Software Engineering Institute

Ultraseek is a search engine used on private and public websites. Ultraseek includes the /highlight/index.html script which highlights strings in search results. An attacker may be able to exploit this vulnerability by sending specially-crafted URLs to the vulnerable script.

Note that Ultraseek was previously produced by Verity, which is now owned by Autonomy.

A remote, unauthenticated attacker could provide arbitrary content to a web site, effectively performing cross-site scripting attacks. An attacker could also access content from or enumerate non-public hosts and services.

Configure in-document highlighting filter
From the Ultraseek Administrator Guide:
In-document highlighting filter

Specifies which URLs can be highlighted. By default, documents from all URLs can be highlighted. Ultraseek examines the list of URL patterns in the order they are specified. The first matched URL pattern determines whether in-documenting highlighting is allowed for documents originating from the specified URL. If there is no match, Ultraseek disallows highlighting on documents from the URL.
Changing this setting to restrict highlighting to specific domains will limit the scope of this vulnerability.

To change this setting:

1. Log into the server as the admin user.
2. Click on the parameters tab.
3. Click on the advanced tab.
4. In the In-document highlighting filter text box, enter the domains that should be allowed to access the highlighting features.

Restrict access to non-public services

Using access control lists, firewalls or similar technologies to restrict access to the highlighting script can limit an attacker's ability to access non-public services.