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FBI, Pentagon Talk to MS about XP Hole
(eternal_software) writes: "The Associated Press is reporting that the FBI and Defense Department are talking to Microsoft about the serious flaws found in the XP operating system. As we all know, the most recent flaw allowed any XP machine to be hijacked simply by connecting it to the internet. The government is getting involved because of growing U.S. concerns about risks to the 'net as a whole." In fact, the FBI would like you to go a bit beyond the MS patch. davecl points out the updated page put out by the National Infrastructure Protection Center about this vulnerability as well.
now we see the Gov't take a special interest in
the latest XP hole.
Dont know about you, but I am really dont know what to think?
Sigs are dangerous coy things
the fact remains, ms code *can* be secure, obviously just not xp, good to see them getting their act togethor
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
MS XP patch disabled network card on my computer!
I guess the computer is really safe now.
Microsoft has known for five weeks that XP had a serious security hole. They didn't do anything to warn customers who bought XP during that time. They just kept telling how XP is so secure.
It's unbeliavable what Microsoft can get away with. I don't think the hole and the patch are the important issues here. I'm shocked how Microsoft can lie to the whole world for five weeks and people still trust them.
Microsoft should have withdrawn XP and fixed it. Expecially as they don't even have any serious competitors. What they showed was that they don't care about the safety of their customers. They just want to make money no matter what.
Microsoft explained that a new feature of Windows XP can automatically download the free fix, which takes several minutes, and prompt consumers to install it.
I must be living under a rock because this is the first I've heard of this. XP just starts downloading files without any action from the user? Does anyone beside me feel uncomfortable about that?
I honestly and truly hope that the US government brings them to their knees about this. That's wishful thinking, I know. However, two statements in particular in the Yahoo! article surprised me:
1. Microsoft declined to tell U.S. officials Friday how many consumers downloaded and installed its fix during the first 24 hours it was available.
2. Microsoft also indicated it would not send e-mail reminders to Windows XP customers to remind them of the importance of installing the patch.
The reasons for point 1 are quite clear though. Acting on point 1 would indicate what a fiction the sales figures for XP really are.
Point 2 is more difficult to fathom... perhaps they're hoping people won't notice? Why on earth, other than their disdain for non-corporate users, wouldn't they send out the reminder? Or even a reminder stressing the improtance of installing the auto-updater?
After all the blather and FUD from Redmond, they again pushed a product out the door with great media hype which is again unsecure. It would be so ironic if Microsoft were punished for this kind of negligence after getting a slap on the wrist. I don't expect that to happen though.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Yeah, but those eEye guys didn't want to be on our Security-Through-Obscurity team! And we had all these great goodies for them!"
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
MagikSlinger is almost certainly right about this. However, if there is a terrorist group out there which was organized and sophisticated enough to carry out another large-scale, imaginative attack (which I doubt), Microsoft might be on their list for these reasons:
- It's American, and a symbol of American characteristics such as innovation, which is in itself hated by reactionaries.
- It's extremely visible.
- Its market dominance could be perceived as "imperialist" or culturally imperialist by people who think like that.
- It's a center of wealth and therefore, in puritanical minds, of evil decadence.
- It could be thought of as a "vital organ" of the American economy by someone who doesn't realize how decentralized the American economy is.
Arguing against an attack on Microsoft is the idea that it's causing enough trouble for the US by itself, but this concept is probably beyond the reach of most fanatics.
Why care? Well, I found out after installing MSN Messenger that most of the features are useless behind a NATed network unless your router/firewall understands UPNP. Of course, Microsoft ICS and Servers understand it. I was getting frustrated since I couldn't use MSN messenger except for messages behind my home linux firewall. ICQ features like file transfer work fine by port forwarding the necessary ports or using a kernel module for it.
So, here's the interesting bit. UPNP works by telling the other client on the other end what your private IP address is. Microsoft's docs say this is necessary for the other client to be able to find out how to talk back to you. I think this is stupid. The other end of an MSN connection just needs to look at the source IP in the packets it receives and just send there and hope the owner of the IP knows what to do.
