Last Week’s Security News: Black Hat Pwnie Awards, iPhone Checks Photos, Evil Windows Print Server, Cisco VPN Routers Takeovers. Hello everyone! Last Week’s Security News, August 1 – August 8.
Black Hat Pwnie Awards
Last week was more quiet than normal with Black Hat USA and DEF CON security conferences. I would like to start with the Pwnie Awards, which are held annually at Black Hat. It’s like an Oscar or Tony in the information security world. Pwnie Awards recognizes both excellence and incompetence. And, in general, is a very respectable, adequate and fun event.
Firstly 2 nominations, which were received by the guys from Qualys. Best Privilege Escalation Bug: Baron Samedit, a 10-year-old exploit in sudo. Most Under-Hyped Research: 21Nails, 21 vulnerabilities in Exim, the Internet’s most popular mail server.
Best Server-Side Bug: Orange Tsai, for his Microsoft Exchange Server ProxyLogon attack surface discoveries.
Most Epic Fail: Microsoft, for their failure to fix PrintNightmare.
Last Week’s Security news: Serious Sam in Metasploit, PetitPotam, Zimbra Hijack, Joint Advisory TOP30 CVEs. Hello everyone! Last Week’s Security News, July 26 – August 1.
Serious Sam in Metasploit
Last week I talked about the Serious Sam vulnerability (CVE-2021-36934), also known as HiveNightmare. The name HiveNightmare comes from the fact that Windows stores its registry data in a small number of proprietary database files called hives. Due to mismanagement of SAM and SYSTEM hives in Windows 10, it is possible for an unprivileged user to read those files and then, for example, extract the account password hashes. An exploit for this vulnerability is now available in Metasploit and it will be much easier for attackers to exploit this vulnerability. The issues is still under investigation by Microsoft and a patch is not currently available, only the list of vulnerable OS versions, however a workaround has been provided.
PetitPotam
At the beginning of last week, PetitPotam (Little Hippo) attack made a lot of noise. It could force remote Windows systems to reveal password hashes that could then be easily cracked.
“The PetitPotam bug is tied to the Windows operating system and the abuse of a remote access protocol called Encrypting File System Remote Protocol (MS-EFSRPC). The protocol is designed to allow Windows systems to access remote encrypted data stores, allowing for management of the data while enforcing access control policies. […] The PetitPotam PoC is a form of manipulator-in-the-middle (MitM) attack against Microsoft’s NTLM authentication system. Next, an attacker uses the file-sharing protocol Server Message Block (SMB) to request access to a remote system’s MS-EFSRPC interface. According to [security researcher Gilles Lionel], this forces the targeted computer to initiate an authentication procedure and share its authentication details via NTLM.
In response to the public availability of the PoC, Microsoft was quick to respond, outlining several mitigation options. For starters, Microsoft recommends disabling NTLM authentication on Windows domain controllers. It also suggests enabling the Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA) feature on AD CS services.”
But there won’t be any special fix. Microsoft: “PetitPotam is a classic NTLM Relay Attack, and such attacks have been previously documented by Microsoft along with numerous mitigation options to protect customers.”
How to fix “Nessus failed to load the SSH private key” error? If you are using Nessus to scan Linux hosts and authenticate by key, you may encounter this problem.
You have generated the keys correctly, placed the public key on a remote server. You can connect to this server using the private key.
Last Week’s Security news: Pegasus, SeriousSAM, Sequoia. Hello everyone! After 4 episodes of the Last Week’s Security news, I decided to change the format. I will no longer try to cover all the important news, because it takes a long time to prepare such reviews. So, from now on, I will focus only on a few news of the past week, which I subjectively consider the most interesting.
So, the last week, July 19 – July 25. In my opinion, the most interesting news was the scandal related to the iPhone Pegasus spyware and two Elevations of Privileges: SeriousSAM for Windows and Sequoia for Linux.
