Patched BadTunnel Windows Bug Has ‘Extensive’ Impact

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Do this weeks patches if you haven't already. That is the short version. Want the tech details? Read on.

 

Excerpt:

 

"Among the more than three dozen vulnerabilities Microsoft patched on Tuesday was a fix for a bug that the researcher who found it said has “probably the widest impact in the history of Windows.”

 

“There were also some wide impact vulnerabilities before, but maybe not like this extensive,” Chinese researcher Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab told Threatpost.

 

The flaw, which he’s called BadTunnel, exposes local area networks to cross-network NetBIOS Name Service spoofing. An attacker can remotely attack a firewall- or NAT-protected LAN and steal network traffic or spoof a network print or file server.

 

“In combination with other system mechanisms, it can hijack the network traffic, and even run any program,” Yang said.

The flaw was addressed yesterday by Microsoft in security bulletin MS16-077 and in CVE-2016-3213.

 

“An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists in Microsoft Windows when the Web Proxy Auto Discovery (WPAD) protocol falls back to a vulnerable proxy discovery process,” Microsoft said in its advisory; it rated the flaw as “Important.” “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could bypass security and gain elevated privileges on a targeted system.”

 

The flaw is particularly serious because it affects every version of Windows, including long-unsupported versions of the OS going back to Windows 95.

 

“To successfully implement a BadTunnel attack, [you] just need the victim to open a URL (with Internet Explorer or Edge), or open a file (an Office document), or plug in a USB memory stick,” Yang said. “[You] even may not need the victim to do anything when the victim is a web server.”

 

The whole article and more is here: https://threatpost.com/patched-badtunnel-windows-bug-has-extensive-impact/118697/