Sowhat has discovered a vulnerability in PeanutHull, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.

The vulnerability is caused due to the program not dropping its SYSTEM privileges before running another external program such as Internet Explorer. This can be exploited by non-privileged users to gain SYSTEM privileges by invoking the program from the system tray and then using its help menu to invoke Internet Explorer and then cmd.exe.

The vulnerability has reportedly been fixed in version 3.0. However, version 3.0.1.0 is confirmed to be vulnerable as non-privileged users still are able to access the program by sending a SW_SHOW message to the window.

Solution
Grant only trusted users access to the affected systems.

Provided and/or discovered by
Sowhat

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
http://secway.org/advisory/AD20050720EN.txt

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers