Businesses Urged To Use Unofficial Windows Patch 374
frankie writes "ZDNet is reporting on the latest dire pronouncements about the WMF vulnerability. The problem is so serious that security experts are urging IT firms to use the unofficial patch. Microsoft's current goal is to release the update on Tuesday." From the ZDNet article: "This is a very unusual situation -- we've never done this before. We trust Ilfak, and we know his patch works. We've confirmed the binary does what the source code said it does. We've installed the patch on 500 F-Secure computers, and have recommended all of our customers do the same. The businesses who have installed the patch have said it's highly successful" It's big enough that even mainstream media is covering the flaw.
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Does MS view this as important? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Does MS view this as important? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does MS view this as important? (Score:3, Insightful)
WooHoo 3rd parties! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ha, so much for such "features" - times have changed...
--LWM
Re:block wmf (Score:2, Insightful)
I save a hacked WMF on the webserver as HeaderPicture.jpg and link it into the webpage with an img tag it will be downloaded as a jpg file, and only then once it gets to my computer does it get handled using the internal WMF code.
It would be easy to block WMF files on the border, but as you can see, not every WMF identifies itself quite so easily.
To block it on the firewall, the IDS will require file content scanning which if I remember rightly would strain the poor processors and hold up all the other good traffic.
Thats what I heard about it all anyway, ymmv
Re:Does MS view this as important? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the liability if MS screws up a patch? They do it all the time, but I don't hear anything about them being sued or compensating businesses they've hurt.
Re:Does MS view this as important? (Score:5, Insightful)
One Gets the Feeling... (Score:4, Insightful)
It may not have been anything like this at all, but this is the feeling one gets.
One also wonders about the job security of the MS programmer who didn't get this fix out in a timely manner.
Liability is not always monetary. (Score:2, Insightful)
The Business Mindset (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:F-Secure are publicity sluts (Score:3, Insightful)
No complaints.
--LWM
And Vista will fix all of this, won't it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah that's what I meant to say. Sorry.
The problem is it's a GDI exploit (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, testing a fix for a system component like that takes time, espically since it affects a ton of versions.
Now you might ask, why not release a hack fix, and then do a proper patch later? Well as it stands, it's hard enough to get people to update their systems. We fight with it all the time with people here at work. They turn auto updates off since they run simulations at night and don't want it rebooting (even though patch day is known ahead of time) and then never manually patch since they "can't be bothered".
Well, if MS released a patch that broke things, that just makes that many more people stop patching. Remember all the whining and bitching about SP2. There were very few systems that had problems with it, and most that did were spywared to hell, but still there are tons of people that refuse to install it for fear that "it'll break my computer".
Thus the offical patch takes time, as they have to test and make sure that the problem really is fixed, and no new problems were created with the fix. REgression testing isn't quick.
Re:Liability is not always monetary. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Does MS view this as important? (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe not. I wouldn't want the guy to have his whole neighborhood bought by a pissed off Bill Gates and turned into a toxic waste dump...a mere pittance spent by Bill on a stunt like that would ruin the patch-writer financially if he owns his home.
Re:Does MS view this as important? (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't sit well with me to see Microsoft eat their cake and have it too.
-Peter
This really IS as bad as SANS says... (Score:5, Insightful)
The unofficial patch is 100% necessary. This is BAD folks.
And if the evil people are smart, they'd have a very VERY nasty suprise come monday, when most people are still not patched and M$ hasn't released the official patch yet.
I read MS's Press release.... (Score:2, Insightful)
My question in all of this is if it's fixed in this "OneCare" thing, then what's the difference in the rollout to everyone else? Please, God, tell me this isn't some stupid marketing ploy (the delay that is) to get more people on this damn OneCare thing...
Xserv
Re:block wmf (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in other words, it does exactly the same thing Unix does for every single executable file.
Do a man magic if you don't know what I'm talking about, and/or look into why scripts have that #! as the very first two bytes in order to work automatically.
