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Unencrypted Windows Crash Reports a Blueprint For Attackers
An anonymous reader writes "According to Forbes online, up to 1 billion PCs are at risk of leaking information that could be used as a blueprint for attackers to compromise a network from Microsoft Windows Error Reporting (WER) crash reports that are sent in the clear. Researchers at Websense Labs released a detailed overview of the data contained in the crash reports, shortly after Der Spiegel released documents alleging that nation-state hackers may have used this information to execute highly targeted attacks with a low risk of detection, by crafting attacks specifically for vulnerable applications that are running on the network. Also interesting to think that Microsoft knows exactly what model of phones that you have plugged into your PC..."
Disabled on every machine I own, every machine I've deployed, every machine that I've been given the permission to manage.
Not because I think someone might be able to sniff them and then use them against my workplaces / PC's. Purely because they are WORTHLESS.
Reporting them, you see nothing back. All those people who get error reports upon upgrading to a duff hotfix, it takes someone to whinge to Microsoft to get it fixed. Millions of crash reports aren't acted up, from what I see. I doubt anyone reads them.
When offered to software developers, etc., I'm always told that it's easier to just get me to run a debug version rather than piss about with any built-in error reporting / dumping possible from the Microsoft tools. It gives them more information, they can debug it live, and I don't have to worry about information going back and forth.
Pretty much every time I've had one, it's been ignored, by Microsoft, developers, or myself. I learned a long time ago that debugging from any default dump or crash report - even for huge multinational companies that are trying to help solve your problem - is worthless. It's just not worth the effort.
Hence I've disabled them since day one. Not only do they not do anything useful, they don't tell me anything useful, they want to connect to the Internet (which can trigger my software firewall for a completely different process to those authorised applications I already allow through, assuming the machine is even online), and they actually make the error messages HARDER to read for my users. I disabled it entirely. "There was an error" and a hard crash is infinitely better than my users trying to debug a crashed application themselves or sending off dumps because the button says to do it, and still getting a hard crash. Hell, if the crash was because the network cable fell out (which apps will if they are based on a network share sometimes), the submission process triggers a DNS lookup which hangs the PC for 30+ seconds sometimes.
Worthless. Disabled.