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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.
IIRC, we discussed this in MSE classes, the same ones where the instructor assured us we need not register a domain name for our internal network (!), and agreed that despite the lack of information from Microsoft, It was worth it to block SMB ports from the public networks. As well as others, such as SQL Server (1433/1434 at a minimum), AD (135,389,5722, and the list goes on), and other services we need not expose to nor listen on for external traffic, we rapidly got to the point where the reasonably responsible admin blocked by default, opened only what was necessary, and then directed these to the proper hosts inside the network.
This is slightly older than the Y2K bug. And still not really fixed? Microsoft's choices here have always come back to haunt them. NetDDE, OLE, the HTML viewers, and this, all making Outlook once the premier distribution method for viruses and all form of malware,
Interprocess friendliness has its cost. Ease of use goes both ways. The crooks are happy to take advantage of your features.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.