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Businesses Urged To Use Unofficial Windows Patch
frankie writes "ZDNet is reporting on the latest dire pronouncements about the WMF vulnerability. The problem is so serious that security experts are urging IT firms to use the unofficial patch. Microsoft's current goal is to release the update on Tuesday." From the ZDNet article: "This is a very unusual situation -- we've never done this before. We trust Ilfak, and we know his patch works. We've confirmed the binary does what the source code said it does. We've installed the patch on 500 F-Secure computers, and have recommended all of our customers do the same. The businesses who have installed the patch have said it's highly successful" It's big enough that even mainstream media is covering the flaw.
It brings interesting schemes into my mind. Oh don't mind me, I'm just going to grab my tin foil hat.
do.what.promptcmds
Vulnerability in Graphics Rendering Engine Could Allow Remote Code Execution
y /912840.mspxt eal.bankash.g.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/16074
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisor
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/pf/pws
If you're curious as to what all they do, you can take a look here. A sample quote from the article:
In some cases, particularly when the Internet Explorer browser is involved, the testing process "becomes a significant undertaking," Toulouse said. "It's not easy to test an IE update. There are six or seven supported versions and then we're dealing with all the different languages. Our commitment is to protect all customers in all languages on all supported products at the same time, so it becomes a huge undertaking."
Its not just the extension that dictates that it's a WMF... Windows in its infinate wisdom also looks at the header bytes of the file and says "ohh! thats a WMF!" Execute! im in a damned hurry, hopfully I stated that correctly...ymmv
Its ok, I found th...!&^!")NO CARRIER
liqbase
This article isn't anything like the one that I submitted.
Mine looked more like this (body content from memory):
The actual root of the problem is in the GDI, which is what handles all basic interface display for Windows. The unofficial patch just disables the call that the exploit uses. Ok, fair enough, but that's a hack, not a fix. That means that anything that legitmately uses that call won't work, and the underlying problem is still there.
Well, testing a fix for a system component like that takes time, espically since it affects a ton of versions.
Now you might ask, why not release a hack fix, and then do a proper patch later? Well as it stands, it's hard enough to get people to update their systems. We fight with it all the time with people here at work. They turn auto updates off since they run simulations at night and don't want it rebooting (even though patch day is known ahead of time) and then never manually patch since they "can't be bothered".
Well, if MS released a patch that broke things, that just makes that many more people stop patching. Remember all the whining and bitching about SP2. There were very few systems that had problems with it, and most that did were spywared to hell, but still there are tons of people that refuse to install it for fear that "it'll break my computer".
Thus the offical patch takes time, as they have to test and make sure that the problem really is fixed, and no new problems were created with the fix. REgression testing isn't quick.
will be to compare the Microsoft released patch to the unofficial one.
It would be deliciously muddying for Microsoft if someone discovered significant parts of the unofficial patch in the official one.
Worse, in fact. There are SEVERAL ways, all well known, which could leverage this exploit to compromise millions of hosts in a matter of hours.
The unofficial patch is 100% necessary. This is BAD folks.
And if the evil people are smart, they'd have a very VERY nasty suprise come monday, when most people are still not patched and M$ hasn't released the official patch yet.
Test your net with Netalyzr
According to this F-Secure's Web log, it tells what is going wrong with the Windows Metafiles (WMF) vulnerability. It turns out this is not really a bug, it's just a bad design from another era. When Windows Metafiles were designed in late 1980s, a feature was included that allowed the image files to contain actual code. This code would be executed via a callback in special situations. This was not a bug; this was something which was needed at the time. The feature now in the limelight is known as the Escape() function and especially the SetAbortProc subfunction, and has been around since Windows 3.0, shipped in 1990...
Seen on Digg. This Broadband Reports' security forum thread mentioned this as well.
Copied and pasted from my AQFL Web site.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
If you want the patch itself, try here:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1010
Second time this story came up with no links to the patch.
