IEPeers – A New Internet Explorer Zero Day Vulnerability

We posted an aside yesterday referencing Microsoft’s recent blog post for new security advisory 981374 referencing a new zero day vulnerability in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. New details have emerged since, and the exploit has moved from being what was described as part of “limited targeted attacks” to being widely accessible and available as a new module for the Metasploit framework.

March’s Patch Tuesday

Today is patch Tuesday for March 2010, and Microsoft has released two security bulletins for this round of updates, neither of which are deemed critical. The second bulletin addresses seven different vulnerabilities across various versions of Microsoft Office Excel.

Press F1 for Help, pwned.

Microsoft published security advisory 981169 yesterday in response to the zero day vulnerability reported a few days prior. The vulnerability is in the help system and can be triggered by luring an Internet Explorer user into pressing the F1 key. Windows 2000, Windows XP SP2 & SP3, and Windows 2003 SP2 with Internet Explorer 7 [...]

Microsoft’s Google Attack Patch?

Noted journalist and friend of the blog George V. Hulme shared the picture below from CNBC, perhaps the most amusing way seen thus far of describing the patch for the ‘Aurora bug‘ that famously affected Google late last year.

February’s Patch Tuesday

Today is patch Tuesday for February 2010, and it marks a fairly busy patch cycle for Microsoft, who released thirteen updates today. In late January, there was an out-of-band release for two critical patches, in response to the high profile issue around the Internet Explorer Aurora exploit. This makes a total of fifteen total patches between since January’s patch Tuesday.

The “Aurora” IE Exploit Used Against Google in Action

The big news hit earlier this week, the attack vector that allowed bad actors presumably from China into the networks of Google, Juniper, Adobe, and some 30 other firms was an Internet Explorer zero day, a use after free vulnerability on an invalid pointer reference affecting IE 6, 7, and 8 but only used in IE 6 according to Microsoft. Per Microsoft’s Advisory 979352: “In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution.. Earlier today this entry from yesterday at Wepawet (an online analysis engine for malware) was pointed out to H.D. Moore, and within hours Metasploit has an exploit of the vulnerability integrated. McAfee has confirmed that the exploit is out and the same one they saw during the investigation. The video below demonstrates how crackers gained access to the corporate networks of Google, et al. using this zero day attack.

Regular or Decaf? Tool launched to combat COFEE

About a month ago, there was much news about the release of COFEE into the torrent wild. I even gave my two cents about the much hyped forensics toolkit which is provided to law enforcement for the purposes of easily capturing volatile data from personal computers during evidence collection. A tool to counter COFEE, aptly [...]

From Promiscuous to Port Scanning with Powershell

It’s been a while since my last post regarding Powershell which showed how to scan hosts for network interfaces in promiscuous mode. This time around, we’ll scan for some well known ports in our Active Directory to see who has a local IIS or SQL Express running on their machine. I know what you’re thinking. [...]

More COFEE Please, on Second Thought…

The forensics tool provided to law enforcement officials created by Microsoft called COFEE  (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) has been leaked on torrents last week, and this has caused quite a bit of excitement.  Let’s see if the big deal is warranted.

Server 2008 R2: Active Directory Functional Levels

Windows Server 2008 R2 was released in August, and it introduced new functional levels for Active Directory. This article takes a look back at the different functional levels of the past and what is new in the latest release of the server operating system for Active Directory (yes, a recycle bin for AD objects!).

Functional levels [...]