Cylance announced the discovery of a new attack with the capacity to leverage automated HTTP requests sent by background applications.
Here is the Comment from Rapid7’s HD Moore, Chief Research Officer, on how the attack works and what the research tells us:
“This is a novel attack that can be easily abused to significantly increase the exploitability of Windows client systems communicating on untrusted or compromised networks. While tools like KARMA, Metasploit, and Responder.py depend on the user to make a SMB connection back to the attacker, the Cylance research improves on the attack by abusing how HTTP redirects are handled by callers of the URLMon API.
The Cylance research shows that instead of waiting for the user to open their browser or manually connect to a network share, an attacker can look for automated HTTP requests sent by background applications and redirect these to file:// URLs, triggering a SMB connection and automatic authentication. Given how many applications a typical laptop or tablet has running in the background, this can drastically speed up SMB capture and relay attacks against Windows-based laptops and tablets connecting to insecure wireless networks.
On a Windows 8.1 laptop, at least 50 different HTTP connections were made after a restart and within 5 minutes, most of which could be hijacked by a network-local attacker to force SMB authentication to a malicious service. The source of these connections ranged from OEM “update” checks to weather and news applications”.
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About Rapid7
Rapid7’s mission is to develop simple, innovative solutions for security’s complex challenges. The company understands the attacker better than anyone and builds that insight into its security software and services. Rapid7’s IT security analytics solutions collect, contextualize, and analyze the security data users need to dramatically reduce threat exposure and detect compromise in real-time. They speed investigations so customers can halt threats and clean up systems fast. Unlike traditional vulnerability assessment or incident management, Rapid7 provides insight into the security state of your assets and users, across virtual, mobile, private and public cloud networks.
The company offers advanced capabilities for vulnerability management, penetration testing, endpoint controls assessment, and incident detection and investigation. Its attacker intelligence is informed by more than 200,000 members of the Metasploit community, the industry-leading Rapid7 Research Labs, and its experienced security services team. Rapid7 is trusted by more than 3,000 organizations across 78 countries, including more than 250 of the Fortune 1000.
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