Everything that was once directly lived has receded into a representation. -debord
Its not just the extension that dictates that it's a WMF... Windows in its infinate wisdom also looks at the header bytes of the file and says "ohh! thats a WMF!"
So, in other words, it does exactly the same thing Unix does for every single executable file.
Do a man magic if you don't know what I'm talking about, and/or look into why scripts have that #! as the very first two bytes in order to work automatically.
Windows has gotten bashed for years for relying on file extensions. Here they don't and they get bashed more! Ok, yeah, it's yet another example of deviation from expected behavior, but complain about that, not that they're finally trying to be smarter about files. Hell, most programs will now ignore file extensions and look at the file header -- it's hardly a MS only behavior.
That said, MS's slackness on this issue is ridiculous. Yes, I know that they have to test a patch in a very large test environment to make sure nothing goes "boom", but in this case they would better serve their customers by simply disabling WMF support entirely until they can properly patch things. WMF is not a widely used format -- in the very few cases where it's actually being used you could simply not patch the computer and take appropriate actions to isolate that system. It would be a hell of a lot better than the current situation, especially given how nasty and widespread this exploit is.
This puts MSFT in an interesting position -- their official patch has to be tested on systems with the unofficial patch. Otherwise there's a possibility that the unofficial patch will break something in the official patch (or vice versa.)
With the unofficial patch already deployed on thousands (millions?) of machines, it would be a big deal if something went wrong.
God, I'd hate to be in Redmond right now...
-ch
Testing?
Even if it means, in contravention of best security practice and all possible "trustworthy computing", knowingly delaying an urgent, critical fix (which would be less troublesome than the first Shatter fix which was pushed out, and only disable a single GDI function that frankly hasn't been used since Windows 3.1 and should never have been used in the first place) for a publically-disclosed, unpatched vulnerability that had been discovered from a 0day exploit, for an indefinite amount of time over a public holiday period while the vulnerability is being "tested"?
When there's realistically no possible way the different L10n's of Windows would affect the GDI32 core because it contains almost no l10n strings anyway, and the vulnerability is in fact a purposely-designed, never-used legacy "feature" that should definitely have been removed in Windows NT or during the Windows 2000 GDI rewrites, or noticed, say, during last months GDI audit?
Despite Microsoft promising that the introduction of the Patch Tuesday would not preclude emergency fixes being issued out-of-cycle and as soon as possible for, ooh, say, critical core Windows vulnerabilities with an enormous number of possible vectors of infection, no effective mitigation and wide, dangerous exploits in the wild with a number of vulnerable machines easily capable of providing an ample breeding ground for supporting wide botnets or enormous worm infections?
Which is exactly what has happened, as Windows has, frankly, just faced the worst single vulnerability in its entire history?*
What the fuck are they doing, deliberately trying to breed another big internet worm?
Sorry, but I'm calling bullshit. I'm a security researcher, and I'm really quite angry at Microsoft's piss-poor handling of this. They couldn't have done much worse if they'd heard about the bug and then have let MSRC take Christmas off anyway.
This was not business as usual. This was an exceptional event (true 0days are actually quite rare to discover in the wild). It could not, and should not, have waited until the next patch cycle. This is exactly the kind of situation upon which a speedy mitigation - hours to days, but definitely not weeks - is absolutely critical, and we should demand that. They should AT LEAST have provided the (untested) hotfix themselves within a day, and pushed it out to Automatic Updates and Windows Update/Microsoft Update within the week after first discovery in the wild - not unrealistic goals for a vendor who wishes to paint themselves as "trustworthy".
They should be brought to task on this one. Behaviour like this is what created the full-disclosure movement in the first place.
* Yes, I'm going to say this one's actually worse than the various active remote vulnerabilities we've had over the years, like the UPnP vuln or the numerous RPC-related vulns. Those, you could at least block with a firewall. This, it's single-payload, multi-vector. It's got plenty of room to drop anything, it's capable of highly metamorphic exploit streams, can be fed online or offline, even spread on media, anything from email to a web page to a simple read-only directory listing or right-click, or uploaded to a site or blog, god help you, rendered inside MSN... the number of potential vectors is so numerous and troublesome it even makes analysis difficult; Windows disregarding filenames and extensions and MIME types and using magic sniffing instead, so you can't even block it effectively using a content-inspecting IDS - that's just the icing on the cake. This is a classic vulnerability, a real ticking Christmas present, a true textbook candidate.