My thoughts on the “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment”. What about the quality? The Gartner Vulnerability Management Reports are one of the few marketing reports that I try to read regularly. This started back in the days when I was working for a VM vendor doing competitive analysis. Gartner is one of the few organizations that think about Vulnerability Assessment and Vulnerability Management and clearly articulate where we are and where we are going.
I got a free reprint of “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment” from the Tenable website. Thanks a lot to them for that.
Let’s start with what I liked:
It’s great that Gartner has made vulnerability prioritization technology (VPT) a separate class of solutions, that do not detect vulnerabilities themselves, but work with them. For example, Kenna or my Vulristics. And it could be additional functionality like Tenable VPR.
I liked the focus on EDR as a promising VM replacement. Especially, Microsoft solutions (Defender for Endpoint or as was mentioned in the report Microsoft’s Threat & Vulnerability Management, TVM).
It’s nice that various areas related to Vulnerability Management have been mentioned: Pentest, Bug Bounty, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS).
An interesting diagram that shows that VA is primarily about “Assess” and “Asset Management”, VPT is primarily about “Prioritize” and “Workflow Management”, BAS is primarily about “Compensate” and “Security Controls”.
Now what I didn’t like. I have one pain point – the quality of the scanning. And here, on the one hand, something was said, but on the other, it was not enough and not as definite as I would like. Market Direction is the most interesting section of the document. And it was the most painful to read.
Last Week’s Security news: Exploits for ForgeRock, vSphere, Apache Tomcat, new Print Spooler vuln, Kaseya Patch and REvil, SolarWinds, Schneider Electric, Bulletins. Hello guys! The fourth episode of Last Week’s Security news, July 12 – July 18.
I would like to start with some new public exploits. I think these 4 are the most interesting.
If you remember, 2 weeks ago I mentioned the ForgeRock Access Manager and OpenAM vulnerability (CVE-2021-35464). Now there is a public RCE exploit for it. ForgeRock OpenAM server is a popular access management solution for web applications. Michael Stepankin, Researcher: “In short, RCE is possible thanks to unsafe Java deserialization in the Jato framework used by OpenAM”. And now this vulnerability is Under Active Attack. “The [Australian Cyber Security Centre] has observed actors exploiting this vulnerability to compromise multiple hosts and deploy additional malware and tools,” the organization said in an alert. ACSC didn’t disclose the nature of the attacks, how widespread they are, or the identities of the threat actors exploiting them”.
A new exploit for vSphere Client (CVE-2021-21985). The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a remote code execution vulnerability due to lack of input validation in the Virtual SAN Health Check plug-in which is enabled by default in vCenter Server. 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.
Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 – Open Redirect (CVE-2018-11784). “When the default servlet in Apache Tomcat […] returned a redirect to a directory […] a specially crafted URL could be used to cause the redirect to be generated to any URI of the attackers choice”.
Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 – Cross-Site Scripting (CVE-2019-0221). “The SSI printenv command in Apache Tomcat […] echoes user provided data without escaping and is, therefore, vulnerable to XSS”. However, in real life this is unlikely to be used. “SSI is disabled by default. The printenv command is intended for debugging and is unlikely to be present in a production website”.
Vulristics Microsoft Patch Tuesday July 2021: Zero-days EoP in Kernel and RCE in Scripting Engine, RCEs in Kernel, DNS Server, Exchange and Hyper-V. Hello everyone! For the past 9 months, I’ve been doing Microsoft Patch Tuesday reviews quarterly. Now I think it would be better to review the July Patch Tuesday while the topic is still fresh. And that will save us some time in the next Last Week’s Security news episode. So, July Patch Tuesday, 116 vulnerabilities.
The 2 most critical are the Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-31979, CVE-2021-33771). These vulnerabilities are critical because they are used in real attacks according to Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center and Security Response Center. Tenable: “A local, authenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to run processes with elevated permissions. Similar zero-day vulnerabilities were patched in April 2020, which were observed under active exploitation by Google Project Zero.”
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