Slashdot Mirror
The Windows Flaw That Cracks Amazon Web Services
Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell decided to poke around the security of Amazon Web Services, and found a potential loophole that could theoretically allow anyone — a developer, an unscrupulous Amazon employee, the NSA — to access and copy data volumes stored on the system, using a slightly modified version of the popular 'chntwp' password tool. In this article, he breaks down how he did it, and suggests some ways for those who use cloud-hosting services to keep their data a little more secure in the future. 'The key here, of course, is that an unscrupulous employee might be able to make a copy of any existing Windows volume, and go to work on it without the customer ever knowing that it happened,' he writes. 'Now let's be clear: I'm not accusing anyone of having done this; in fact, I doubt anybody has, considering I was unable to find a working copy of chntpw until I modified it.' It's a security concern, and one that's particularly insidious to patch."
chntpw has been in the wild since 1997. It's wonderful that the researcher just realized that it works on cloud volumes just as well as physical volumes, but this it flat out not news. It's also mitigated by deploying an Active Directory domain controller if you want to stick with windows or rolling one yourself with krb5/ldap/samba/etc. if you want your backend servers running unix of whatever variant you like.