Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2020

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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.

Crypto AG scandal

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The article in The Washington Post is really huge, but even a brief glance is enough to see how absolutely amazing this Crypto scandal is. A great example of chutzpah. 😆

“Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security. It was jointly owned by the American CIA and West German intelligence agency BND from 1970 until about 2008. … The company was a long-established manufacturer of [backdoored] encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices.”

“You think you do good work and you make something secure,” said Juerg Spoerndli, an electrical engineer who spent 16 years at Crypto. “And then you realize that you cheated these clients.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now the causes of hysteria around Kaspersky and Huawei become more clear. It is natural to suspect others in the things you practiced yourself.

A completely different company, with a different strategy

And note the disclaimer on the Crypto’s website. A completely different company, with a different strategy. ☝️😏 Okaaay…

Is Vulnerability Management more about Vulnerabilities or Management?

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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

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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.

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IT Security in The New Pope

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Lol, IT Security is everywhere. Even in the first episode of “The New Pope” TV series (the sequel of “The Young Pope”, 2016) some monks change credentials in the Vatican’s IT systems under cover of night. This happened after, well, some unexpected changes in the corporate culture and organizational structure. 😁

IT Security in The New Pope

– How did it go?
– Very well. We’ve changed the passwords, only you can log on to the bank accounts. The vault too, only you can get in.
– Tomorrow they’ll be crying.

I hope it won’t be a big spoiler. 😅 The episode was great. 👍 🔥

0day RCE in Firefox

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This seems like a pretty interesting vulnerability CVE-2019-17026 in Firefox (and Thunderbird) in Windows, MacOS and Linux.

A pretty interesting vulnerability in Firefox (and Thunderbird)

“Incorrect alias information in IonMonkey JIT compiler for setting array elements could lead to a type confusion. We are aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw”.

US-cert informs us that “an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system“. Yep, it’s RCE.

On the one hand, it’s not a big deal, because Firefox will ask you to update it after the next launch.

Firefox will ask you to update it after the next launch

But if somewhere in your organization the old version of Firefox is used because it is the only version that is supported by some legacy application or plugin, you are in hell. Of course, this old browser may be only installed somewhere and not used, but still try to monitor this and take care. Especially if you use some custom Firefox-based build.

The first Zbrunk dashboard and other news

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The long New Year holiday season in Russia was not in vain. I had time to work on Zbrunk. 😉 As you can see, I made my first dashboard and added other features.

The first Zbrunk dashboard

No more timestamps in code

I added functions to get Unix timestamps from lines in human-readable time format, e.g. “2019.12.10 13:00:00”.

Instead of a date, you can use words:

  • Today
  • Yesterday
  • N days ago
  • Beginning of Time
  • End of Time

API requests will continue to support only Unix timestamps.

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