EternalRed – CVE-2017-7494

I wrote another post for the Milton Security blog on the CVE-2017-7494 Samba exploit, which affects Linux machines running Samba 3.5.0 – 4.5.4/4.5.10/4.4.14. This also includes NAS devices that many people do not patch regularly. In the blog post i talked about what Samba is and how it has been vulnerable for the last 7 years due to this bug. I also go over on how to test/ exploit your machine to see if you’re vulnerable. I also cover some mitigations, the maintainers of the Samba project have provided a patch so I would advise you install it as soon as possible, some NAS firmware upgrades have been available from Netgear and Synology already. Continue reading

CVE-2017-0199 exploiting and preventing – guest blog

Phishing scams tricking unsuspecting users into opening nefarious files are nothing new, and attackers have using weaponized documents for just about as long. This week, I had the pleasure of being featured on Milton Security’s blog to talk about a new attack that was spotted as early as last year, and was finally patched by Microsoft in April. I went over this CVE-2017-0199 vulnerability that affected Windows based machines using Microsoft Word and the default built-in Wordpad, that enabled an attacker to send a malicious RTF file that would execute a HTA file remotely without any user interaction besides opening the file. I went over how to create the file using Metasploit, a python script, and finally just using Microsoft Word itself and editing the file to make it autorun. Spear-phishing attacks could allow the attacker to send these files to their victims over a spoofed in email and gain a foothold into the victim’s network if they weren’t properly patched which the article also covered towards the end on how to mitigate. So head over there and check it out. https://www.miltonsecurity.com/company/blog/analysis-cve-2017-0199-ms-word-threats-are-back

M17-010 EternalBlue

A few weeks ago ShadowBrokers released a dump of NSA/EquationGroup tools used to exploit various machines that they previously tried to auction off unsuccessfully. One of the exploits was for Windows SMB RCE which allowed an unauthenticated attacker to gain System-level privileges on target machines remotely by sending a specially crafted packet to a targeted SMB server. Microsoft quietly patched this as MS17-010 a month before, in March, before the dump was even made public. Although the dump was supposedly stolen around 2013, this affected Windows machines from Win2k up to Win2k16. Most reliable targets were Win7 and Win2k8 R2.


One exploit was codenamed EternalBlue. Everyone quickly jumped on the tools and found that along with ExternalBlue there was another tool called DoublePulsar that allowed you to inject shellcode or DLLs into the victim target after they were exploited with EternalBlue, it sets up the APC call with some user mode shellcode that would perform the DLL load avoiding use of the standard LoadLibrary call. DOUBLEPULSAR implements a loader that can load almost any DLL. A few people had writeups [1] & [2] on how to successfully install the tools in Windows and on Wine on Linux using older versions of Python. It was also discovered you could replace the DoublePulsar .dll with something like Meterpreter or Empire to have more control over your target with the need to use the NSA-provided GUI tool called FuzzBunch. Continue reading