Windows has gotten bashed for years for relying on file extensions. Here they don't and they get bashed more! Ok, yeah, it's yet another example of deviation from expected behavior, but complain about that, not that they're finally trying to be smarter about files. Hell, most programs will now ignore file extensions and look at the file header -- it's hardly a MS only behavior.
That said, MS's slackness on this issue is ridiculous. Yes, I know that they have to test a patch in a very large test environment to make sure nothing goes "boom", but in this case they would better serve their customers by simply disabling WMF support entirely until they can properly patch things. WMF is not a widely used format -- in the very few cases where it's actually being used you could simply not patch the computer and take appropriate actions to isolate that system. It would be a hell of a lot better than the current situation, especially given how nasty and widespread this exploit is.
Add the unofficial patch to the test matrix... (Score:5, Insightful)
With the unofficial patch already deployed on thousands (millions?) of machines, it would be a big deal if something went wrong.
God, I'd hate to be in Redmond right now...
-ch
Re:One Gets the Feeling... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a very small code snippet that prevents the Escape() call with a certain argument. If you allow that, your system is vulnerable; if you don't, it isn't.
There's no way you can preserve the operation of legacy code without preserving the vulnerability, so if your legacy code relies on that behaviour (which is *extremely* unreliable), you're fucked, and there's nothing Microsoft can do to get around it. They're just reticent to bite the bullet.
Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it means, in contravention of best security practice and all possible "trustworthy computing", knowingly delaying an urgent, critical fix (which would be less troublesome than the first Shatter fix which was pushed out, and only disable a single GDI function that frankly hasn't been used since Windows 3.1 and should never have been used in the first place) for a publically-disclosed, unpatched vulnerability that had been discovered from a 0day exploit, for an indefinite amount of time over a public holiday period while the vulnerability is being "tested"?
When there's realistically no possible way the different L10n's of Windows would affect the GDI32 core because it contains almost no l10n strings anyway, and the vulnerability is in fact a purposely-designed, never-used legacy "feature" that should definitely have been removed in Windows NT or during the Windows 2000 GDI rewrites, or noticed, say, during last months GDI audit?
Despite Microsoft promising that the introduction of the Patch Tuesday would not preclude emergency fixes being issued out-of-cycle and as soon as possible for, ooh, say, critical core Windows vulnerabilities with an enormous number of possible vectors of infection, no effective mitigation and wide, dangerous exploits in the wild with a number of vulnerable machines easily capable of providing an ample breeding ground for supporting wide botnets or enormous worm infections?
Which is exactly what has happened, as Windows has, frankly, just faced the worst single vulnerability in its entire history?*
What the fuck are they doing, deliberately trying to breed another big internet worm?
Sorry, but I'm calling bullshit. I'm a security researcher, and I'm really quite angry at Microsoft's piss-poor handling of this. They couldn't have done much worse if they'd heard about the bug and then have let MSRC take Christmas off anyway.
This was not business as usual. This was an exceptional event (true 0days are actually quite rare to discover in the wild). It could not, and should not, have waited until the next patch cycle. This is exactly the kind of situation upon which a speedy mitigation - hours to days, but definitely not weeks - is absolutely critical, and we should demand that. They should AT LEAST have provided the (untested) hotfix themselves within a day, and pushed it out to Automatic Updates and Windows Update/Microsoft Update within the week after first discovery in the wild - not unrealistic goals for a vendor who wishes to paint themselves as "trustworthy".
They should be brought to task on this one. Behaviour like this is what created the full-disclosure movement in the first place.
