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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."
You had me at Windows
People with access to your data are able to access your data.
If you mount your Windows harddrive in Linux without using Encryption you can access all your Data?
Not news at all. You can do this on any operating system of any type assuming your not using an encrypted system.
This is no different than booting a LiveCD and changing the Windows password from a Linux LiveCD running with access to the same storage device. This is not a flaw in AWS in any fashion, other than illustrating the trust you place in AWS having access to your physical devices. Why is this news? This is a standard if-you-have-access-to-hardware-you-can-have-complete-control-over-everything-on-it-not-encrypted problem.
Oh look, it's yet another case of "If you have physical access to the server, all bets are off.". If you can clone the volume, you effectively have physical access to the server. This isn't a new vulnerability. Just another case of "It's on the webz, it must a a completely novel thing!".
1. Take a Windows server on Amazon Web Services, make a copy of the hard drive (which Amazon calls a volume),
If you can do this, the system is already compromised in a dozen different, less-interesting, ways.
The question is whether you can do this without already having the passwords, with EC2's existing security. I see no evidence from the article he can.
Without that, the claim is half gratuitous cleverness, half FUD of an attention-grabbing vendor name, to my eyes.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
This can all be done simply without Linux using Windows and without chntpw. Simply add the drive to a system you own, move Magnify.exe out of the way (for later restoration), and copy command.exe to Magnify.exe then boot of the modified drive and choose to use the "Accessibility Tool". Instant command shell with full priveledge escalation. I have personally done this on Windows Server 2008. I do not know if they finally got smart and added code to prevent this in Server 2012, but I wouldn't be surprised if it works on every version of Windows that has the "Accessibility Options" on the login screen.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Too bad the author of TFA is a flaming idiot, and this has nothing to do with Windows at all. It's a total non-story.
He just "discovered" that if you download a cloud machine disk volume - which is completely OS-agnostic, you could do it BeOS if you wanted to - you can mount it on your own machine and go to town on the data. Unix-like OS? Cool, go read /etc/shadow and get the password hashes (or change/add your own password and re-mount it, as he suggests doing with Windows). There's absolutely nothing here Windows-specific at all except that the idiot only *just* discovered that password resetting by modifying the user login data is possible.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...