To be vulnerable to this, what sort of dumb things are end users doing?
I couldn't immediately figure out here whether we're talking
0. Microsoft's supported products default enable this worthless "authentication" feature
1. Microsoft's supported products provide such a feature behind a UI that's not clearly marked "Danger: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye"
2: Microsoft does still support this, behind some Registry nonsense most users do not understand and once enabled it doesn't turn on the "I am a toxic waste dump, leave by nearest exit" warning signs on affected machines
3: Microsoft doesn't support this at all but some 3rd party commercial stuff does and customers really do love their crusty archaic 3rd party garbage
4: But this long abandoned SCO machine we've kept on life support for twenty years!
5: What does "supported" mean? Windows NT is scary, we're still on Windows 98 here.
You have to actively go out of your way to have this enabled. But large or older companies always have some old machine (can be as dumb a an old but very expensive printer) that isn't updated.
Even today the only reason to use samba 2 in 90% of companies where it's enabled are old appliances.
At some point device X isn't working, employees complain, IT say they need to buy a new very expensive replacement and after much argumentation they come to the agreement to enable that legacy horror support until the purchase can be made. Which is then never made.
This is mostly an issue in active directory networks. Usually the reason people give as to why they still have this enabled is due to some legacy system that can't authenticate via Kerberos or at least NetNTLMv2. Worst case is if they then enable NetNTLMv1 on the domain controllers, even if the DC acts as a client. Using authentication coercion, this is a pretty quick win for an adversary.
Really curious how this was discussed with the legal team...
"We're releasing hacking tools to allow others to break into poorly secured computer systems... But we are doing it with good intentions so it won't be illegal right??"
There used to be a joint online project to compute these tables in a SETI like distributed system. Everyone who contributed their CPU cycles, could use the tables. And yeah, around 2005-2008.
net-ntlmv1 rainbow tables have been around forever too though, the same attack documented in this blog post has been hosted as a web service at https://crack.sh/netntlm/ for 10+ years
A few years ago i was doing some vm things in azure. Hadnt touched azure before, and spent 10+ minutes of frustration trying to figure out how to get amd64/x86_64 things started, as the only thing i could find was "Azure ARM", and on googling, "arm" here means azure resource manager... ARGH why does microsoft insist on using existing names and acronyms!?!?
This empowers script kiddies, but not significantly moreso than they already were. Of all the places this is still in use, they've been exposed for years, so this isn't likely to result in a a bunch of new exploitations.
However, it's most likely to be used by governments, with legacy servers that are finicky, with filesharing set up that's impacted other computers configured for compatibility, or legacy ancient network gear or printers.
I wonder who they're pushing around, and what the motivation is?
Mandiant is Google's incident response consulting business. Having worked for many years in that field myself (though not for Mandiant), they're probably sick of going to the same old engagements where companies have been getting owned the same way over and over again for the last 15 years.
What releases like this do is give IT ops people the ammunition they need to convince their leadership to actually spend some money on fixing systemic security problems.
> Mandiant is Google's incident response consulting business
Consulting business? I was under the impression (from Google Reader) that if users aren’t in the millions, then they’ll kill the project. How could they also run a high-touch consultancy?!
> they're probably sick of going to the same old engagements
Hmm… consultancies love this type of recurring revenue - it’s easy money
> Consulting business? I was under the impression (from Google Reader) that if users aren’t in the millions, then they’ll kill the project. How could they also run a high-touch consultancy?!
Google also has the Project Zero which doesn't fit into Google business culture either. I wonder if Mandiant is paying for their payroll.
Google is a quarter million person company (if you count full time, temps, vendors and contractors).
Google Cloud is basically an entirely different company than Search or Maps. Cloud will happily sell you $10m in compute a year and a value add $400k of security consulting.
It also empowers IT depts and cybersecurity people to be able to easily build a PoC to show why moving on from the deprecated protocol is important. In many white-hat jobs you can't just grab rainbow tables from a torrent, so a resource like this is helpful. For the grays and black hats, they've had access to rainbow tables like this for a very long time, so no change there.
Its less about torrents being the delivery mechanism and more about bringing data from a potentially unknown source, under potentially unknown licensing, and distributed for a potentially unknown reason into the corporate computing environment.
Torrents would be a perfectly valid way for Google to distribute this dataset, but the key difference would be that Google is providing it for this purpose and presumably didn't do anything underhanded to collect or generate it, and tells you explicitly how you're allowed to use it via the license.
That sort of legal and compliance homework is good practice for any business to some extent (don't use random p2p discoveries for sensitive business purposes), but is probably critical to remain employed in the sorts of giant enterprises where an internal security engineer needs to build a compelling case for spending money to upgrade an outdated protocol.
