I haven’t found any pretty solution for this. I parse public html pages on the Microsoft site I’ll show you how I do it. If you know something better, please write in the comments.
Let’s start with Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday. I think the most interesting thing is that it contains a fix for the PetitPotam vulnerability. I talked about this vulnerability two weeks ago. At the time, Microsoft had no plans to release a patch because PetitPotam was a “classic NTLM Relay Attack”. But the patch was actually released as part of August Patch Tuesday.
A quote from Rapid7: “Tracked as CVE-2021-36942, the August 2021 Patch Tuesday security update blocks the affected API calls OpenEncryptedFileRawA and OpenEncryptedFileRawW through the LSARPC interface”.
There are no formal signs that this vulnerability is critical other than comments from the vendors. My Vulristics tool has flagged this “Windows LSA Spoofing” as a Medium level Vulnerability. But this fix seems to be the most important thing in this Patch Tuesday. So install this patch first.
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.
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.”
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.
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”.
Hello everyone! Let’s now talk about Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities for the second quarter of 2021. April, May and June. Not the most exciting topic, I agree. I am surprised that someone is reading or watching this. For me personally, this is a kind of tradition. Plus this is an opportunity to try Vulristics in action and find possible problems. It is also interesting to see what VM vendors considered critical back then and what actually became critical. I will try to keep this video short.
First of all, let’s take a look at the vulnerabilities from the April Patch Tuesday. 108 vulnerabilities, 55 of them are RCEs. Half of these RCEs (27) are weird RPC vulnerabilities. “Researcher who reported these bugs certainly found quite the attack surface”. The most critical vulnerability is RCE in Exchange (CVE-2021-28480). This is not ProxyLogon, this is another vulnerability. ProxyLogon was in March. And this vulnerability is simply related to ProxyLogon, so it is believed that it is exploited in the wild as well. In the second place this Win32k Elevation of Privilege (CVE-2021-28310). It is clearly mentioned in several sources as being used in real attacks. “Bugs of this nature are typically combined with other bugs, such as a browser bug or PDF exploit, to take over a system”. And the only vulnerability with a public exploit is the Azure DevOps Server Spoofing (CVE-2021-28459). Previously known as Team Foundation Server (TFS), Azure DevOps Server is a set of collaborative software development tools. It is hosted on-premises. Therefore, this vulnerability can be useful for attackers.
This is my personal blog. The opinions expressed here are my own and not of my employer. All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners. All company, product and service names used here for identification purposes only. Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement. You can freely use materials of this site, but it would be nice if you place a link on https://avleonov.com and send message about it at me@avleonov.com or contact me any other way.
