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.
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.
MIPT/PhysTech guest lecture: Vulnerabilities, Money and People. On December 1, I gave a lecture at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (informally known as PhysTech). This is a very famous and prestigious university in Russia. In Soviet times, it trained personnel for Research Institutes and Experimental Design Bureaus, in particular for the Soviet nuclear program.
Nowadays MIPT closely cooperates with Russian and foreign companies, trains business people, software developers and great scientists. For example, the researchers who discovered Graphene and won Nobel Prize for this in 2010 were once MIPT graduates.
This is a very interesting place with a rich history. So it was a great honor for me to speak there.
WannaCry about Vulnerability Management. Nearly all mainstream media wrote today about massive ransomware attacks around the world: 16 medical institutions in UK, strong rumours that huge companies in Russia, and even Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs suffered a damage.
At this moment Kaspersky recorded more than 45,000 attacks in 74 countries around the world, but mostly in Russia. During the attack WannaCry malware encrypts data with the extension “.WCRY” added to the filename – that’s why it is called this way.
What I like in this WannaCry story, that it’s actually all about Vulnerability Management.
Why you can’t update it all at once? It’s the second part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show “Safe Environment” recorded 29.03.2017. In this part we talk about vulnerabilities in Linux and proprietary software, problems of patch an vulnerability management, and mention some related compliance requirements.
Video with manually transcribed Russian/English subtitles:
Taking about the fact that if you use fully updated software and do not use some self-written scripts, programs, then in theory everything will be safe.
But recently there was some statistics that critical vulnerabilities stay in Linux kernel about 7 years from the moment they appeared as a result of a programmer’s error till the moment they were found by our white hat researcher.
But it is not clear during these seven years if cybercriminals have found them, used them and how many systems were broken using this vulnerabilities. Not to mention that some special government services may use it too.
For example: The latest Linux kernel flaw (CVE-2017-2636), which existed in the Linux kernel for the past seven years, allows a local unprivileged user to gain root privileges on affected systems or cause a denial of service (system crash). The Hacker News
Well yes. There is such a statistic. There is also some criticism from proprietary software developers. Like you say “many eyes that looks in code will find any error.” This is a quote from Linus Torvalds, if I’m not mistaken.
Not exactly. Linus’s Law is a claim about software development, named in honor of Linus Torvalds and formulated by Eric S. Raymond in his essay and book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999).[1][2] The law states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”; or more formally: “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.” Wikipedia
But in practice, yes, there are really old vulnerabilities that come up after many many years. Because apparently they did not looking for this vulnerabilities well enough.But we still don’t have anything else, except Linux kernel. Therefore, they can say anything, but they will use it anyway. It is in the first place.
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