Windows Remains Vulnerable To Serious 18-Year-Old SMB Security Flaw

Mark Wilson writes A serious security hole leaves millions of Windows users open to attack, making it possible to extract encrypted credentials from a target machine. Researchers at Cylance say the problem affects "any Windows PC, tablet or server" (including Windows 10) and is a slight progression of the Redirect to SMB attack discovered by Aaron Spangler way back in 1997. Redirect to SMB is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack which involves taking control of a network connection. As the name suggests, victims are then redirected to a malicious SMB server which can extract usernames, domains and passwords. Cylance also reports that software from companies such as Adobe, Oracle and Symantec — including security and antivirus tools — are affected.

Comments

Article one giant spew of hyperbole

[laughingskeptic]

The article states "the encryption method used was devised in 1998 and is weak by today’s standards ... Microsoft has yet to release a patch to fix the Redirect to SMB vulnerability" as if Microsoft must remove the feature in order for Cylance to consider this resolved. Instead a number of improvements have been made to SMB since 1998 include support for HMAC-SHA256 (v2.0) and AES-CMAC (v3.0) hashing. http://www.windowsecurity.com/.... You are going need a little more than "$3000 worth of GPUs" to forward brute force the AES-CMAC hashed passwords.