt ftp client can create forks
The NT FTP client treats a colon (:) in a filename as a delimiter between the filename and a resource fork name.  Therefore if you download "hello:kitty", it will create the file "hello" with a fork named "kitty" holding the actual file.  The reason this is a security problem is that NT doesn't come with any tools for fork managment, so forks are effectively hidden files.  You can create this type of file even without using FTP, so apparently the issue is that most users won't realize that they are creating a hidden file when they are doing the FTP transaction.

solaris xdm login will reveal usernames
When logging into a Solaris box using "desktop login" (xdm), if you enter a username for a user that has chosen a window manager other than CDE, a graphic to the side will change to indicate the chosen window manager.  This way you can determine usernames of users on the system who aren't using CDE.

solaris cde screensaver (w/nis+) doesn't need a password
If you're using NIS+ and CDE on Solaris, and you are not root, and you lock your screen with the CDE screensaver, it will accept any password to unlock.  (It doesn't require your password.)

irix buffer overflows
Xterm and libXaw on Irix have buffer overflow problems.

sco 'mscreen' exploit
They don't give any specifics, but it's suid root, so my first guess would be a buffer overflow.  'mscreen' is specific to SCO.

frontpage bugs update
FrontPage is some sort of web DAV-like thing by Microsoft that lets users update their web pages easily.  For them to use FrontPage, you need to be running a FrontPage server on your web server box.  This is one of Microsoft's first unix servers, so holes galore were to be found.  An update was posted that showed that some have been fixed, some haven't.  The bottom line is that you shouldn't run this on a unix box yet.  None of the exploits were unusual so probably aren't worth listing here.

freebsd rst attack
FreeBSD had a bug in its handling of TCP RST packets that would cause it to accept a RST packet if the sequence number was anywhere within about 50% of what it should be.  In other words, a random guess at a sequence number would be right 50% of the time.  Evil-doers can force connections to drop by forging RST packets.  This looked similar to the Windows problem at first glance, but is actually different (and easier to exploit).