Category Archives: Topics

Microsoft Patch Tuesday May 2020: comments from VM vendors, promising stuff for phishing, troubles with SharePoint and lulz with Visual Studio

Leave a reply

Microsoft Patch Tuesday May 2020: comments from VM vendors, promising stuff for phishing, troubles with SharePoint and lulz with Visual Studio. This will be my third Microsoft Patch Tuesday report in video and audio format. And for the third time in a row, Microsoft has addressed over a hundred vulnerabilities. With my Microsoft Patch Tuesday parser, it was possible to generate a report almost on the same day. But, of course, it takes much more time to describe the vulnerabilities manually.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday May 2020
  • All vulnerabilities: 111
  • Critical: 16
  • Important: 95
  • Moderate: 0
  • Low: 0

Last time I complained that different VM vendors release completely different reports for Microsoft Patch Tuesday. This time I decided that it’s not a bug, but a feature. I upgraded my script to not only show vulnerabilities, but also show how these vulnerabilities were mentioned in the reports of various VM vendors (Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7 and ZDI). In my opinion, it seems pretty useful.

Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2020: my classification script, confusing RCE in Adobe Type Manager and updates for older vulnerabilities

1 Reply

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2020: my classification script, confusing RCE in Adobe Type Manager and updates for older vulnerabilities. Making the reviews of Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities should be an easy task. All vulnerability data is publicly available. Even better, dozens of reviews have already been written. Just read them, combine and post. Right?

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2020: my classification script, confusing RCE in Adobe Type Manager and updates for older vulnerabilities

Not really. In fact it is quite boring and annoying. It may be fun to write about vulnerabilities that were already used in some real attacks. But this is a very small part of all vulnerabilities. What about more than a hundred others? They are like “some vulnerability in some component may be used in some attack (or may be not)”. If you describe each of them, no one will read or listen this.

You must choose what to highlight. And when I am reading the reports from Tenable, Qualys and ZDI, I see that they choose very different groups of vulnerabilities, pretty much randomly.

My classification script

That’s why I created a script that takes Patch Tuesday CVE data from microsoft.com and visualizes it giving me helicopter view on what can be interesting there. With nice grouping by vulnerability type and product, with custom icons for vulnerability types, coloring based on severity, etc.

Continue reading →

AVLEONOV Podcast

Leave a reply

AVLEONOV Podcast. I finally launched my own podcast! These are the audio tracks from my videos with some minimal changes, but it may be more convenient for someone to follow me this way. You can try to find my podcast in your podcast player by searching for “avleonov” (well, at least it works in Podcast Addict) or add it with the direct URL https://avleonov.com/podcast/feed.xml.

AVLEONOV Podcast

And here is what I recently learned about podcasting.

Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 "Wormable" RCE and updates for February goldies

Leave a reply

Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 “Wormable” RCE and updates for February goldies. Without a doubt, the hottest Microsoft vulnerability in March 2020 is the “Wormable” Remote Code Execution in SMB v3 CVE-2020-0796. The most commonly used names for this vulnerability are EternalDarkness, SMBGhost and CoronaBlue.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 "Wormable" RCE and updates for February goldies

There was a strange story of how it was disclosed. It seems like Microsoft accidentally mentioned it in their blog. Than they somehow found out that the patch for this vulnerability will not be released in the March Patch Tuesday. So, they removed the reference to this vulnerability from the blogpost as quickly as they could.

But some security experts have seen it. And, of course, after EternalBlue and massive cryptolocker attacks in 2017, each RCE in SMB means “OMG, this is happening again, we need to do something really fast!” So, Microsoft just had to publish an advisory for this vulnerability with the workaround ADV200005 and to release an urgent patch KB4551762.

Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2020

2 Replies

Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2020. IMHO, these are the two most interesting vulnerabilities in a recent Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2020:

  • Mysterious Windows RCE CVE-2020-0662. “To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker who has a domain user account could create a specially crafted request, causing Windows to execute arbitrary code with elevated permissions.” Without needing to directly log in to the affected device!
  • Microsoft Exchange server seizure CVE-2020-0688. By sending a malicious email message the attacker can run commands on a vulnerable Exchange server as the system user (and monitor email communications). “the attacker could completely take control of an Exchange server through a single e-mail”.

There were also RCEs in Remote Desktop (Client and Service), a third attempt to fix RCEs in Internet Explorer, Elevation of Privilege, etc. But all this stuff we see in almost every Patch Tuesday and without fully functional exploits it’s not really interesting. ?

Read the full reviews in Tenable and Zero Day Initiative blogs.

Is Vulnerability Management more about Vulnerabilities or Management?

Leave a reply

Is Vulnerability Management more about Vulnerabilities or Management? I’ve just read a nice article about Vulnerability Management in the Acribia blog (in Russian). An extract and my comments below.

In the most cases Vulnerability Management is not about Vulnerabilities, but about Management. Just filtering the most critical vulnerabilities is not enough.

Practical Cases:

  1. “Oh, yes, we know ourselves that that everything is bad!” – CVE-2013−4786 IPMI password hash disclosure on > 500 servers. Customer just accepted the risks, Acribia proposed an effective workaround (unbrutable user IDs and passwords). It’s often hard to figure out right remediation measures and implement them. Someone should do it!
  2. “We can download OpenVAS without your help!” – CVE-2018-0171 Cisco Smart Install RCE on 350 hosts. Vulnerability detection rules of several Vulnerability Scanners were not good enough to detect this vulnerability. Do not rely on scanners, know how they work and their limitations.
  3. “If the attackers wanted to hack us, they would have already done it!” – CVE-2017-0144 (MS17-010) Windows SMB RCE on domain controller and several other critical servers. Vulnerability was detected in infrastructure several times, the remediation was agreed with the management, but it was ignored by responsible IT guys. As a result, during the next successful WannaCry-like malware attack the servers, including the DC were destroyed. Vulnerability Management is about the willingness to patch anything, very quickly, as often as required. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

Big Microsoft day: EOL for Win7, Win2008 and crypt32.dll

Leave a reply

Big Microsoft day: EOL for Win7, Win2008 and crypt32.dll. Big Microsoft day. End-of-life for Windows 7 desktops and Windows 2008 servers (strictly speaking Windows Server 2008 R2). I think that today many security guys had a fun task to count how many host hosts with win7 and win2008 they still have in the organization. So, Asset Management is a necessity! ?

Windows 7 desktop

Now an interesting time should begin, when critical unpatched vulnerabilities may appear for these operation systems. At the same time, the number of hosts with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 will be still big enough for massive attacks. ? Although I think that Microsoft will continue to release patches for the most critical vulnerabilities, like they did it for WinXP. Upd. Also note, that for Windows Server 2008/2008r2 it’s also possible to purchase an extended three years  security update subscription.

Windows 2008 server

The second interesting topic is the mysterious vulnerability in crypt32.dll (this dll appeared in Windows more than 20 years ago), which might somehow affect authentication and digital signatures in Windows.

crypt32.dll

Far now it has been only a rumor, but soon it will become clear how dangerous it is and how it can be used.

upd. 15.01. So, what about this vulnerability in crypt32.dll. Now it has the name NSACrypt (because NSA reported it) and the id CVE-2020-0601. It’s not for all versions of Windows, only for Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019.

Continue reading →