BitTorrent Vulnerabilties

Following the news regarding vulnerabilities found in the uTorrent BitTorrent client, Bob Rudis, Chief Data Scientist at Rapid7 commented below.

Bob Rudis, Chief Data Scientist at Rapid7:

“Over the past few months, researchers from Google’s Project Zero have been working with BitTorrent, Inc. to fix vulnerabilities in their uTorrent BitTorrent client. BitTorrent is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing which is used to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet, and the uTorrent client — a BitTorrent product — enables users to share and download files using this protocol. There are millions of active uTorrent users online every day.

The core of the flaw lies in a “remote control” feature of uTorrent. When launched, uTorrent creates a local “mini-server” that makes it possible to issue commands (e.g. “download this new file”, “copy this file that has been downloaded”) from other clients on the local network. Due to a flaw in the way uTorrent tries to protect this remote control interface, any website that a user visits can read and copy every torrent they’ve downloaded just by testing for the presence of this mini-server and issuing commands to it. The core flaw lies in both uTorrent Web and uTorrent Classic.

It is imperative that all uTorrent users download the available updates immediately and monitor BitTorrent for updates on this issue. Organisations are further encouraged to block the use of uTorrent and other BitTorrent clients on end-user workstations and at the network-level to help ensure the integrity of their systems, networks and data.”