Just in that brief piece, I can spot three typical points of inaccuracy:
This, of course, is precisely the sort of vague, inaccurate half-understanding that Microsoft wishes end-users to have. If the phrasing of the article made it clear that Windows is not something physical, not something "shipped" in the same sense that a power supply or a mouse is "shipped"-- that there is no such thing as a "Windows PC", only a "PC running Windows"-- perhaps they'd begin to ask tough questions like "Well, are there any alternatives that we could run on our PCs to prevent these problems from affecting us?" These are, in their own small way, subversive questions, anti-authoritarian questions, anti-monopolistic questions-- and thus questions that Microsoft and their ilk don't want people asking.
On the bright side, at least they're admitting (finally) that the problems only affect computers running Windows. If I see another story talking about an "email virus" (read: "MS-Outlook-running-on-MS-Windows-only virus/worm/exploit"), my head is going to explode into a fine pink mist.
People, I'm sure, will say that I'm "nitpicking" or being an "English nazi", but one's choice of words does make a difference. The usages here are just reinforcing common vague half-truths and misconceptions that the general population has about computers, and for every article out there that says "Windows PCs" instead of "PCs running Windows", or "viruses" instead of "malware" or "security exploits", it just makes the already-huge problem of user ignorance that much bigger.
Consider the two sentences below:
Which one makes Senator Smith out to be a sneaky crook, and which one merely cautious?
The difference is all in the choice of words. Words matter. So anyone who wants to tell me I'm just being nitpicky-- shove it. One's choice of words creates impressions, both conscious and subconscious, in the reader-- and thus, the seemingly
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
...zero-day
SETABORTPROC Escape
Linux geeks are not afraid.
IDS, thanks for playin'
Unofficial patch burn
World serves its own needs
Dummy serve your own needs.
Feed the news from ISC,
Go insane
The blogs all start to clatter
With fear fight down height.
Wire is on fire
On a new years' holiday
And the mafia for hire
At a pharma site.
Tuesday now it's coming in
A hurry with the worries
breathing down your neck.
Team by team the coders baffled,
trumped, tethered cropped.
Feature? That's insane!
Fine, then. Uh oh,
A week 'till it's released to you
But it'll do
Unregister a DLL
World serves its own needs,
Patch this at your own speed
Crummy packet capture
And it's never quite
Right, right.
Admin now an alcoholic
Can't take bright light
Feeling pretty tired.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
they found the Weapon of Mass Frustration
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's great, but it's all irrelevant. The HTTP 1.1 protocol says that a browser shouldn't try to guess the MIME type of a document if it's specified by the server. IE ignores this and tries to guess the MIME type anyway.
Note the key difference between an OS (your example) and a browser (reality).
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
This guy (he may be reknowned in the security community, but I've never heard of him) was able to successfully bandage a Windows flaw before Microsoft, without access to the Windows source code or any backing from the writers of the program being patched. I doubt he'll need to look far for work for a long time, and if he does, 'Successfully wrote a patch for a Windows flaw independently' looks damn good on his resume. He still has to pay for Windows, sure, but it's not like he's going to be completely unrewarded for his work.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Huh? How'd get this modded Insightful? It's pretty much the opposite, actually - considering that F-Secure is in the business of security solutions, it's *expected* of them to uncover new problems, and I at least think it's *GREAT* that they decide to make the information available to everyone instead of just rolling it into the next update for their enterprise products.
Think about it - they're doing good research, AND they're making it available for free, and you still criticise them for exactly that? You're not just looking the gift horse into the mouth, buddy, you're trying to paint the giver in a bad light for attempting to give it to you for free.
Seriously, get a grip.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.