However, UPNP apparently knows how to handled multiple chains of NAT networks, kinda like I guess an old fashioned UUCP bang path. Problem is, it seems like one can modify that "bang path" to route return packets to false places. Can you say DDOS?
So I sent a rant to my friends about this on December 10, and about how UPNP is a security hole waiting to happen according to posts I read out of google searches...
Here's my rant...
Microsoft claims UPNP is a universal open standard. It'd be interesting to learn more about its origins and who is really controlling development of it, security of it, etc. Microsoft claims all manner of peripheral vendors will be supporting it.
Is the concept itself as flawed as it seems, or is this just yet another case of Microsoft's implementation of something being flawed?
Nevermind that such an exploit could also be used to do just the same thing and send people off to download a "patch" form a psuedo MS site.
Suddenly people are taking seriously the idea that MS can present a problem for national security, when this was dismissed as a trollish comment before.
The fantasy is the unlikely end result with Bill Gates and buddies being arrested for treason for the software. yes it is just a fantasy. ,p.But isn't Xmas the time of year for dreams? ;)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
In epidemiology, one of the mitigating factors of the spread of any disease is simply the diverse genetic makeup of the targeted population.
The opposite to this is what's called a monoculture, where one particular genetic structure is present in the large majority of the population. Such situations will usually not last long, beacuse once something is found that affects that population, it spreads quickly and decisively.
With Windows having such a large share of the market as it is, could this be considered the electronic equivalent of a monoculture? Would one major virus or security flaw cause much more damage to the net than otherwise would have happened, because of the homogenity of the net's computer systems in terms of OS?
Whether the king is Linux or Windows or MacOS, or..., is having a near monopoly market share ofany one OS a good thing in light of this philosophy? Hmm. GFood for thought.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Why buy a CD? Using this bug, you can install Mandrake remotely to all Windows XP systems connected to the internet.
So what is up with those buffer overflows...do Microsoft developers hate users and not care about quality? Well, no. It only takes one buffer overflow in the whole system that hundreds of developers have worked on, to make it vulnerable.
At Microsoft the ultimate way people are valued is at review time when bonuses, stock options, and raises are awarded. Do developers get hosed for leaving buffer overflows in? Well, not as of when I left (April 2000). But maybe that will change, slowly.
Eventually you have to stop accepting excuses like "Gee code is really complicated and I thought I was being careful" or "we really tried to think through this design" and recognize that essentially every buffer overflow comes from being lazy as a developer, or not accounting for what kind of garbage packets can come in off the net. If Microsoft starts emphasizing that you can be fired for leaving a buffer overflow in, then things might change. Of course it's a little unfair, there is no doubt lots of clunky code in there that just doesn't happen to expose an externally exploitable buffer overflow (and merely crashes the system or something), but you start emphasizing the necessity to go over things with a fine-tooth comb to prevent buffer overflows, it will improve all the code.
Because although there may be a few cases where someone really tried to check boundary conditions and just did it wrong in the code, in most cases developers are just being lazy about writing the code robustly to begin with. Plus if you have some code to prevent this and you write it wrong, you haven't tested your code properly anyway.
More ruminations at this osopinion article.
- adam
I remember when NT 4.0 came out (they were fairly low key with NT 3.x) and Microsoft claiming it was far more secure than UNIX and you wouldn't have buffer overflows because the source was closed and people couldn't find them even if they existed.
I also remember many years ago them claiming NT was more secure and showing the number of submissions of security holes posted to Bugtraq (before NTbugtraq) there were for UNIX vs NT (back when nothing serious ran on NT and no one really cared less about it to look for holes).
Now they want their code running in everything, including acting as firewall devices. I find this so fucking funny I could just split a gut. You're going to protect machines running code "x" by installing a device running much of the same code "x" to protect those machines from the world?
I just find it a bit frightening. The entire world running on code from one manufacturer that is not open to public review. I'm even more surprised that foreign governments are so trusting of it.
