Category: Microsoft

Microsoft unifies Defender umbrella… Ignite 2020

Defender is getting ignited .. more products are getting in to one umbrella. Initially change of windows defender to Microsoft defender in early 2020, this comes as a products unification .

Products are mainly categorised in to two. Microsoft 365 defender for endpoints and Azure defender for cloud Infrastructures

Microsoft 365 Defender line will include:

Microsoft 365 Defender
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Office 365
Microsoft Defender for Identity

Azure Defender line will include:

Azure Defender for Servers
Azure Defender for IoT
Azure Defender for SQL

It’s hard to follow product portfolio’s since the inception of products . It’s difficult to keep track of products.Going forward, there will be Microsoft Defender and Azure Sentinel.

Microsoft Defender will be Microsoft’s XDR product, while Azure Sentinel will be the company’s SIEM line.

XDR stands for eXtended Detection and Response and is a cyber-security term that refers to products that detect and respond to active threats on endpoints .

SIEM stands for Security Information and Event Management and is a cyber-security term that refers to web applications that aggregate logs from all devices in order to analyze large quantities of data from a vantage point and search for anomalies and signs of a security breach.

Azure Sentinel is deeply integrated with Microsoft Defender so you can integrate your XDR data in only a few clicks and combine it with all your security data from across your entire enterprise.

Microsoft believes that defenders can benefit from using deeply integrated SIEM and XDR for end-to-end visibility and prioritized actionable insights across all your enterprise assets.

by Categories: Microsoft, cybersecurity, Security, cloudsecurity, Windows Defender, Endpoint SecurityTags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Windows 10 Sandbox has a Vulnerability inside

A researcher discovered a new zero-day vulnerability in most Windows 10 editions, which allows creating files in restricted areas of the operating system.

Exploiting the flaw is trivial and attackers can use it to further their attack after initial infection of the target host, albeit it works only on machines with Hyper-V feature enabled.

An unprivileged user can create an arbitrary file in ‘system32,’ a restricted folder holding vital files for Windows operating system and installed software.

However, this works only if Hyper-V is already active, something that limits the range of targets since the option is disabled by default and is present in Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, and Education.

Hyper-V is Microsoft’s solution to creating virtual machines (VM) on Windows 10. Depending on the physical resources available on the host, it can run at least three virtual instances.

Given sufficient hardware resources, Hyper-V can run large VMs with 32 processors and 512GB of RAM. An average user user may not have a use for such a virtual machine but they may run Windows Sandbox, an isolated environment for executing programs or loading websites that are not trusted, without risking to infect the normal Windows operating system.

Microsoft introduced Windows Sandbox with the May 2019 Update, in Windows 10 version 1903. Turning on this feature automatically enables Hyper-V.

To demonstrate the vulnerability researchers created in \system32 an empty file named phoneinfo.dll. Making any changes in this location requires elevated privileges but these restrictions are irrelevant when Hyper-V is active.

The creator of the file is also the owner, an attacker can use this to place malicious code inside that would be execute with elevated privileges when needed.

CERT/CC vulnerability analyst Will Dormann confirmed that the vulnerability exists and that exploiting it requires literally no effort from an attacker on the host.

Although this vulnerability is easy to exploit there are more dangerous issues in Windows 10 that Microsoft should address. This is one reason he decided to make it public and not report it through Microsoft’s bug bounty program.

by Categories: cybersecurity, Microsoft, Security, Windows OSTags: , , , , Leave a comment

MrbMiner ! Havocing SQL databases

Thousands of Microsoft SQL Servers (MSSQL) have been found to be infected by a new malware gang, named this new malware gang which is hacking into the servers and installing a crypto-miner, MrbMiner.

The cybercriminal group is so named after one of the domains used by it to host their malware.

The hackers blasted in through the weak password of the SQL Servers and then released the crypto-miner on target systems,


“MrbMiner mining Trojan will carefully hide itself to avoid being discovered by the administrator,” the company said in a blog post earlier this month.

“The Trojan will monitor the task manager process. When the user starts the ‘task manager’ process to view the system, the mining process will immediately exit and delete related files,” .

Researchers discovered the Linux system and ARM system-based mining Trojan files on the FTP File Transfer Protocol) server of the MrbMiner mining Trojan, speculating that MrbMiner has cross-platform attack capabilities.

by Categories: Microsoft, cybersecurity, Security, Sql, Malware, Crypto currencyTags: , , , , Leave a comment

CVE 2020-1472 – Exploit goes wild

The CVE-2020-1472 flaw is an elevation of privilege that resides in the Netlogon. The Netlogon service is an Authentication Mechanism used in the Windows Client Authentication Architecture which verifies logon requests, and it registers, authenticates, and locates Domain Controllers.

“An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when an attacker establishes a vulnerable Netlogon secure channel connection to a domain controller, using the Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC).

An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could run a specially crafted application on a device on the network.” reads the advisory published by Microsoft.

“To exploit the vulnerability, an unauthenticated attacker would be required to use MS-NRPC to connect to a domain controller to obtain domain administrator access.”

“By forging an authentication token for specific Netlogon functionality, he was able to call a function to set the computer password of the Domain Controller to a known value. After that, the attacker can use this new password to take control over the domain controller and steal credentials of a domain admin.”

“The vulnerability stems from a flaw in a cryptographic authentication scheme used by the Netlogon Remote Protocol, which among other things can be used to update computer passwords.”

An attacker could exploit the vulnerability to impersonate any computer, including the domain controller itself, and execute remote procedure calls on their behalf.

An attacker could also exploit the flaw to disable security features in the Netlogon authentication process and change a computer’s password on the domain controller’s Active Directory.

“By simply sending a number of Netlogon messages in which various fields are filled with zeroes, an attacker can change the computer password of the domain controller that is stored in the AD. This can then be used to obtain domain admin credentials and then restore the original DC password.”

“This attack has a huge impact: it basically allows any attacker on the local network to completely compromise the Windows domain. The attack is completely unauthenticated”

The ZeroLogon attack could be exploited by threat actors to deliver malware and ransomware on the target network.

The only limitation on how to carry out a Zerologon attack is that the attacker must have access to the target network.

Researchers released a Python script that uses the Impacket library to test vulnerability for the Zerologon exploit, it could be used by admins to determine if their domain controller is still vulnerable.

August 2020 Patch Tuesday security updates only temporarily address the vulnerability making Netlogon security features mandatory for the Netlogon authentication process. This has the severity score of 10

by Categories: cybersecurity, Microsoft, Ransomware, Security, Windows OSTags: , , , , Leave a comment