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posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 11 2016, @12:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the easy-peasy dept.

Microsoft's PowerShell feature "Just Enough Administration" (JEA) is, apparently, "way too much administration" according to researcher Matt Weeks.

In this write-up of JEA, root9B and Metasploit module developer Weeks says JEA profiles aren't much of a barrier, since people with JEA profiles can escalate themselves to sysadmin status. Cutting to the conclusion:

"Every JEA profile I had found Microsoft has published can be bypassed to obtain complete system administrative rights, most of them immediately, reliably, and without requiring any special configuration."

The idea with JEA is to provide granular administrative profile management – a good thing, if only it worked out that way.

By way of demonstration, Weeks provides a variety of examples in which capabilities in JEA are exploitable.

The Add-Computer "cmdlet", used to add a computer to a domain or change its domain, and which Weeks says is "a reliable vector to break the JEA security barrier, and escalate privileges to complete unrestricted system control".

His attack doesn't use any hacks-or-cracks stuff: it ends with the new computer pulling group policy from an attacker-controlled Domain Controller providing group policy settings.

Result? Success: the victim machine "will pull group policy settings from your new server, enabling you via a group policy configuration to change any setting, drop the firewall, execute any command as system via startup scripts or scheduled tasks, or directly log in as the domain admin. You have broken the 'security barrier' and have full unrestricted administrative control over the system."


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @02:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @02:52AM (#412773)
    Use NAT? Bollocks. Get yourself a real honest to goodness stateful firewall and you'll have all the safety that NAT supposedly gives and more. Repeat after me: NAT is NOT a security measure! It only looks that way because in order to implement NAT you need to have some of the functionality of a stateful firewall, but security is secondary to it and it can be easily circumvented. A true routable IP address behind a properly configured stateful firewall will be more secure than an RFC1918 host living behind a NAT.
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