6 ms·

Apparently Steam games are favourite attack vector of NSA, they love exploiting Steam games on sysadmin machines. https://www.wired.com/2016/01/nsa-hacker-chie

by gutigen 10y ago

Apparently Steam games are favourite attack vector of NSA, they love exploiting Steam games on sysadmin machines. https://www.wired.com/2016/01/nsa-hacker-chief-explains-how-to-keep-him-out-of-your-system/ https://www.wired.com/2016/01/nsa-hacker-chief-explains-how-...

ryanlol 10y ago
The steam uri handler probably has lots of avenues of easy RCE.
spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
No Sysadmin shoud be playing games on the systems he/she uses for admin work.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Oh, I so wish that were true. Heck, back in the day I caught someone (thankfully not at the place I worked) running a game (some FPS) server on their exchange server box. Running Steam is well within the realm of possibilities.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    At one building, friends and I rigged every machine to have hidden copies of Alien vs Predator and Everquest. I modified the system software to intercept keystrokes before they got to the game. One command crashed video, audio, and then whole system. I also set others to randomly crash around same time people walked in to supervise what was going on. Friends and I griped our machines were down about every day. Person in charge ordered us to keep using them and get no replacements because that served wiseasses like us. Oh, yes it did. Served us well. (evil grin) Note: Also embedded web browser into our business application in development-mode only. The GUI forms and such. Policy had IE locked down but embedded browser still worked lol. So, fast coders got the job done quickly then were bullshitting around on Internet till someone approached. One key stroke and back to boring UI testing. ;)
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Since I alternate between developer and system admin jobs[1], you message hits me both as "Righteous" and "Dammit you $^%& developer". I am so conflicted. 1) welcome to the wonderful and horrible world of a journeyman in the middle
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        I try to stay in those grey areas where people sort of want to stop me but find my antics too useful or entertaining. :) Far as that setup, sysadmin was a pal of mine who hated the unreliable crap he had to manage. He had already made sure all the work sync'd to their Novell network's central storage. I also told people to make CD backups with the CD burners on the machines. With my help, people just lost time here and there with him not having to do any extra work. So, sysadmin was thanking me for helping him deal with machines that were inexplicably always crashing "because Acer machines are garbage." You feel more or less conflicted now? :P
        protomyth 10y ago
        Sadly, these days, the Acer machines are the least problematic of the machines (looking at you H "100 hard drive failures out of 120 machines" P) I have to deal with. [edit] I feel about the same, as a system admin, I get bit in the /\$$ way too often by good intentions. I hear they pave a road with them (I think I worked there).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- briane80 10y ago
  I once heard a (probably apocryphal) story of a developer who had been playing Doom installed on a server. The sysadm caught him playing it and promptly unistalled the game. However the important business application hosted on the server then stopped working and no one could figure out why. Nothing would work... even after lots of debugging, error log analysis and redeploying. The developer suggested installing Doom again and lo and behold, the application started working.
  - dkuntz2 10y ago
    If someone tells you that story, they have to explain why.
    - nextweek2 10y ago
      It was actually a common problem back in the day. Software would ship with shared DLL's, uninstalling an application would usually have a knock on effect. MS-DOS was used a lot for small office servers. Whilst Windows NT4 was growing in popularity, it was an expensive option for firms. Plus it was hard to play games on NT4 due to memory protection issues. A fable of Doom being needed to run a server in today's environment is ridiculous, however back then things were a lot less mature. The issue wasn't limited to just games. Any application with shared files was a nightmare, normally you just renamed files, rebooted, then if things worked you could delete the files.

by gutigen 10y ago

ryanlol 10y ago

The steam uri handler probably has lots of avenues of easy RCE.

spacecowboy_lon 10y ago

No Sysadmin shoud be playing games on the systems he/she uses for admin work.

protomyth 10y ago
Oh, I so wish that were true. Heck, back in the day I caught someone (thankfully not at the place I worked) running a game (some FPS) server on their exchange server box. Running Steam is well within the realm of possibilities.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  At one building, friends and I rigged every machine to have hidden copies of Alien vs Predator and Everquest. I modified the system software to intercept keystrokes before they got to the game. One command crashed video, audio, and then whole system. I also set others to randomly crash around same time people walked in to supervise what was going on. Friends and I griped our machines were down about every day. Person in charge ordered us to keep using them and get no replacements because that served wiseasses like us. Oh, yes it did. Served us well. (evil grin) Note: Also embedded web browser into our business application in development-mode only. The GUI forms and such. Policy had IE locked down but embedded browser still worked lol. So, fast coders got the job done quickly then were bullshitting around on Internet till someone approached. One key stroke and back to boring UI testing. ;)
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Since I alternate between developer and system admin jobs[1], you message hits me both as "Righteous" and "Dammit you $^%& developer". I am so conflicted. 1) welcome to the wonderful and horrible world of a journeyman in the middle
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      I try to stay in those grey areas where people sort of want to stop me but find my antics too useful or entertaining. :) Far as that setup, sysadmin was a pal of mine who hated the unreliable crap he had to manage. He had already made sure all the work sync'd to their Novell network's central storage. I also told people to make CD backups with the CD burners on the machines. With my help, people just lost time here and there with him not having to do any extra work. So, sysadmin was thanking me for helping him deal with machines that were inexplicably always crashing "because Acer machines are garbage." You feel more or less conflicted now? :P
      - protomyth 10y ago
        Sadly, these days, the Acer machines are the least problematic of the machines (looking at you H "100 hard drive failures out of 120 machines" P) I have to deal with. [edit] I feel about the same, as a system admin, I get bit in the /\$$ way too often by good intentions. I hear they pave a road with them (I think I worked there).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
briane80 10y ago
I once heard a (probably apocryphal) story of a developer who had been playing Doom installed on a server. The sysadm caught him playing it and promptly unistalled the game. However the important business application hosted on the server then stopped working and no one could figure out why. Nothing would work... even after lots of debugging, error log analysis and redeploying. The developer suggested installing Doom again and lo and behold, the application started working.
- dkuntz2 10y ago
  If someone tells you that story, they have to explain why.
  - nextweek2 10y ago
    It was actually a common problem back in the day. Software would ship with shared DLL's, uninstalling an application would usually have a knock on effect. MS-DOS was used a lot for small office servers. Whilst Windows NT4 was growing in popularity, it was an expensive option for firms. Plus it was hard to play games on NT4 due to memory protection issues. A fable of Doom being needed to run a server in today's environment is ridiculous, however back then things were a lot less mature. The issue wasn't limited to just games. Any application with shared files was a nightmare, normally you just renamed files, rebooted, then if things worked you could delete the files.