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Hot Potato Exploit Gives Attackers the Upper Hand On Multiple Windows Versions
An anonymous reader writes: By chaining together a series of known Windows security flaws, researchers from Foxglove Security have discovered a way to break into almost all of Microsoft's recent versions of Windows. The exploit, named Hot Potato, relies on three different types of attacks, some of which were discovered back at the start of the new millennium, in 2000. Going through these exploits one by one may take attackers from minutes to days, but if successful, the attacker can elevate an application's permissions from the lowest rank to system-level privileges. All of these security flaws have been left unpatched by Microsoft, with the explanation that by patching them, the company would effectively break compatibility between the different versions of their operating system.
They put a lot of effort into backwards compatibility in each version. They've been known to create "shims" to duplicate previous undocumented/buggy behavior that a particular app depends on that get loaded for just that app, because they know that if you update windows and your app stops working, it's not the app using unsupported functionality that's gonna get blamed.
They put a lot of effort into backwards compatibility in each version.
That's an urban legend. When I worked there, I didn't hear of any effort at all made for backwards compatibility, except for a few tools we used internally. We just didn't give a damn about it, and that's why Windows is so horrific at it.
For example, the company I work for now uses 29 pieces of official software, and 26 of them have at least minor problems on Windows 7 or newer. They all work fine on Vista, so we're stuck with Vista. We've even offered a bounty* for anyone that can get Lotus 2.3 to run. On Windows 10, when you run 123.EXE, it displays the message "This app can't run on your PC." Even right clicking on the file in Exploder, Properties, Compatibility tab, Compatibility Mode then Windows 95 doesn't help. That option doesn't seem to do anything on the ~50 different programs I've tried it on. Microsoft doesn't give a damn about backwards compatibility.
* We have six hundred thousand legal documents in Lotus that we can't convert to other formats because there's just too much paging and formatting problems. OpenOffice is damn good, but it isn't perfect. Obviously with that many files and with having to run Vista or older on all of our computers means we're willing to pay quite a stiff bounty to anyone that can help us solve this Microsoft-created problem without resorting to running a vm.