As always malware and mass infections is a numbers game so the bad guys will always target the most popular and prolific operating systems to increase their chances of widespread infections.

For me personally UAC in Windows Vista was simply a pain in the ass, so much so I just turned it off completely as did most people rendering it completely ineffective. They seem to have toned it down in Windows 7 to make it less invasive and perhaps as a byproduct have made it less effective.

A researcher at Sophos reports putting Windows 7’s User Account Control feature to the test and finding the technology failed to block numerous pieces of malware. Microsoft, however, stresses that UAC is only one part of Windows 7’s security.

A researcher at Sophos called the UAC feature in Windows 7 ineffective after numerous pieces of malware snuck by the technology in a test.

Microsoft first introduced User Account Control in Windows Vista to improve security. After some users complained the number of alerts it generated were annoying, the company pledged to cut down on the number of prompts in Windows 7. The move however has raised concerns in the security community, and Sophos Senior Security Adviser Chester Wisniewski said his test proves Microsoft took it a step too far.

Wisniewski wrote on his blog Nov. 3 that seven of the 10 pieces of malware he tested ran with the default AUC enabled in Windows 7 without generating any prompts. As part of the test, no antivirus software was installed on the system. Two of the malware samples did not work in Windows 7; of the remaining eight, only one generated a prompt, and that one still would have been installed had the user clicked yes, Wisniewski told eWEEK.

I’d imagine it only throws an alert if the software being installed tries to modify system files or place itself in system directories (c:/windows etc).

That would make sense to me, and yes it would make it ineffective against malware and even more ineffective when the bad guys work out how it functions and adapt to that.

Nothing much new here though is it, run anything on Windows XP and you’ll get no warnings..so just be vigilant. I’d rather Microsoft try an educate people on good security practice rather than trying to implement half-arsed technical measures to protect against wetware ignorance.

When asked about the test, Microsoft officials pointed to the other features of Windows 7 that have improved security.

“Windows 7 is built upon the security platform of Windows Vista, which included a defense-in-depth approach to help protect customers from malware; this includes features like Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), User Account Control (UAC), Kernel Patch Protection, Windows Service Hardening, Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP),” a spokesperson said.

“Windows 7 retains all of the development processes, including going through the Security Development Lifecycle, and technologies that made Windows Vista the most secure Windows operating system ever released,” the spokesperson added. “Coupled with Internet Explorer 8—which includes added malware protection with its SmartScreen Filter—and Microsoft Security Essentials, Windows 7 provides flexible security protection against malware and intrusions.”.

All the above technologies are great and they do help a LOT when it comes to exploitation of vulnerabilities and trying to execute shell-code. But that’s not the biggest threat, the biggest threat is idiot users installing malware ‘by accident‘ on their own computers.

So yes, however obvious it may seem to us – you still need to install Anti-virus software on Windows 7.

Source: eWeek

It’s a fair move by Mozilla though as the add-on can cause security vulnerabilities in Firefox outside of their control. They can’t fix the software, so the best thing they can do to ensure user safety is to block it.

Compounded with the fact it’s extremely hard for users to remove the add-on themselves the block is a good idea.

Mozilla late Friday blocked the Microsoft-made software that had put Firefox users at risk from attack.

The two-part Microsoft component — an add-on dubbed “.NET Framework Assistant” and a plug-in named “Windows Presentation Foundation” — have been blocked by Mozilla as a precautionary measure, said Mike Shaver, the company’s head of engineering.

“Because of the difficulties some users have had entirely removing the add-on, and because of the severity of the risk it represents if not disabled, we contacted Microsoft today to indicate that we were looking to disable the extension and plug-in for all users via our blocklisting mechanism,” Shaver said in an announcement posted Friday night to the company’s security blog .

The annoying thing is these add-ons are installed in Firefox without any kind of prompt or permission given by the user.

Microsoft pushed them out with the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) update in February this year, so our browsers have been vulnerable since then.

The software was almost impossible to remove without some registry hacking, Microsoft did remedy this later – but still how many people would know?

Mozilla maintains an add-on/plug-in blocking list that automatically bars risky software from being used by Firefox. The open-source company first used the blocker in 2007. Mozilla has used the tool only nine times, including Friday’s blocking of the Microsoft add-on and plug-in. In May 2008, for example, Mozilla added a Vietnamese language pack for Firefox to the blocking list when the pack was found to contain a worm.