* Yes, I'm going to say this one's actually worse than the various active remote vulnerabilities we've had over the years, like the UPnP vuln or the numerous RPC-related vulns. Those, you could at least block with a firewall. This, it's single-payload, multi-vector. It's got plenty of room to drop anything, it's capable of highly metamorphic exploit streams, can be fed online or offline, even spread on media, anything from email to a web page to a simple read-only directory listing or right-click, or uploaded to a site or blog, god help you, rendered inside MSN... the number of potential vectors is so numerous and troublesome it even makes analysis difficult; Windows disregarding filenames and extensions and MIME types and using magic sniffing instead, so you can't even block it effectively using a content-inspecting IDS - that's just the icing on the cake. This is a classic vulnerability, a real ticking Christmas present, a true textbook candidate.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whoa, that's really bizarre (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit. (Score:1, Insightful)
Now haven't we seen other problems where file extensions were trusted over the magic number. What about files that have multiple file extensions when the user has no file extensions displayed (which is the default for Windows Explorer, at least on XP and I believe 2000).
The sad reality of the problem is that no matter how bad the problem gets, people are still going to rely on Microsoft. The average home user won't switch until their favorite games/applications switch over. The average office user won't switch until their management is convinced by the IT department that alternatives exist for the business world. Unfortunately that won't happen until business application developers consider writing for alternative platforms. The whole problem is that people are complacent with what they currently have. Even for those who want to change, they probably won't be able to unless they have equivilant applications for the alternate platform.
JimM
Are you kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This really IS as bad as SANS says... (Score:3, Insightful)
On a hasty no-but-seriously note: are you suggesting WMF is wormable? I can't see how; an machine infected with a WMF worm would have to contact another vulnerable machine and somehow induce it into downloading an image file and parsing it. There was a rather feeble attempt at an IM worm over the weekend which fortunately seems to have fizzled, and I can't easily imagine other vectors. (Perhaps I have a weak imagination!) (Hmmm, if it's OK I may take the liberty of mailing you from my work addy about that?)
I think a lot of people are treating this as a spambot / zombie threat, which is more of a nuisance than a threat to the entity hosting the zombies. A wormable threat like MS05-053 (was it? they blur into one after a while) tends to prompt faster action, at least amongst those who witnessed the havok Nimda, Code Red, Blaster et al wrought.
My theory is that the coders with enough skillz to write effective malware and little enough morals to actually use it are more likely to be working for straightforward money-motivated crooks these days than to be out just to trash the world.
Re:MS has to test very extensively (Score:5, Insightful)
A better analogy would be that Microsoft is withholding the cure for breast cancer until they verify that it doesn't cause patients with other cancers to worsen, that it really does cure breast cancer on more than just one woman, and that it doesn't kill patients outright. with QA, at minimum you've got to verify that a patch can be installed, can be uninstalled if that's an option, fixes the problem, is stable, and passes any baseline usage tests that you have.
The analogy still isn't perfect, but it's far more representative of what a QA process is.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once-and-only-once is the first and last rule of good programming. The moment any information appears in more than one place, things start to hit the fan.
Re:Software Restriction Policy (Score:4, Insightful)
I've implemented this today on the network, but don't be fooled into thinking that this will protect you 100% because it doesn't. The flaw isn't in shimgvw.dll, that dll is just one of the common attack vectors. The flaw is a 'feature' of GDI as many of the
Until the patch is released it wont hurt to take a few simple steps to reduce the attack vectors (emphasis deliberate)
* Educating users about the dangers
* Updating AV definitions across the network
* Blocking
* Disabling the shimgvw.dll using the above method or the regsvr32 method.
Some people might want to consider the unofficial patch - personally, I wouldn't let it anywhere near the network of 3000+ machines. If something goes wrong, that a lot of cleaning up to do, and Microsoft will not be interested in helping.
Re:Are you kidding? (Score:2, Insightful)
-Peter
Re:Does MS view this as important? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cisco traditionally has used a monolithic kernel, which Linux guys poo-poo, but when you control all of the hardware, and you know all of the possible modular components that can be installed in that hardware, why not? The new IOS XR software (runs on the CRS, and GSRs, two routers you'll never see if you can't figure out which code to run at your office) is modular. Eventually, I believe that their entire hardware catalog will utilize the XR code, but that won't occur for years.
