Monthly Archives: June 2021

Last Week’s Security news: Cisco ASA, BIG-IQ, vSphere, Solaris, Dlink, iPhone %s, DarkRadiation, Google schema, John McAfee

Hello, today I want to experiment with a new format. I will be reading last week’s news from my @avleonovnews channel, which I found the most interesting. I do this mostly for myself, but if you like it too, then that would be great. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and my Telegram @avleonovcom.

Let’s start with some new public exploits.

  1. Researchers at Positive Technologies have dropped a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit on Twitter for a known cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) CVE-2020-3580. This flaw was patched in October. There are reports of researchers pursuing bug bounties using this exploit. Maybe you should do this too. Well, or at least ask your IT administrators if they have updated the ASA.
  2. F5 BIG-IQ VE Post-auth Remote Root RCE. BIG-IQ provides a single point of management for all your BIG-IP devices — whether they are on premises or in a public or private cloud. It was possible to execute commands with root privileges as an authenticated privileged user via command injection in easy-setup-test-connection. A good reason to check if you have this in the infrastructure. But of course the fact that this is Post-auth makes it less interesting.
  3. VMware vCenter 6.5 / 6.7 / 7.0 Remote Code Execution. From the description of the vulnerability that was published in February 2021. “The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a remote code execution vulnerability in a vCenter Server plugin. A malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts vCenter Server.” Therefore, if your IT colleagues have not patched vCenter since February, you can try to demonstrate how this vulnerability is exploited in practice.
  4. Solaris SunSSH 11.0 Remote Root. “CVE-2020-14871 is a critical pre-authentication (via SSH) stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) in Oracle Solaris. PAM is a dynamic authentication component that was integrated into Solaris back in 1997 as part of Solaris 2.6”. If you are still using Solaris in your infrastructure, this is a great opportunity to try this exploit.
  5. Dlink DSL2750U – ‘Reboot’ Command Injection. There, in the exploit code, there is a link to the full study that shows how the researcher, Mohammed Hadi, gains admin access to the router. This is interesting considering that this router model is quite popular and you can still buy such a router.
  6. It’s 2021 and a printf format string in a wireless network’s name can break iPhone Wi-Fi. On Friday, Carl Schou, a security researcher in Denmark, reported that his iPhone lost its Wi-Fi capability after attempting to connect to a Wi-Fi network named “%p%s%s%s%s%n”. Fortunately, the damage appears not to be permanent. Apple iOS devices that lose Wi-Fi capability after being bitten by this bug can be restored via the General -> Reset -> Reset Network Settings menu option, which reverts network settings to their factory default. Not a very interesting vulnerability in terms of practical exploitation, but fun. Don’t connect to unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks.
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PHDays 10: U.S. Sanctions, My Talk on Vulristics, Other Great Talks Related to VM

Today I will talk about the Positive Hack Days conference, which took place on May 20 and May 21 in Moscow. I can say that this was and remains the main event for Information Security Practitioners in Russia.

First of all, I have to say a few words about the sanctions. The organizer of the event, Positive Technologies, is under the sanctions of the US Treasury Department since April 2021 among the “COMPANIES IN THE TECHNOLOGY SECTOR SUPPORTING RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES”. In a press release, the Treasury Department wrote that Positive Technologies hosts large-scale conventions that are used as recruiting events for russian special services. Well, I don’t know exactly what they mean. Maybe they mean PHDays or maybe not. But to say this about PHDays is like saying that any major international conference, Black Hat or RSA, is a recruiting event. This is ridiculous. In my humble opinion, these are some dirty political games. It is sad that reputable information security companies and security researchers are suffering from this.

Now let’s talk about my speech at PHDays 10. This year I had the opportunity to talk for an hour about my pet project – Vulristics. This project can help you prioritize known vulnerabilities. Anything that has a CVE id. There is a full video of my speech. I have uploaded this to my YouTube channel.

Russian version.

And a version that was dubbed into English.

So, if you’re interested, I recommend watching the full video. Here I will simply repeat the main points.

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Getting Hosts from Microsoft Intune MDM using Python

Today I want to talk about Microsoft Intune. It is a Mobile Device Management platform.

Well, I think that the importance of MDM systems has become much higher than it was before the days of covid-19. Simply because a lot more people now work remotely using corporate laptops. And if these people don’t connect to the corporate network using a VPN, you most likely won’t see any activity from their devices in Active Directory. This means that you will not understand whether the device is active or not. And it will be impossible to get the correct security metrics for these devices.

Mobile device management is a solution to this problem as it maintains a connection between the laptop and the cloud server. MDM can collect various parameters from hosts, but for me the most important parameter is the timestamp. I will not describe all the features of Microsoft Intune here. Simply because at this stage they are not very interesting to me. The task I needed to solve was how to get the timestamp of the last activity for all hosts in Microsoft Intune using the official API. And since this is poorly documented, I want to share it with you.

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