According to Shaver, Microsoft gave Mozilla the go-ahead to block the .Net Framework Assistant and the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Last week, Microsoft’s security team acknowledged that its software — which had been silently installed in Firefox as far back as February 2009 — contained a critical vulnerability that could be used by hackers to hijack Windows PCs. The same vulnerability also affected all versions of Internet Explorer (IE), including the newest version, IE8.

Thankfully Firefox has the blocklist functionality and they have been aggressively moving towards ensuring 3rd party additions are also secure and don’t comprise the integrity of the platform.

Last month they warned users with out of date Flash plugins to update.

Firefox 3.6 will be even more aggressive in this aspect warning users when they visit a site that relies on one or more outdated add-ons.

Source: Network World

The exploit isn’t 100% reliable but it’s still fairly significant in my eyes as it is a critical vulnerability and can be used for code execution.

Vista isn’t the most popular OS still so perhaps Microsoft don’t the threat being that wide as the protocol this exploit focuses on (SMB 2) was only introducted in Vista.

A security researcher has downplayed the significance of publicly released attack code exploiting a critical vulnerability in newer versions of Windows, saying it isn’t reliable enough to force Microsoft to issue an emergency patch.

The exploit, which on Monday was folded into the open-source Metasploit penetration testing kit, is at best successful only 50 percent of the time, said Dave Aitel, CTO of security firm Immunity. Given the burden of releasing out-of-schedule patches, Microsoft is unlikely to do so in this case.

“To move something like Microsoft you’ve got to have something major and this isn’t quite it,” Aitel, whose company released its own attack code two weeks ago. “It’s going to be a lot of work to take the exploit where it is to something that works enough that they will do that.”

It seems like the exploit is more reliable with Windows on VMware, but honestly how commonly do you see that? With a real native Windows installation they are only seeing a 10% success rate.

Which really isn’t that serious is it?

Apparently Immunity have made it much more reliable, but they have poured a ton of resources into it.

The vulnerability, which surfaced three weeks ago, resides in file-sharing technology called SMB2, short for server message block version 2, which was first added to Windows Vista and later made its way into newer versions of the operating system. While the Metasploit exploit is sophisticated, it is frequently thwarted by a security measure known as ASLR. Short for address space layout randomization, it picks a different memory location to load system components each time the OS is started.

Without being able to predict where required code will be located, the Metasploit attack isn’t reliable enough to prompt Microsoft to take the drastic step of releasing a patch outside of the regularly scheduled update cycle. The software giant adopted the patch routine to make life easier on system administrators by allowing them to plan and test updates before installing them on huge numbers of business critical machines.

The Metasploit exploit in many cases is able to get around ASLR by targeting memory locations that are predictable when Windows is running on VMware. But when the exploit targets the OS running directly on a computer, the success rate can be as low as 10 percent.

Microsoft will patch this eventually, but I doubt it’ll be soon and they definitely won’t be rushing an out-of-schedule patch out just for this vulnerability.

The question is can the bad guys fashion this into a reliable exploit and get some major ownage going on?

Source: The Register

So far Redhat has offered a workaround for the flaw and Juniper has responded that their equipment is not vulnerable.

It could be that Juniper doesn’t really understand the attack yet, if so that’s bad news as most of the Internet backbone (ISP Level) runs on Juniper equipment.

Microsoft and Cisco have issued updates that protect against a new class of attack that requires very little bandwidth and can leave servers and routers paralyzed even after a flood of malicious data has stopped.

The bug in the TCP, or transmission control protocol, was disclosed in October by security researchers Jack Louis and Robert E. Lee of Sweden-based Outpost24. It gave many security watchers pause because it provided attackers with a new way to launch potentially crippling attacks on a wide array of equipment used to route traffic over the internet.

“This is definitely momentum and other vendors, once they fully understand what has been talked about here, will come up with mitigation strategies of their own,” Lee told The Register. “This really is good progress from both Microsoft and Cisco.”

Microsoft rolled it out in their normal “Patch Tuesday” fashion and Cisco issued a bulletin about especially disruptive DoS attacks.

Good to see it being addressed finally, I guess it took Microsoft some time and money in R&D to come up with a satisfactory solution.

I wonder if any other vendors will be following suite shortly.

