Disable WPAD Now or Have Your Accounts Compromised, Researchers Warn (csoonline.com)
It's enabled by default on Windows (and supported by other operating systems) -- but now security researchers are warning that "Man-in-the-middle attackers can abuse the WPAD protocol to hijack people's online accounts and steal their sensitive information even when they access websites over encrypted HTTPS or VPN connections," according to CSO. Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: Their advice: disable WPAD now. "No seriously, turn off WPAD!" one of their presentation slides said. "If you still need to use PAC files, turn off WPAD and configure an explicit URL for your PAC script; and serve it over HTTPS or from a local file"... A few days before their presentation, two other researchers named Itzik Kotler and Amit Klein independently showed the same HTTPS URL leak via malicious PACs in a presentation at the Black Hat security conference. A third researcher, Maxim Goncharov, held a separate Black Hat talk about WPAD security risks, entitled BadWPAD.
To prevent Windows from tracking which network support WPAD, you need to make a simple registry change:
Click the Start button, and in the search field, type in "regedit", then select "regedit.exe" from the list of results
Navigate through the tree to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Wpad"
Once you have the "Wpad" folder selected, right click in the right pane, and click on "New -> DWORD (32-Bit Value)"
Name this new value "WpadOverride"
Double click the new "WpadOverride" value to edit it
In the "Value data" field, replace the "0" with a "1", then click "OK"
Reboot the computer
Unless I have Windows Server 2008 RC2. Any clues as to how to turn it off on Windows 10? I do not use proxy so I should turn it off regardless.
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
If you were finding the summary to be less than clear on WTF it was referring to.. WPAD = Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol
Is this advice for Windows 10? Windows 8? Windows 7? Windows Vista? Windows XP? Windows NT? Windows 2000? Windows 98? Windows 95? Windows ME?
????
Is there any such setting to disable on OS X/macOS?
This should work for most users:
1. Uncheck “Automatically detect settings” of Local Area Network (LAN) Settings in Internet Options.
2. Disable the service “WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service” in Services.
3. Disable devolution by setting UseDomainNameDevolution value under the following registry entry to 0 (FALSE):
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
a quick search on the Internet shows that these exact warnings about WPAD were given over 4 years ago.
If anyone made a program to disable this, you'd probably make some money. I don't want to try remotely editing the Registry on my mother's computer :-)
I've done well over the past 20 years by just looking for marketingspeak and deactivating pre-emptively.
Insert a CD or device and then manually run SETUP.EXE? Fine. Insert a CD and let Autorun do it? Presume insecure. Disable.
DHCP is "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol." No marketing name, but it works just fine and automagically gets me an IP. Something like Web Proxy Auto Discovery of an external service on the LAN? Presume insecure.
TV? Monitor? Fine. Smart TV? Literally a device with unpatchable firmware sitting on your network. Disable/block it.
Mounting a remote filesystem? Fine. Bonjour/Zeroconf = Presume insecure. (And while we're at it, File and Print "Sharing" done over port 137/138/139? NetBIOS/NetBEUI? REALLY?!?!?!)
Plug-and-Play (as the replacement for setting interrupts)? Works just fine. The totally related Universal Plug-and-Play, as in UDP Port 1900?) Presume insecure.
Setting up WPA2 with PSK? Works. WPS, originally known as "Wi-Fi Simple Config" with a push-button? Again, insecure
Actual programs that you run and that aren't tightly integrated to the OS? Fine. Windows Widgets and Gadgets because oooh, they're on the desktop and not in their own separate windows? No. Insecure.
Any service with a marketing-friendly name like "Smart" "Auto" "Easy" - and especially one enabled by default - must be presumed insecure and must be disabled.
If anyone made a program to disable this, you'd probably make some money. I don't want to try remotely editing the Registry on my mother's computer :-)
$5 maybe. Not worth the effort.
Article links to 2 PDF's hosted by Blackhat. Can't wait to read em!
Why not? The registry isn't all that scary. It's just a config file, but in a binary, hierarchically-organized key-value store rather than a text file. Apparently, that scares some people. Some because it's The Registry, and some because "zomg binary config files are teh devil".
Back in the old days (the mid-90's), there were lots of stupid people griping about the registry. Fast forward two decades, and there are still a few fighting that sad, long-forgotten war. And those people (a group that largely overlaps with the binary-files-are-evil crowd) are still stupid.
The fact is, the registry hasn't been "unstable" since Win95+USB or possibly earlier, and you can't break your system by messing with the registry without really trying some Quirky-Ass Shit(tm). Unknown keys are simply ignored, and known keys with bad values only crash shitty software that you shouldn't be using anyway because it trusts data it doesn't control.
Any system-wide DWORD value (like the one to disable various parts of WPAD) is going to simply be handled like a C-int-as-a-boolean, where 0 == false and everything else is true. Simple rule to know whether it's safe to mess with a registry entry:
1) if it's a binary value, leave it the hell alone,
2) if it's a string and it's either not readable text or is text containing lots of numbers and delimiters (because some jackass programmer decided to parse a string instead of import a binary value), leave it the hell alone,
3) if you don't know what the hell it is just by looking at it, leave it the hell alone,
4) otherwise, it's not a big deal.
Sounds a bit overhyped to me, "You won't believe what happened when they connected to an untrusted network!"
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
You have done well Glasshopper.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
overhyped because Slashdot is an FBI site. This story is bogus. Don't worry about this issue whatsoever.
ice pick.
The story is bogus.
These are FBI faggots that went to school to learn criminal law and shit not tech.
Slashdot is a combination of SIGINT/HUMINT
What torrent sites do YOU use now :) :) :) Lying punks.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/08/05/0329246/popular-bittorrent-search-engine-site-torrentzeu-mysteriously-disappears
I found an 8 year-old article (http://perimetergrid.com/wp/2008/01/11/wpad-internet-explorers-worst-feature/) about this and how to disable it with a simple Google search. I'm still glad Slashdot posted about it today because I would never have realized it was a problem. How has this vulnerability existed for almost a decade without being rectified?
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.co...
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Anything in the User Hive is not secure so I hope there is a way to turn this off totally... Microsoft's site is not useful so I guess I will have to slog through GPEDIT since I use Pro to see if there is a policy that can lock this down in the OFF position.
... "Stop using Windows NOW. No, seriously, stop using it NOW!" ?
Can someone in the know make a definitive statement about whether this affects OS X users and if it does what to do?
Why create a program? Just create a reg file and copy/paste the above post of drinkypoo:
--copy starts here--
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Wpad]
"WpadOverride"=dword:00000001
---copy ends here--
Copy then paste it into a registry file (without the hyphens), say "DisableMyWPAD.REG" then email to your mom tell her to double click this file. No need to build a program.
You can disable this via the registry DWORD (0) at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\EnableAutoproxyResultCache.
https://support.microsoft.com/...
Area51 - We are watching...
Will WPAD even work with a self-signed certificate for the URL? If you have a private LAN with DHCP supplying the WPAD/PAC file URL, if the URL only has a self-signed certificate will that work? Is that functionally self-defeating due to an untrusted CA?
You can't can't get private IP certs anymore from trusted global CA's, and if you are in a mixed/ad-hoc environment you can't preload your own private CA onto every device. Is this basically the end of WPAD/PAC files for mixed environments then? What alternatives are there?