Any business that needs convincing to move on from anything labeled NTLM does not care what "nerds" have to say. They are either one of those "I'm not spending money on something that works" or stuck with such legacy technical debt that at this point, removing it from environment is too costly to even consider so executives kick it down the road.
You've been able to find these for years. In fact it's entirely possible they just grabbed some or all of them out of an existing torrent originally.
It would completely not surprise me if there are automagic attacks on net-ntlmv1 at this point against some cloud hosted storage. This has been doable by anyone since like 2016 if you had the space and weren't prevented from using that protocol version.
Yeah that protocol is very very broken. I recently did an ntlm plugin implementation for Caido [1] and I had to fork our crypto JS module to add back MD4 and 3DES.
Mandiant releases rainbow tables for a 25 year old broken protocol because enterprises still won't disable it. It seems like sometimes the best security tool is just making the risk impossible to ignore.
Tangent: this link looks like a right-wing propaganda site; I wouldn’t trust any information there without verifying it with trusted sources.
> Thanks to the President’s decisive leadership in the face of radical left-wing obstructionism, the Department of the Treasury has now resumed normal operations.
This is like reminding that there are CVSes from 2010. Yes there are. And there are plenty of vulnerable systems.
They decided to not fix the vulns (either directly by not patching, or indirectly by not investing in cybersecurity). So exploiting them is somehow an act of mercy. They may not know they have a problem and they have an opportunity to learn.
Let's just hope they will have white or gray-ish hats teaching the lesson
Holy smoke. I honestly thought the 90s called and wanted their Windows exploits back (TFA mentions 1999). I do remember talk about this from many moons ago.
Plenty of protocols used by google over the years have been deprecated. The difference being that google actually stops using insecure protocols when they are discovered to be insecure instead of trying to sweep things under the rug.
Keep in mind we are talking about a protocol from 1987. How many protocols from 1987 is google currently using?
Keep in mind that google is primarily a cloud business. That means that they take on a lot more of a risk, as when they are hacked its a them problem vs traditional software where its much more the customer's problem. Security is very much about incentives, and the incentives line up better for google to do the right thing.
It's more about when Google assumed full control of the cloud, the browser, the OS, and everything in between they self-appointed themselves as the unelected standards board of the Internet, and forced everyone else to follow their whims and timelines. Some of which are completely insane.
What are the policies you view as "completely insane"? I have some I disagree with like how they've handled things like Manifest v3 in the browsers, however there are still alternatives like Firefox anyway. However I think in terms of web standards some of the things they have pushed are also helpful. It's been much nicer having a much more consistent web browsing experience with less things like "You must use Internet Explorer on this site".
I feel like web browser and website standards are one of the main areas Google has a lot more control of policies. Is there somewhere else they have much control of for standards?
"To demonstrate how crappy most front door locks are, to boost our company's social media cred we will be leaving drills and a dish of bump keys at the entrance of the neighborhood."
NTLM is often used for more of the underlying technologies, some more secure than others… nthash, net-ntlmv1, net-ntlmv2. There’s a little more complexity here and this is different than the stuff that was out 15 years ago
> this is different than the stuff that was out 15 years ago
This stuff was out at least 10-15 years ago. It’s different from the ancient local ntlm hash cracking everyone used to get admin in high school, yes, but it’s not a novel technique.
You're not wrong, I just want to point out this is net-lmvm1, which is different and more complex. Not functionally meaningfully more complex to an adversary with a few hundred USD (almost typed LSD) in monies. But technically larger tables. That being said I'm in agreement that this has been known problem for 10+ years, and Google is just saying the horses are so long out of the barn their grandchildren are grazing.
The bad guys already know you live in a bad neighborhood and have been closing your front door with a plastic combination lock you got in a Happy Meal 40 years ago. They can already come and go at a whim. This is Google letting you know that your crappy lock is pre-broken to encourage you to upgrade to literally anything else.
It's certainly morally and legally dubious to facilitate attacks on things that others choose to use in within their own private domains, just because you disagree with that choice. But that's how these people roll.
It's been 15 years since this was known broken. If you had children when it was not known broken, they'd be almost old enough to drive in most western nations.
I couldn't immediately figure out here whether we're talking
0. Microsoft's supported products default enable this worthless "authentication" feature
1. Microsoft's supported products provide such a feature behind a UI that's not clearly marked "Danger: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye"
2: Microsoft does still support this, behind some Registry nonsense most users do not understand and once enabled it doesn't turn on the "I am a toxic waste dump, leave by nearest exit" warning signs on affected machines
3: Microsoft doesn't support this at all but some 3rd party commercial stuff does and customers really do love their crusty archaic 3rd party garbage
4: But this long abandoned SCO machine we've kept on life support for twenty years!
5: What does "supported" mean? Windows NT is scary, we're still on Windows 98 here.
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