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Windows 2003 and XP SP2 Vulnerable To LAND Attack

An anonymous reader writes "Dejan Levaja, a Serbian security engineer has discovered that nearly 8 years after the attack was first made public, WIndows 2003 and Windows XP SP2 are in fact vulnerable to the historic LAND attack." Granted, you need to have the firewall turned off for this work, but there's a whole lotta machines that don't have it turned on.

13 of 534 comments (clear)

  1. News? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Granted, you need to have the firewall turned off for this work, but there's a whole lotta machines that don't have it turned on."

    Machines that are not protected are vulnerable. Well, that isn't really news is it? Sounds pretty silly to me.

    1. Re:News? by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You forgot something:

      A box running no services should be not vulnerable of any dos except brute force even without a firewall. A firewall shouldn't be a solution to poor design/implementation problems and code bugs. That is simply not working. What if someone gets through the firewall?

      --
      It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
      Be yourself no matter what they say
    2. Re:News? by fsck! · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Generally speaking, just about any Windows instance is going to gave at lease these ports open:

      Starting nmap 3.75 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2005-03-07 11:45 EST
      (The 1659 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
      PORT STATE SERVICE
      135/tcp open msrpc
      139/tcp open netbios-ssn
      445/tcp open microsoft-ds

      So this could reak havoc on business or residential networks. But then, I guess this is what you get for giving your users or peers an inapropriate level of trust.

  2. Only one thing though... by MtViewGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Granted, you need to have the firewall turned off for this work, but there's a whole lotta machines that don't have it turned on.

    ...Isn't the Internet Connection Firewall that comes with Windows XP SP2 turned on by default when you install it in the first place?

    Anyway, given all the warnings about Internet security in the last five years, the majority of users will already have downloaded and installed firewall programs such as ZoneAlarm.

    1. Re:Only one thing though... by eviltypeguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you think the majority of users are security minded like that, then why do you think the majority of users have so many problems that could be prevented in the first place by firewalls? Sorry, but my experience has been the opposite of your fairy tale.

  3. Open ports by ca1v1n · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course, some windows machines need to have open ports, like, say, if they're offering *services*. So really, your mundane desktop need not be affected. It's the production server you should be quite terrified about.

  4. Re:wow by Tassach · · Score: 4, Insightful
    There is NO legitimate reason whatsoever for a modern, patched operating system to be vulnerable to a simple, 8-year-old DOS attack. What's next, reintroduction of the Ping Of Death vulnerability? This is sloppy quality control, pure and simple.

    This incident is just another example which demonstrates the importance (or more accurately, the lack thereof) that Microsoft's corporate culture places on security. Hasn't anyone at Microsoft ever heard about regression testing?

    Microsoft has consistantly demonstrated that, regardless of what their press releases say, security is NOT one of their priorities. People need to start waking up and realizing this before they entrust their critical infrastructure to Microsoft products.

    --
    Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
  5. Re:Not that big of a deal by itsnotthenetwork · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nobody deserves to get their Boxen hacked, even if they don't always use the best available defenses.
    That is like saying the rape victim is at fault "'cause she looked so sexy"

  6. And source isn't useful to many people by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm not a programmer, so looking through a C file isn't likely to give me any useful information, unless it's in comments at the beginning of the code. What's more, I imagine even programmers would rather just hear a summary than have to sit there and look through a bunch of code to figure out what it does.

    I mean ethical issues aside, it's just not that helpful to most people. I'm sure most people though "WTF is a LAND attack?" and cliked on the link to see. Getting a C file, is probably not the answer they wanted, espically given that it doesn't seem to be transfering, so I can't even see if it has useful comments or not.

    When doing /. stories, link to relivant and if possible, concise descriptions of terms that people are likely to be unfarmilar with. If you want to provide a link to source, do it seperatly and note it as such.

  7. UNLABELED too. by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know the land attack is old, but still, linking to a .c ? I was not aware /. was a scriptkiddie toolz warehouse.

    Not only that, it was unlabeled. That means anybody who follwed the link now has a copy of the malware in their machine's webcache, minimum. And if they saved it (to keep the list of vulnerable configurations, for example) they have the malware itself.

    This simultaneously puts a bunch of slashdot readers at legal risk (from false prosecution and/or in-court character assasination, based on evidence from a siezed computer) and gives real baddies plausible deniability.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  8. Re:so what? by m50d · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This isn't funny, it's sad. People have been so brainwashed by MS that they believe it's normal for machines to not be safe if they have a direct internet connection.

    --
    I am trolling
  9. Mod parent down by Ulric · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's a list of operating systems from 1997, taken out of an exploit from 1997. Linux 2.0.30? Novell 4.11? Solaris 2.5.1?

  10. Re:Not that big of a deal by Ulric · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Anybody with a web server must accept incoming syn packets. If they are "protected" by something like:
    permit tcp any host 1.2.3.4 eq 80
    Then they are probably vulnerable.