Posts Tagged Microsoft
Microsoft prepares 13 patches for Next Tuesday
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in Operating System, Software Security, Vulnerabilities on February 5, 2010
Microsoft announce that they are about to release a 13 security updates on next Tuesday, these new security patches are issued to fix 26 security vulnerabilities in windows operating system and Microsoft office suite.
According to the Advanced Notification five updates are critical and the 8 others are important. While we can find 11 of 13 patches are issued to fix vulnerabilities in one or more operating systems, and the remaining two patches are for Office XP and Office 2003 for windows and Office 2004 for Mac.
Among the patches we can find a fix for a 17 year old Bug in 32-bit windows version, and will close the loophole that involves the venerable DOS operating system. Internet Explorer two recent critical vulnerabilities will not be patched for this Tuesday updates.
You can find Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for February 2010 Here.
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Microsoft to Fix 12 Vulnerabilities On Tuesday, While Sophos Alerts of fake Microsoft updates coming through email
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in News, Software Security, Vulnerabilities, Vulnerabilities & attacks on December 5, 2009
On this Tuesday we are going to have the regular monthly update by Microsoft the release will include a set of patches to fix 12 problem, we can find among the patches a fix to Internet Explorer 8 vulnerability.
These releases are issued for windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, 2008 as well as IE 8, Office XP and Office 2003. Three patches status are critical, this means that the impact allows a hacker to use these bugs to run an arbitrary command remotely.
Internet Explorer 8 vulnerability will also be among the patches this bug can allow attacker to run malicious software on the system like Trojan or rootkit to steal credential and data authentication, Microsoft already warned of an existing exploit for this bug and recommends all customers to prevent this attack by keeping antivirus up to date, using a good Pc Firewall and installing all previous patches.
On the other hand Sophos security lab alerted of a fake email message that includes a link to an executable file Windows-KBxxxxx-ENU.exe which contains malware Mal/EncPK-LL here you can find the email image:
The source of the message appears coming directly from Steve Lipner, Microsoft’s Director of Security Assurance, it is here important to be careful and not follow direct links to executable files and make sure that you are updating your system from a trusted sources.
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First Tool to Crack Microsoft BitLocker Encryption
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in Pentesting on December 3, 2009
Passware Company has introduced the first commercial software solution that offer a way to Crack files encrypted by BitLocker system. Microsoft released this advanced tool for a full hard drive encryption system and it has integrated it in windows Vista and made it also available on Windows 7 and Windows Server2008.
We already listed on a previous post the enhancement in Microsoft Windows7 ( Windows 7 overall security improvement )and you can find among the improvement the BitLocker tool that is provided by Microsoft.
Passware Kit Forensic 9.5 recovers encryption keys for hard disks, secure Technology and BitLocker. the way that this software work is by scanning HD image searching for cryptographic keys and decrypt the image to make it in a clear file.
Now the Software is available in several versions and there is a mobile version that gives user the ability to have it on a USB stick and use it directly on the desired machine without leaving any trace on it. This is not all because this tool also offers 8 different password recovery attacks (Dictionary , Brute-force, Xieva , Known Password/Part , Previous Passwords, Decryptum, SureZip , Join Attacks, and Append Attacks) these 8 types gives the user a way to customize the desired attack according to the type of file and available information so it reduces the Time of operation.
Currently the tool supports 180 types of file and allows users to restore PGP-archives and virtual disks passwords. The program compatible with Windows 7/VISTA/2003/XP and 2008 server.
you can find more details on the official webstie.
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Malware Scam on Microsoft Outlook Web Access
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in Internet, News on October 16, 2009
Websense has warned recently of a serious attack concerning Microsoft Outlook Web Access network service.
Security experts have reported that they had founded emails that contain links to download malicious software, they already detected about 30,000 of these mails daily.
Here is a screen shot of the malicious message:
This is very frequent attack and provides hacker a high level of customization, because the page looks very credible with Microsoft logo and other details, here you can find the screen shot for the website:
Hackers can at this webpage insert any malicious file that can contains Trojan for building botnet and enable them to control the system remotely.
Screen shot sources from Websense security lab website.
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Critical Windows Remote Vulnerability Exploit
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in Pentesting, Vulnerabilities & attacks on September 30, 2009
A new post has been released yesterday providing a script to exploit a critical vulnerability in windows, the vulnerability has been discovered since the 7th of September.
Up to this Monday the vulnerability can lead only to a failure in the system but now and after Stephen Fewer from Metasploit issued this script publicly it is possible to run remotely on the vulnerable PC unauthorized software.
Recently security firm Immunity has developed its own code that uses this bug, but that was available only for their subscriber, while Metasploit made it freely available for the wide.
Members of the Metasploit project, which produces an open-source program for network testing, said that the exploit works on Windows Vista Service Pack 1, 2 and Windows 2008 SP1, SP2, on the other hand, according to Kostya Kortchinsky from Immunity, Metasploit code is completely unreliable. The expert said that he was able to make exploit work only with operating system that runs on virtual machine VMware. If he tried to apply it to Windows runs on physical machine it just fails.
In response,HD Moore from Metasploit team assumed that the attack definitely works on several physical machines, but it seems that additional test is required for it.
Now we find that there is a serious vulnerability and there still no patch available yet, Microsoft advice the following:
Mitigations that help prevent attacks
There are a number of mitigating factors that could aid in preventing attacks such as:
• Enterprise customers can disable SMBv2 using a simple registry script or the Fix It described above. Disabling SMBv2 prevents the vulnerable code from being reached.