On Tuesday, Microsoft responded with MS09-048, a security advisory that fixes a variety of networking vulnerabilities in Windows operating systems, including those discovered by Louis and Lee. The update implements a new feature called memory pressure protection, which automatically drops existing TCP connections and SYN requests when attacks are detected.

The update from Microsoft came during the company’s Patch Tuesday, in which it fixed a total of eight security vulnerabilities in various versions of its Windows operating system. In all, Microsoft issued five patches, which change the way Windows processes javascript, MP3 audio files and wireless signals. As always, the Sans Institute provides a helpful overview here.

Cisco issued it’s own bulletin warning that multiple products are vulnerable to DoS, or denial-of-service attacks that can be especially disruptive.

It’s often hard to fix problems like this in core components because a band-aid solution could end up breaking some of the functionality, especially with something like the TCP stack which is relied on so heavily.

Even then, a patch is released but how many people actually apply it? Cisco equipment is well known for being hard to manage/patch so I’d imagine many network devices will remain unpatched.

Source: The Register

Especially internal Windows LAN setups with a domain, for Linux I always felt there were better choices – but as far as Windows went LANguard was my choice.

Fairly recently GFI released version 9 of their scanner (overview here) with improvements to the scanning engine and the interface (including the monitoring dashboard which gives you a good heads-up of the scan results).

One of the big positives for me with LANguard was the ability to detect patch levels and automatically roll out patches over the network. This makes it a very comprehensive solution, the recent versions also include checks to ensure 3rd party software such as Anti-virus solutions are also up to date (full features here).

It’s as easy to install and get up and running as ever, if you do have any issues the Installation Guide is here [PDF].

Getting started with a scan is as easy as clicking 1 button, the interface has been simplified from what I remember and it’s a lot more attractive than it used to be. In fact it’s simple enough that non-security IT folks could use it without much problem.

After a scan is complete you have a choice to Analyze or Remediate. The Analysis section will give you fairly detailed instructions on any vulnerabilities found (including a vulnerability level) and full system information including shares, patch levels and so on.

The Remediate section will inform you of missing patches and allow you to apply these. Other than the standard MS patches and service packs you can also deploy 3rd party applications and uninstall rogue software.

Most things in the scanner can be scheduled too so for example if you want to scan outside of office ours or roll out software/patches at the weekend you can set LANguard to do that.

The dashboard is a nice addition which gives you an overview of the network security and the changes in vulnerabilities over time.

It also comes with the generic network utilities like Whois, DNS Lookup, Traceroute & SNMP Walk.

All in all I think it’s a great tool, especially for those managing Windows based networks. It makes your life a LOT easiest and it makes it easier to manage patches and software across the Domain.

It’s not a hardcore security tool, which means it also appeals to people more in the Sys Admin & Network areas of the industry. If you have any Windows machines do give it a look, perhaps start with the free version below.

You can download the latest version here:

GFI LANguard 9 Download

Pricing is done on a per-IP basis with prices starting from around $32USD per IP for a 10-24 IP block.

There is also a FREE version available here:

GFI LANguard 9 5-IP Freeware edition

In the current compilation state it allows to log into a Linux system as ’root’ user without typing the correct password or to elevate privileges from current user to root. For Windows systems it allows to enter any password protected profile without any knowledge of the password.

It was mainly created for Ubuntu, later the author has made a few add-ons to cover some other Linux distributions.

Entire Kon-Boot was written in pure x86 assembly, using old grandpa-geezer TASM 4.0.

Latest Updates – Kon-Boot for Windows

Kon-Boot was moved to Windows platforms. So now it provides support for Microsoft Windows systems and also the Linux systems listed below. Kon-Boot for Windows enables logging in to any password protected machine profile without without any knowledge of the password. This tool changes the contents of Windows kernel while booting, everything is done virtually – without any interferences with physical system changes. So far following systems were tested to work correctly with Kon-Boot:

• Windows Server 2008 Standard SP2 (v.275)
• Windows Vista Business SP0
• Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
• Windows Vista Ultimate SP0
• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise
• Windows XP
• Windows XP SP1
• Windows XP SP2
• Windows XP SP3
• Windows 7

No special usage instructions are required for Windows users, just boot from Kon-Boot CD/Floppy, select your profile and put any password you want. You lost your password? Now it doesnt matter at all.

