[HN Gopher] Full System Control with New SolarWinds Orion and Se...
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       Full System Control with New SolarWinds Orion and Serv-U FTP
       Vulnerabilities
        
       Author : wglb
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2021-02-04 16:36 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.trustwave.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.trustwave.com)
        
       | chrisco255 wrote:
       | This same FTP server powers Dominion Voting Systems, which
       | controls a huge share of the election infrastructure in the U.S.
       | 
       | https://dvsfileshare.dominionvoting.com/Web%20Client/Mobile/...
        
         | blhack wrote:
         | Can you elaborate on why you think this is relevant?
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | leesalminen wrote:
           | Can you elaborate on why you think this isn't relevant? It
           | seems plainly obvious to me how it's relevant.
        
             | thefreeman wrote:
             | Does the FTP server print out paper ballots which voters
             | then review and manually scan in a machine? If not then
             | it's totally irrelevant.
        
               | chrisco255 wrote:
               | Dominion works off of dongles and file transfers.
               | 
               | If you're curious about the DVS topology: https://www.sos
               | .state.co.us/pubs/elections/VotingSystems/sys...
        
               | tw04 wrote:
               | For early voting reports. Paper ballots are tallied for
               | official results.
               | 
               | A vulnerability in the FTP software, which I don't
               | believe you've provided any proof was actually exploited
               | in the wild during the elections, makes 0 difference to
               | official results.
        
               | ficklepickle wrote:
               | They never claimed it was exploited in the wild nor that
               | it affected the results of the 2020 US election .
        
           | korethr wrote:
           | I will elaborate on why _I_ think it 's relevant.
           | 
           | The election infrastructure for much of the country has the
           | security of swiss cheese. And this isn't some new thing
           | created from whole cloth by Trump supporters; people have
           | been raising concern about this for years. Back when Obama
           | was up for election, there were news articles about how
           | election machines could potentially be tampered with to steal
           | the election from Obama. When it was Trump vs Hillary, some
           | were concerned the election would be stolen from Hillary, and
           | when Trump _was_ elected, insinuations and outright
           | accusations were levied that Trump stole the election
           | through, amongst other things, election machine tampering.
           | And then in this most recent election cycle, we have the
           | "Kraken", et. al., which appears to have, in-part, motivated
           | the Capitol riot.
           | 
           | Regardless of what you think of the of the truth of the
           | accusations, whether in this election cycle, prior ones, or
           | future ones, the fact that the underlying (lack-of) security
           | lends a plausibility to such accusations is a problem unto
           | itself. If elections have or are tampered with by malicious
           | agents, foreign or domestic, we do not have free and fair
           | elections, and that's a Big Problem. If demagogues can easily
           | stir up popular sentiment that the elections are not free and
           | fair, that's also a Big Problem. It is the lack of election
           | security that amplifies those problems into big ones.
           | 
           | Sure, we can go after entities that try to tamper with
           | elections, and we would do well educate ourselves to be able
           | to spot demagoguery and misinformation. But we would also do
           | quite well to go after underlying problems that make the
           | aforementioned problems worse.
        
             | thefreeman wrote:
             | That's why the CISA had a huge emphasis on paper backups in
             | the election. You can't hack a physical printout which the
             | voter verifies themself before scanning.
        
               | ndiscussion wrote:
               | The QR code is scanned, not the text on the paper
               | printout, as far as I understand
        
             | TrispusAttucks wrote:
             | Your right. It's complicated. The sad thing is, it doesn't
             | matter. Simpler manufactured narratives will win in the
             | future.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | I poked around on Serv-U's customer testimonials. Lots of US
         | Military, White House, various healthcare providers, etc. And
         | they include specifics on customers too. Almost a ready made
         | hit list. Ouch.
        
       | malux85 wrote:
       | Unauthenticated queue, with unsafe deserialisation, running as
       | the system account.
       | 
       | Amateur hour
        
         | uncledave wrote:
         | That's almost as bad as the time Microsoft ran Defender sandbox
         | as LocalSystem. CVE-2017-0290. That one was a massive dose of
         | irony in one CVE.
         | 
         | You'd think people would have learned about least privilege by
         | now?
        
       | a-dub wrote:
       | the serv-u thing looks like a misconfiguration to me. i'd be
       | curious how many installs in the wild are actually vulnerable.
       | ie.
       | 
       | 1) was there a previous install process that did set correct
       | permissions for the access list tree?
       | 
       | 2) did sites secure the access list tree themselves after
       | install/security review?
       | 
       | the msmq thing isn't great, but any professionally managed site
       | would be protecting/firewalling application level sockets anyhow.
       | 
       | not to say the bugs aren't real, they are, just wondering how
       | much exposure they actually open up in the wild when combined
       | with basic security hygiene.
        
         | john37386 wrote:
         | You can maybe ask shodan?
         | https://www.shodan.io/search?query=serv-u
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | Their hotfix seems to acknowledge that the software is
         | specifically setting weak ACLs on that C:\Program
         | Data\RhinoSoft\Serv-U\Users directory.
         | 
         | You're right that end users should do "2)", but I imagine it's
         | pretty common to just run the installer.
        
           | a-dub wrote:
           | the name of the previous developer (rhinosoft) of the
           | software appears in the directory tree, which would lead me
           | to guess that maybe the original installer did set correct
           | ACLs but when ported to the new post-acquisition solarwinds
           | installer, that was maybe dropped. (just a guess)
           | 
           | i dunno how modern windows admin is done, but the last time i
           | worked with it it was common for large sites to use
           | deployment automation and do repackaging, even if was less
           | sophisticated than what you'd see in unixland.
        
         | DharmaPolice wrote:
         | My organisation uses Serv-U. The permissions in our programdata
         | folder matches the article (we've not applied the most recent
         | Serv-U patch which came out quite recently).
         | 
         | But as the article says you need to be RDP'd to the server
         | which for us would be Administrators. Who already have control
         | over the server. Also we don't run the service as local system
         | just as a regular service account with no admin rights.
         | 
         | So while this is a vulnerability it doesn't seem overly
         | critical in our case. If you let non-privileged users RDP to
         | your application servers and you're running as local system
         | then sure, it's pretty bad.
        
       | john37386 wrote:
       | There is a deterrent disclaimer
       | https://dvsfileshare.dominionvoting.com/
       | 
       |  _Access to this site is for authorized users only! All
       | unauthorized use and access will be prosecuted to the fullest
       | extent of the law._
       | 
       | I'd be carefull before trying anything on that server.
       | 
       | -edit: Added italic on the disclaimer
        
         | vmception wrote:
         | I like when the hackers make complete disc images on docker and
         | let people download those
         | 
         | the hacker is the only one with any unauthorized access
         | liability and all the other tinkerers have none from what I can
         | tell
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-05 23:00 UTC)