But we're not talking about Cisco in this thread... We're discussing Microsoft. We're talking about a the largest software company in the world refusing to release a critical security update as quickly as possible. We're talking about a conscious decision to leave millions of systems vulnerable to a known exploit in the wild, so that no one gets left behind.
It's criminal.
Re:F-Secure are publicity sluts (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it - they're doing good research, AND they're making it available for free, and you still criticise them for exactly that? You're not just looking the gift horse into the mouth, buddy, you're trying to paint the giver in a bad light for attempting to give it to you for free.
Seriously, get a grip.
Re:The issue was actually a feature... - WRONG (Score:4, Insightful)
Read the Fucking Back Story: This would be almost 0% issue if any of the following were true:
1. MSIE/SHELLDOC used extensions or mime-types (MSIE) in determining what file format something was [[ This flaw is transparent to users: it can be in almost any file extension ]]
2. MSIE/SHELLDOC had a feature like the mailcap file on UNIX which allows us to only list programs that can operate on untrustworthy files(!)
3. The WMF magic was outside of a critical system component (that could simply be unregistered and removed)
As a result, this is a very serious problem, and by playing Microsoft's tune about how "it's not that big of a deal", you're only making the problem worse.
By the way, someone should (quick!) make some WMF files that use the AbortProc routines to disable printscreen and stuff when they're visible so they can sue MS for DCMA (copy protection circumvention) violations...
Re:Good ol' patch Tuesday (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, tactically speaking, I'd assume that it's best to release a mega-worm about a week and a half to two weeks before patch day. The reason why is simple: if you release it too early and it's bad enough, Microsoft will break stride and release a patch early. On the other hand, if the time to develop a patch and test it (I'm guessing around a week to a week and a half, depending on the difficulty of the patch) is within four or five days of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft is politically better off waiting until Tuesday to release th epatch anyways, for fear of a large media buzz over the emergency patch.
Alternatively, two or three days before Patch Tuesday might also be prudent. It's highly unlikely Microsoft would be able to release a fix by that Tuesday (in many cases, they might not even recognize the true scope of an exploit during that time), so you get a week or so without the patch, and Micrsoft needs to issue an emergency patch anyway.
It depends on what you're trying to accomplish, I suppose. The first option gives you the best chance of infecting more systems. On the other hand, the second option has a far better chance of getting egg on the face of Microsoft. Then again, it might have a backwards effect, increasing people's trust of Microsoft in that they broke protocol and offered an emergency patch.
Personally, I'd probably prefer the first option.
Re:Are you kidding? (Score:1, Insightful)
What do you think a resume is for? To show how humble you are?
Re:block wmf (Score:3, Insightful)
And Linux users don't? Double click on a GIF/JPG/MP3/HTML/etc file in Konqueror or Nautilus (or the file manager of your choice) and what happens? Exactly the same as in Windows -- it launches the executable that's associated with the file.
There is no execute bit in their filesystems.
Yes there is. Admittedly, it's not used very much, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon. Not that it would've mattered in this case.
Linux users also expect data to NOT be given execute priviledges.
That's nice. And if a previously unknown vulnerability is found in libjpeg, then how is it going to matter? Sure, the JPEG isn't marked executable, but when the program that actually loads the executable links to libjpeg.so, and the JPEG contains a buffer overrun exploit then the resultant code may end up executing bytes out of the "non-executable" JPEG. The only way to avoid this is to use the new NX mode/instructions in modern CPUs -- something that you can do in Windows Server 2003 as well as in Linux.
Frankly, I know a lot of Unix users who will happily run a shell script without looking at it, or assume that a
I'm suprised virus writers waited until this millenium to finally exploit such a stupid flaw.
They didn't. Kinda. The idiocy of MS hiding "known" extensions was exploited years ago (happyfun.txt.exe -- guess what it shows up as in Outlook Express or Explorer?), along with similar exploits.