It has been tested with the following Linux distributions:

• Gentoo 2.6.24-gentoo-r5 GRUB 0.97
• Ubuntu 2.6.24.3-debug GRUB 0.97
• Debian 2.6.18-6-6861 GRUB 0.97
• Fedora 2.6.25.9-76.fc9.i6862 GRUB 0.97

You can download Kon-Boot here:

Floppy Image – FD0-konboot-v1.1-2in1.zip
CD ISO Image – CD-konboot-v1.1-2in1.zip

Or read more here.

It seems DirectX 7, 8 and 9 in Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 are at risk. Windows Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7 are not effected – so they have fixed the problem at some point in their development cycle, they just haven’t pushed it back to the older operating systems yet.

For the third time in the last 90 days, Microsoft Corp. has warned that hackers are exploiting an unpatched critical vulnerability in its software.

Late Thursday, Microsoft issued a security advisory that said malicious hackers were already using attack code that leveraged a bug in DirectX, a Windows subsystem crucial to games and used when streaming video from Web sites.

Hackers are using malicious QuickTime files — QuickTime is rival Apple Inc.’s default video format — to hijack PCs, Microsoft said. “The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if [the] user opened a specially crafted QuickTime media file,” the company said in the advisory. “Microsoft is aware of limited, active attacks that use this exploit code.”

According to Christopher Budd, a spokesman for the Microsoft Security Response Center, QuickTime itself is not flawed. Instead, the QuickTime parser in DirectShow, a component of DirectX, contains the bug. “An attacker would try and exploit the vulnerability by crafting a specially formed video file and then posting it on a website or sending it as an attachment in e-mail,,” Budd said in an entry on the MSRC blog.

Microsoft has had quite a spate of serious vulnerabilities recently, it seems resourceful hackers are targeting applications and components of the OS rather than the actual OS or networking stack.

Which makes sense, you’d expect the actual OS to be fairly secure now and not attention has been paid to those ‘must-have’ system softwares like DirectX.

Because the bug is in DirectShow, any browser using a plug-in that relies on DirectShow is also vulnerable.

DirectX 7, 8 and 9 in Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 are at risk, Budd said, but Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7 are not. “Our investigation has shown that the vulnerable code was removed as part of our work building Windows Vista,” Budd said.

Until a patch is available, users can protect their PCs by disabling QuickTime parsing. To do that requires editing the Windows registry, normally a task most users shy from, but Microsoft has automated the workaround. “We’ve gone ahead and built a ‘Fix it’ that implements the ‘Disable the parsing of QuickTime content in quartz.dll’ registry change,” Budd said. “We have also built a ‘Fix it’ that will undo the workaround automatically.”

Watch out when you are opening video files from unknown sources, especially in e-mail attachments (even from known sources) and you can use the ‘Fix it’ to mitigate against the problem until the patch is released.

Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Microsoft DirectShow could allow remote code execution

Source: Network World

I guess people just prefer BitTorrent downloads to HTTP downloads, and whoever had this smart idea capitalized on that.

Microsoft should perhaps do something about that and put out a legitimate BitTorrent copy. I guess the problem is updates, once it’s out there and people are seeding it’s out there for good and it’s not necessarily the latest build.

A Trojan buried within counterfeit copies of Windows 7 RC was used to build a botnet of compromised PCs.

The tactic emerged after researchers from security firm Damballa shut down the command and control servers used to control the system, reckoned to have drafted thousands of Windows PCs into its compromised ranks. Damballa reckons malicious hackers distributed the malware by hiding it within counterfeit copies of pre-release versions of Microsoft’s next operating system on offer through BitTorrent.

Damballa reckons that the pirated package was released around 24 April. By 10 May, when security researchers effectively curtailed the operation, as many as 552 new users were becoming infected per hour as a result of the attack.

It seems like the infection rate for this trojan has been pretty sharp, with 552 new users per hour that’s over 13,000 new infections per day adding up to almost 100,000 in one week.

The Command and Control center for the botnet has been taken offline though on May 10th so it’s rendered pretty useless since then.

I guess they should have built a more robust control mechanism like Conficker.

“Since the pirated package was released on 24 April, my best guess is that this botnet probably had at least 27,000 successful installs prior to our takedown of its CnC [command and control] on 10 May,” Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering at Damballa, told eWeek.

Since Damballa’s intervention, users installing the pirated version of Windows 7 RC are outside the control of the botmaster hackers running the attack. However, users who were compromised prior to 10 May remain within the ranks of the zombie drones controlled by the unidentified hackers.

Trend Micro identifies the Trojan featured in the attack as DROPPER-SPX.

Burying backdoors in counterfeit code is a popular tactic among crackers witnessed many times over the years with pirated copies of Microsoft applications and, more recently, with pirated versions of iWork ‘09 for Apple Mac machines. In the case of the latest attack, prospective Windows 7 RC users get infected before they have a chance to install anti-virus tools, many of which are yet to support Windows 7 anyway.

You can check out the details on Trend Micro blog here.

If you want to get hold of Windows 7 you can just go directly to the Microsoft site here.

Source: The Register

Features

• Online Dictionary Attack
• Presence Stealing
• Contact List Stealing
• Single User Flood Mode (Internal)
• Domain Flood Mode (Internal)
• Call Walk (Internal/External)
• Play Spam Audio
• Detailed Report Generation

OAT Modes

Internal Network Attack Mode

Internal Network Mode simulates attacks from the internal IP network, where the attacker has unrestricted access to shared resources and reachability to servers. OCS users are provisioned on a Domain Controller (DC) and can query the DC for data. OAT exploits internal network access by querying the DC for all the communication enabled users. It then adds these users to the attack list.

The following attacks can be performed from the internal network

• Single user IM Flood
• Domain IM Flood
• Call Walk

External Network Attack Mode

External Network Attack Mode simulates the real world attack scenario in which an attacker is outside of the corporate IP network. An attacker sourced from outside of the firewall can not directly query the DC unless they know its hostname.

Once the Dictionary attack is successful against target user, OAT functions like a legitimate OCS client, registering itself with Office Communication Server. Once registered, OAT queries for the contact list of target user and uses this information to create a victim target list. This information is useful for the next attack phase.

The following tests can be performed from the external network

• Contact List Stealing
• List IM Flood
• Call Walking

You can download OAT here:

OAT1.0.zip

Or read more here.

This time a researcher has developed a rootkit style infection tool aimed at the .Net framework.

Most modern computers come with .Net of some description installed so this could be quite a widespread threat, especially if it gets into the hands of the bad guys and they use it for something like Conficker.

A computer security researcher has released an upgraded tool that can simplify the placement of difficult-to-detect malicious software in Microsoft’s .Net framework on Windows computers.

The tool, called .Net-Sploit 1.0, allows for modification of .Net, a piece of software installed on most Windows machines that allows the computers to execute certain types of applications.

Microsoft makes a suite of developer tools for programmers to write applications compatible with the framework. It offers developers the advantage of writing programs in several different high-level languages that will all run on a PC.

.Net-Sploit allows a hacker to modify the .Net framework on targeted machines, inserting rootkit-style malicious software in a place untouched by security software and where few security people would think to look, said Erez Metula, the software security engineer for 2BSecure who wrote the tool.

It an interesting attack vector, attacking a different part of the OS that isn’t usually targeted. It offers better protection from AV software and from being found and it’s pretty much guaranteed all Windows computers will have .Net installed.

I’d guess some pretty interesting stuff can be gathered by tapping into .Net.

.Net-Sploit essentially lets an attacker replace a legitimate piece of code within .Net with a malicious one. Since some applications depend on parts of the .Net framework in order to run, it means the malware can affect the function of many applications.

For example, an application that has an authentication mechanism could be attacked if the tampered .Net framework were to intercept user names and passwords and send them to a remote server, Metula said.

.Net-Sploit automates some of the arduous coding tasks necessary to corrupt the framework, speeding up development of an attack. For example, it can help pull a relevant DLL (dynamic link library) from the framework and deploy the malicious DLL.

Metula said that an attacker would already have to have control of a machine before his tool could be used. The advantage of corrupting the .Net framework is that an attacker could clandestinely maintain control over the machine for a long time.

It could potentially be abused by rogue system administrators, who could abuse their access privileges to deploy so-called “backdoors” or malware than enables remote access, Metula said.

Of course the disadvantage is you already need to have control over the machine to execute this kind of attack, I guess it’s for when you’ve hacked the machine and you want to keep control or gather more data.

Metula has published a white paper on the technique as well as the latest version of .Net-Sploit.

Source: CIO (Thanks Navin)