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from the still-better-with-than-without dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Antivirus programs, in many cases, make us safer on the Internet. Other times, they open us to attacks that otherwise wouldn't be possible. On Friday, a researcher documented an example of the latter—a vulnerability he found in about a dozen name-brand AV programs that allows attackers who already have a toehold on a targeted computer to gain complete system control.
AVGater, as the researcher is calling the vulnerability, works by relocating malware already put into an AV quarantine folder to a location of the attacker's choosing. Attackers can exploit it by first getting a vulnerable AV program to quarantine a piece of malicious code and then moving it into a sensitive directory such as C:\Windows or C:\Program Files, which normally would be off-limits to the attacker. Six of the affected AV programs have patched the vulnerability after it was privately reported. The remaining brands have yet to fix it, said Florian Bogner, a Vienna, Austria-based security researcher who gets paid to hack businesses so he can help them identify weaknesses in their networks.
Bogner said he developed a series of AVGater exploits during several assignments that called for him to penetrate deep inside customer networks. Using malicious phishing e-mails, he was able to infect employee PCs, but he still faced a significant challenge. Because company administrators set up the PCs to run with limited system privileges, Bogner's malware was unable to access the password database—known as the Security Account Manager—that stored credentials he needed to pivot onto the corporate network.
"With the help of AVGater, I gained local admin privileges," Bogner wrote in an e-mail. With full control over the employee computer his exploit provided, he had no trouble accessing the credential store, which is commonly known as a SAM database. "So AVGater was VERY useful during several of our pentests and red-teaming assignments."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:23AM (8 children)
Oh, we found the problem. I was first tipped off by this idea that one would run something called "anti-virus" software. Did not Microsoft make their operating system correctly? Oh, they didn't? And you poor bastards, and I mean that sincerely, you poor bastards (includes one of our "editors", strangely enough), actually put up with this, and, and, (here's the catch), pay money to be so severely screwed over on the security front? Really?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:58AM
Oh, you noticed that still-better-with-than-without fallacy as well.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Troll) by TheRaven on Tuesday November 14 2017, @11:49AM (6 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Funny) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:04PM (1 child)
MS-DOS 5.1
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @01:38AM
There's no such thing.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @05:57PM
I have a bunch of Drones locked up in my basement that recite zeroes and ones to a custom made (also made from drones) processing unit which then flips cards on a large screen.
It's a bit on the slow side, but very secure... (as long as they don't escape)
It's also cheaper to run than an iphone
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 14 2017, @06:44PM
"Tu Quoque, evermore!" quoth TheRaven? Surely we are past the point when anyone can be smug just for mocking Windows users. And it does not matter what "other" OS said mocker is running, this is a Windows vulnerability.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 18 2017, @02:54AM (1 child)
The issue is not whether a system, a software, or application has vulnerabilities. The issue is, how often are vulnerabilities found, and, how quickly are they addressed.
For a couple of decades, Windows led the world in the number of vulnerabilities, and the frequency with which more vulnerabilities were found. Adobe took over that position, for at least a short while. Even Adobe finally decided that it was best not to even install Flash.
I generally dislike using the term "engineering" when I talk of software. But, all Unix-likes had security engineered in from day one. Every file on a *nix is owned by someone, and permissions are pretty strictly observed. With Windows, security was a mere afterthought, poorly thought out, and poorly implemented. For those reasons alone, few people who run a *nix ever bothers with any security products. Our most common vulnerabilities are out web browsers. Securing our browsers is generally the most important part of maintaining secure systems.
Don't misunderstand me, please: ALL operating systems have vulnerabilities. Mankind has never produced anything that is perfect, so of course the *nixes are imperfect. But, *nix strives to become more perfect all the time. And, *nix understands that the definition of "perfect" is NOT "how can we milk our users most efficiently?"
Bear in mind that worldwide, virtually all end users are the victims of a decades long propaganda campaing on the part of Microsoft. They've used every dirty, unethical trick in the book to gain their level of dominance, and they continue today with their unethical conduct.
Need a "for instance"? Windows X being forced onto users who never wanted it. Windows X "telemetry". Windows X advertising. Everything about Windows X is just wrong, wrong, wrong. A lot of things were right in Win 7, and Microsoft tore every bit of rightness out of Win 7, to replace it with a giant, intrusive, spyware program.
And, consumers have just accepted that.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday November 19 2017, @08:57PM
They did, then Microsoft invested a couple of billion in static and dynamic analysis tools. They required all certified device drivers to run the static analysis tools, shipped all system DLLs with control-flow integrity enabled by default, added zero-address-space-reuse allocators for a lot of system services and moved others to being written in a managed language to avoid memory safety errors.
This is absolute nonsense. 'UNIX security' was a joke until the mid '90s.
The traditional UNIX security model gives every file a simple 9-bit bitmask of permissions for everyone, owner, and group. In contrast, Windows NT has had access control lists for every single kernel object since its creation. These can specify a range around a dozen permissions for each user in the system independently. Modern *NIX systems add these, but I've rarely seen them used in real deployments.
The Linux kernel alone has had well over a hundred CVEs this year, including several that allow remote arbitrary code execution. A lot of open source server packages have also had vulnerabilities, even without going to the security nightmare that is PHP. If you think running *NIX makes you safe, you really shouldn't be running a server attached to the Internet.
sudo mod me up