You know what's scary? We just bought an EMC disk array and had to give it an IP address for management. Did a port scan on it. WTF? It's listening on netbios ports. Use smbclient to take a gander at it and low and behold....
Domain=[AZBYCXDWEVFU] OS=[Windows NT 4.0] Server=[NT LAN Manager 4.0]
Workgroup Master
AZBYCXDWEVFU CLARIION_SPB
I call EMC and they say "Oh, the new clariions run a stripped down NT kernel in their service processors." :-( Joy... my SAN is now trusted to that super sekure Microsoft code. At least I can block it from the world through my router which, for now, is running non-Microsoft code...
Can you imagine the harm one could do with a hole in THAT? The financial world survived WTC through redundancy and real-time mirrors of data kept in far flung locations. There are disaster recovery data centers where entire warehouses are filled with machines just waiting to kick in during a crisis. So now you have your storage area networks themselves controlled by Microsoft code. Just exploit the hole-of-the-week to get your code inside a corporate or government firewall, seek out these storage networks running NT kernel code, trash them, take out the primary and backup locations. Chaos.
Whenever you log in on your XP system (of course, no password in XP-home at least) a flurry of packets fly off to Mord- er Microsoft and to the OEM you bought the system from. You have no way of knowing the content of that communication. Since it's all closed source,no one can comb through it for vulnerabilities or trojans like they could for the code for apt or rpmfind. A typical user has no way of knowing that the communication is even taking place at all unless they are running something like tcpdump on the network.
Does that help?
Basically, when you buy XP you are wittingly or unwittingly complicit in your own surveillance. You have given your consent in principle, to be spied upon because you were sipping your morning coffee while XP talked to the higher authorities about you. You looked away and sipped instead of yanking the cat5 out. I say in principle because we've seen that all the consent required for this government to violate your Constitutional rights is that you and others do not resist it with force. Though no one posting here can say for certain what passes through this security hole now, neither can anyone deny that, with a hole like this opened in your systems, a hole which everyone is being conditioned to accept as normal, a feature of their OS, there is literally NO LIMIT to the severity of your insecurity. While you're sipping that coffee, the convenient updater can convert your computer system into a telescreen into your private thoughts, business plans, governmental policies, and so on without end, no matter where you live and what flag you salute. It used to be that spyware was an annoyance foisted on the public sporadically by marketers. Now with XP, spyware connects a government approved monopoly to your most trusted communications and private papers. You don't have to be an anticapitalist socialist or a government hating libertarian to understand that at some level the distinction between a government approved monopoly and an agency of that government is essentially null, or so small it's not worth discussing. (Or maybe someome could point out examples to me where ATT told the government it would not cooperate in its counterintelligence efforts against antiwar protestors and civil rights leaders in the 1960's)
Between the 2 of them, Windows XP users have poor Goatse-man beat by a painful mile for the infinite elasticity of their holes. I have no doubt that the Feebs and Dept.of Deathdance have a million things they'd like to talk over with MS in that regard.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
This is a really, really, really big one. It should be in the newspapers. Microsoft has claimed some time ago (free karma to the one who posts a link) that closed source, for-profit software and operating systems are more secure because the company can actually *hire* people to do security audits of the source code, whereas open source developers aren't motivated to do it because it's really boring, and there's no glory in it.
Now, we all know that OpenBSD has proved them wrong, by proving not only that open source developers *want* to do hardcore security audits of the source code, but that doing hardcore security audits on source code prevents security holes from being released into the wild. OpenBSD hasn't had a remotely exploitable security hole in the default install in FOUR YEARS! Windows XP has been in release for for all of about two months, and already there's a major security exploit found.
This proves by Microsoft's OWN ADMISSION, either they do not hire people to do the hardcore security audits they say they can, or if they do, they can't do it as well as the volunteers who "obviously" don't do it at all because there's no monetary motivation to do so.
With lies like this, Microsoft couldn't get into a Better Business Beurau if they paid each of its members a billion dollars.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert