The Back Orifice preprocessor contains a stack-based
buffer overflow. This vulnerability could be leveraged by
an attacker to execute code remotely on a Snort sensor
where the Back Orifice preprocessor is enabled. However,
there are a number of factors that make remote code
execution difficult to achieve across different builds of
Snort on different platforms, even on the same platform
with different compiler versions, and it is more likely
that an attacker could use the vulnerability as a denial
of service attack.
The Back Orifice preprocessor can be disabled by
commenting out the line "preprocessor bo" in
snort.conf. This can be done in any text editor using the
following procedure:
- Locate the line "preprocessor bo"
- Comment out this line by preceding it with a hash
(#). The new line will look like "#preprocessor bo"
- Save the file
- Restart snort