• Consumers (not part of an enterprise network) are protected by the on-by-default firewall included in Windows Vista:
o The on-by-default Windows firewall protects vulnerable systems
o The on-by-default Windows firewall allows packets through only if a user explicitly shares a folder or printer.
o When a Windows Vista user chooses the ‘Public’ firewall setting, the firewall will block packets even if a folder or printer has been shared.
This can help to mitigate the risk till a patch will be issued. you can also test this vulnerability by using Metasploit framework which is also available on the BackTrack.
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Microsoft AV will be out soon!
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in Anti-Viruses, News on September 23, 2009
Microsoft has released an announcement that the free anti-virus package Security Essentials is now reached the final phase.
Microsoft Security Essentials will have the basic requirements for competition among some major security software companies like Symantec and McAfee with a low price AV solution. The new product is designed to protect computers with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating system from viruses, Trojans, spyware, rootkits, etc.
Security Essentials Beta Testing version has been issued last summer: the package was downloaded by 75 thousand users from all over the globe. Reviewer’s opinion generally was positive. In particular, there has been user-friendly interface and a fairly wide range of settings.
As described in the announcement Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) final version will be presented in the coming few weeks. It sounds like the package will be released on the Windows 7 presentation , which will be held on October 22.
Minimum requirements to run the Security Essentials are: 500 MHz CPU and 256 MB RAM with Windows XP and processor at 1 GHz and 1 GB of RAM for Windows Vista or Windows 7.
This appears very attractive especially that Microsoft is trying to integrate all the protective measures in the whole infrastructure but what about non windows platform.
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Microsoft provides a free secure development tools
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in News, Software Security, Vulnerabilities on September 17, 2009
A New utility has been released by Microsoft designed to enhance the application security.
Microsoft Minifuzz is a fuzzing tool that allows users to identify software vulnerability by injecting a random data in the tested application. According to the secure development Lifecycle (SDL), MiniFuzz is a simple file fuzzer that helps to assist developers to find any possible buffer overflow or other common errors in the application.
This tool is one of two security application that Microsoft released this Wednesday, the second is BinScope Binary Analyzer, this aims to ensure that Binaries have been built in compliance with Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) requirements and recommendations.
Here you can find the collection of tools made by Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) in which you can find SDL Threat Modeling Tool while here you can find the recent! Exploitable Crash Analyzer – MSEC Debugger Extensions (Windbg) that provides automated crash analysis and security risk assessment.
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Microsoft and Cisco released a fix for the Sockstress TCP DoS
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in News, Vulnerabilities on September 10, 2009
Microsoft and Cisco have released a number of updates designed to protect customers from a new types of attack that do not require a big bandwidth access and can cause a denial-of-service condition on routers and servers.
The same bug that was discovered last year on October, in which researchers Jack C. Louis and Robert E. Lee demonstrated how it is possible to route traffic from victim’s machine making the remote system unavailable.
Microsoft has made advisory bulletin (MS09-048) available yesterday which covers a wide range of Operating system network vulnerabilities and in this update it introduces a new measure of protection named memory pressure protection, this can helps to automatically resets the TCP connection and SYN requests in case of attack.
The Tuesday update includes fixing for eight vulnerabilities in JavaScript Scripting Engine, Windows Media Format and Wireless software…, here you can find more details.
On the other hand Cisco also released a security advisory for the TCP DoS attack, warning costumers that products (Cisco IOS Software, Cisco IOS-XE Software, Cisco CatOS Software, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance and Cisco PIX, Cisco NX-OS Software) are affected by this vulnerability.
So it is time to review the security advisories and implement the suggested workarounds list to help mitigate the risks.
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Microsoft leaves patches surprise
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in News, Operating System, Vulnerabilities on September 6, 2009
Microsoft announced lately that it will release five critical updates for windows, but at this time Microsoft did not provide the technical details regarding the patch list like the previous one.
However Andrew Storms nCircle’s Director of Security Operations, made a statement about the possible upgrade kit composition, In particular the expert suggested that we will see update for the Active Template Library (ATL) the vulnerability which has been disclosed publically in July while there is four to five updates concerning Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
According to Storm the Tuesday patches will not include the IIS Web server vulnerability while Microsoft promised that it would patch IIS at some point.
Release of these bulletins is scheduled for Tuesday, September 8, so we are still looking for the surprise.
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Bug in Windows 7 RTM Code
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in News on August 7, 2009
Several Internet sources these days are talking about the windows 7 RTM bug, this Bug can brings the system down in a few seconds.
Well the bug is related to the big memory usage when running the chkdsk.exe. The problem affects both 32 bit and 64 bit version of windows 7 and can brings the blue screen of death (BSOD) due to overflow the physical memory.
The test was running on a three different platform of windows 7 to be sure that the problem is in the operating system the first is Intel Atom with a 32 bit version the second is laptop with Intel Core 2 with a 64 bit version the last one is VMware Workstation 6.5.2 with a 32-bit version.
In each machine the checkdsk.exe runs correctly in the first three times, using a small amount of memory (hundreds of MB). Then, the fourth time the amount of memory usage will be growing rapidly until system gets frozen and brings the blue screen of death.
So now the question is windows 7 really better than vista? The only way to answer is to take a look at what is new and different about the new OS. There are many enhancements but there are also a lot of work has to be done by Microsoft.
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