Plus the importance of automatic updates, and Jim's new backup box.

Links:

• Errata Security: Almost One Million Vulnerable to BlueKeep Vuln (CVE-2019-0708) — Microsoft announced a vulnerability in it's "Remote Desktop" product that can lead to robust, wormable exploits. I scanned the Internet to assess the danger. I find nearly 1-million devices on the public Internet that are vulnerable to the bug.
• Even the NSA is urging Windows users to patch BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) | ZDNet — "[The] NSA is concerned that malicious cyber actors will use the vulnerability in ransomware and exploit kits containing other known exploits, increasing capabilities against other unpatched systems.
• Prevent a worm by updating Remote Desktop Services (CVE-2019-0708) – MSRC — This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction. In other words, the vulnerability is ‘wormable’, meaning that any future malware that exploits this vulnerability could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer in a similar way as the WannaCry malware spread across the globe in 2017
• BlueKeep - everyone agrees, you should patch PCs running legacy versions of Windows — I have this horrible feeling that the only way we’re going to wake the world up to the need to patch their ageing versions of Windows against the BlueKeep vulnerability is to wait until a malicious worm begins to spread around the world.
• CVE-2019-0708 | Remote Desktop Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability — A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – when an unauthenticated attacker connects to the target system using RDP and sends specially crafted requests. This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code on the target system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.
• Customer guidance for CVE-2019-0708 | Remote Desktop Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability — Microsoft is aware that some customers are running versions of Windows that no longer receive mainstream support. That means those customers will not have received any security updates to protect their systems from CVE-2019-0708, which is a critical remote code execution vulnerability.
• Forget BlueKeep: Beware the GoldBrute | Threatpost — In the past few days, GoldBrute (named after the Java class it uses) has attempted to brute-force Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections for 1.5 million Windows systems and counting, according to Morphus Labs chief research officer Renato Marinho. The botnet is actively scanning the internet for machines with RDP exposed, and trying out weak or reused passwords to see if it can gain access to the systems.
• The GoldBrute botnet — The latest round of bad news emerged last week when Morphus Labs’ researcher Renato Marinho announced the discovery of an aggressive brute force campaign against 1.5 million RDP servers by a botnet called ‘GoldBrute’.
• Ubuntu Automatic Updates — The unattended-upgrades package can be used to automatically install updated packages, and can be configured to update all packages or just install security updates.
• AutoUpdates - Fedora Project Wiki — You must decide whether to use automatic DNF or YUM updates on each of your machines.
• It's time to block Windows Automatic Updating | Computerworld — Those of you who feel it’s important to install Windows and Office patches the moment they come out – I salute you. The Windows world needs more cannon fodder.
• Windows 10's Ugly Updates Just Got Uglier. Here's How To Stay Safe by Disabling Automatic Updates — Stay safe by disabling automatic updates? How is that possible? As a general rule of thumb, I’d never recommend disabling updates because security patches are essential. But the situation with Windows 10 has become intolerable. Microsoft continues to fail and continues to release update after update that they know, or should know, has serious problems.
• Jim's New Rig — I build, sell, and manage much bigger and meaner systems than this all the time. But this one's MINE! 12 hot swap bays, Ryzen 7 2700 w/ ECC RAM, quiet enough to share an office with, and the trays can take either HDD or SSD with no adapter needed.

Plus what might be the world’s most important killswitch, the real dollar values for stolen credentials and the 19 year old attack that’s back.

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Links:

• The Market for Stolen Account Credentials — But oh, how times have changed! With dozens of sites in the underground now competing to purchase and resell credentials for a variety of online locations, it has never been easier for a botmaster to earn a handsome living based solely on the sale of stolen usernames and passwords alone.
• Hackers shut down plant by targeting its safety system — FireEye reported that a plant of an unmentioned nature and location (other firms believe it's in the Middle East) was forced to shut down after a hack targeted its industrial safety system -- it's the first known instance of a breach like this taking place.
• FireEye Report on TRITON — We assess with moderate confidence that the attacker was developing the capability to cause physical damage and inadvertently shutdown operations. This malware, which we call TRITON, is an attack framework built to interact with Triconex Safety Instrumented System (SIS) controllers.
• ROBOT Attack: 19-Year-Old Bleichenbacher Attack — Dubbed ROBOT (Return of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Attack), the attack allows an attacker to perform RSA decryption and cryptographic operations using the private key configured on the vulnerable TLS servers.
• The ROBOT Attack - Offical Site
• Robot-detect: Detection script for the ROBOT vulnerability — Tool to detect the ROBOT attack (Return of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Threat).
• WannaCry: End of Year Retrospective — Since our Vantage team sinkholed and subsequently nullified the WannaCry attack on May 12th, 2017, we have been monitoring and maintaining the domain known as the WannaCry killswitch.
• Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports — And, according to slides published this weekend by Der Spiegel, this information also includes crash reports from Microsoft's Windows Error Reporting facility built in to Windows.
• Network namespaces — As the name would imply, network namespaces partition the use of the network—devices, addresses, ports, routes, firewall rules, etc.—into separate boxes, essentially virtualizing the network within a single running kernel instance.
• namespaces - Linux manual page — A namespace wraps a global system resource in an abstraction that makes it appear to the processes within the namespace that they have their own isolated instance of the global resource. Changes to the global resource are visible to other processes that are members of the namespace, but are invisible to other processes. One use of namespaces is to implement containers.
• Network Namespaces » ADMIN Magazine — With network namespaces, you can virtualize network devices, IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks, routing tables, ARP tables, and firewalls separately, as well as /proc/net, /sys/class/net/, QoS policies, port numbers, and sockets in such a way that individual applications can find a particular network setup without the use of containers.
• How to Get the Network Namespace Associated With a Socket
• Network devices as virtual Ethernet devices — Virtualize network devices as virtual Ethernet devices by configuring direct MacVTap connections or virtual switches.
• Testing network software with pytest and Linux namespaces
• Implementation of IEEE 802.1ab (LLDP) — LLDP is an industry standard protocol designed to supplant proprietary Link-Layer protocols such as EDP or CDP. The goal of LLDP is to provide an inter-vendor compatible mechanism to deliver Link-Layer notifications to adjacent network devices.
• WireGuard Routing & Network Namespaces — This allows for some very cool properties. Namely, you can create the WireGuard interface in one namespace (A), move it to another (B), and have cleartext packets sent from namespace B get sent encrypted through a UDP socket in namespace A.
• VRF for Linux — The concept of VRF was first introduced around 1999 for L3 VPNs, but it has become a fundamental feature for a networking OS. VRF provides traffic isolation at layer 3 for routing, similar to how you use a VLAN to isolate traffic at layer 2. Think multiple routing tables.
• linux/vrf.txt at master · torvalds/linux · GitHub
• Using VRFs with linux
• Feedback - DHCPDECLINE over and over again
• DHCP Snooping - Cisco
• Hidden Backdoor Found In WordPress Captcha Plugin Affects Over 300,000 Sites — In a blog post published on Tuesday, WordFence security firm revealed why WordPress recently kicked a popular Captcha plugin with more than 300,000 active installations out of its official plugin store.