Comment by jabroni_salad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabroni_salad | Hacker News Reader

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* SMB encryption or signing not enforced

* NTLM/NTLMv1 enabled

* mDNS/llmnr/nbt-ns enabled

* dhcpv6 not controlled

* Privileged account doing plain LDAP (not LDAPS) binds or unencrypted FTP connections

* WPAD not controlled

* lights out interfaces not segregated from business network. Bonus points if its a supermicro which discloses the password hash to unauthenticated users as a design features.

* operational technology not segregated from information technology

* Not a windows bug, but popular on windows: 3rd party services with unquoted exe and uninstall strings, or service executable in a user-writable directory.

I remediate pentests as well as realworld intrusion events and we ALWAYS find one of these as the culprit. An oopsie happening on the public website leading to an intrusion is actually an extreme rarity. It's pretty much always email > standard user > administrator.

I understand not liking EDR or AV but the alternative seems to be just not detecting when this happens. The difference between EDR clients and non-EDR clients is that the non-EDR clients got compromised 2 years ago and only found it today.

Thanks for the list. I got this job as the network administrator at a community bank 2 years ago and 9/9 of these were on/enabled/not secured. I've got it down to only 3/9 (dhcpv6, unquoted exe, operational tech not segregated from info tech). I'm asking for free advise, so feel free to ignore me, but of these three unremediated vectors, which do you see as the culprit most often?

dhcpv6 poisoning is really easy to do with metasploit and creates a MITM scenario. It's also easy to fix (dhcpv6guard at the switch, a domain firewall rule, or a 'prefer ipv4' reg key).

unquoted paths are used to make persistence and are just an indicator of some other compromise. There are some very low impact scripts on github that can take care of it

Network segregation, the big thing I see in financial institutions is the cameras. Each one has its own shitty webserver, chances are the vendor is accessing the NVR with teamviewer and just leaving the computer logged in and unlocked, and none of the involved devices will see any kind of update unless they break. Although I've never had a pentester do anything with this I consider the segment to be haunted.

None of those things require a kernel module with remote code execution to configure properly.

I believe the question was 'in which ways is windows vulnerable by default', and I answered that.

If customers wanted to configure them properly, they could, but they don't. EDR will let them keep all the garbage they seem to love so dearly. It doesn't just check a box, it takes care of many other boxes too.

At work we have two sets of computers. One gets beamed down by our multi-national overlords, loaded with all kinds of compliance software. The other is managed by local IT and only uses windows defender, has some strict group policies applied, BMCs on a separate vlans etc. Both pass audits, for whatever that's worth.

This is the key question for me: is there a way to get [most of] the security benefits of EDR without giving away the keys to the kingdom.

No. If an EDR relies on userland mechanisms to monitor, these userland mechanisms can easily be removed by the malicious process too.

> It's pretty much always email > standard user > administrator

What does this mean?

believe it or not, most users dont run around downloading random screensavers or whatever. Instead they are receiving phish emails, often from trusted contacts who have recently been compromised using the same style of message that they are used to receiving, that give the attacker a foothold on the computer. From there, you can use a commonly available insecure legacy protocol or other privilege escalation technique to gain administrative rights on the device.

It's the attack path.

standard user: why can't I open this pdf? It says Permission Denied

dumb admin: let me try .... boom game over man

>> always email > standard user > administrator

maybe its the boomers that can't give up Outlook? Otherwise they could've migrated everybody to google workspaces or some other web alternative.

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