RE: Pubstro rash

From: David LeBlanc (dleblanc_at_exchange.microsoft.com)
Date: 03/18/05

  • Next message: Joshua Berry: "RE: Pubstro rash" 
    Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 18:31:24 -0800
To: <nick@virus-l.demon.co.uk>, <incidents@securityfocus.com>

    That would be a good guess. XP was the first version where blank
    passwords can only be used at the console.

    BOFH mode = ON
    I think that if the network admin can guess the password on a system
    that it deserves to get a new, very random 15-character (Win2k and up,
    14 on NT 4.0) password, and if that inconveniences the user then they
    need to learn to use decent passwords, and you should set up a system
    whereby you can give them the new password out of band and the system
    should be suitably inconvenient such that they won't want to use it
    again.

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Nick FitzGerald [mailto:nick@virus-l.demon.co.uk]
    Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2005 2:34 PM
    To: incidents@securityfocus.com
    Subject: RE: Pubstro rash

    David Gillett wrote:

    > Further detail: I'm being told that all of the compromised
    > workstations are running 2KPro or NTW. So that suggests that the
    > attackers are getting in through a hole that is fixed in XP or its
    > service packs.

    Or poor password policies...

    Most pubstros I've seen succeed do so with just password guessing (and
    relatively trivial guessing at that) -- not that they don't have other
    methods, just that pwd guessing gets them plenty of victims. Are these
    machines visible to the world for any kind of standard NT authentication
    connections? If so, start with the simplest (and probably most likely),
    which is user slackness (blank, "admin", "guest", "pass", "aaaaa",
    "qwerty", "12345", etc passwords).

    Vulns common to NT and 2K but not XP would be fairly rare (other than in
    non-XPSP2 IE 6??), unless you have very limited patch control over
    non-XP machines but good control of XP patching.

    Regards,

    Nick FitzGerald

  • Next message: Joshua Berry: "RE: Pubstro rash"