7 ms·
Microsoft 0-day feud escalates as researcher threatens another exploit dump
- rekabis 5mo agoI may not have seen the full story - and I am cognizant of this - but what I have seen so far puts me solidly on the side of Nightmare Eclipse. Microsoft is making all indications that it is behaving like a colossal dick. It’s not a good look. As always: if you find yourself in a deep hole, stop digging.
- zadkey 5mo agoEverything I've ready points to the same.
- notawhitemale 5mo ago[dead]
- rolph 5mo agothere are active forks, and active mitigations for redsun undefend and bluehammer. so far as i can tell yellowkey is problematic, as the exploit takes advantage of a backdoor that ms needs, to "manage" your computer. only recently has a OOB mitigation been offered https://www.techspot.com/news/112410-security-researcher-microsoft-secretly-built-backdoor-bitlocker-releases.html https://www.techspot.com/news/112410-security-researcher-mic...
- ranger_danger 5mo ago> backdoor that ms needs source:
- mittensc 5mo ago> so far as i can tell yellowkey is problematic, as the exploit takes advantage of a backdoor that ms needs, to "manage" your computer. It does look like an intentional backdoor. The way ms is responding to it is even more suspicious. Pretty funny since this defeats security on most corporate laptops, so impact is huge. You'd expect them to treat the reporter better and fix the issue fast... I'm curious why they put it in, I'm not sure I understand the 'to "manage" your computer' note. Microsoft should have no reason to put something like this in. So either they were forced or they had some engineers that did this on their own without any oversight.
- rolph 5mo agomanage- meaning remove or disable your stuff and reinstate slopware. i dont know how much fiddling around you may have done to make a win11 install local and secure, but but if you dont get it right the first time, most often the next update will involve re-installation of bloatkrapp. the in house usage is apparently to allow bypass of bitlocker by the winRE recovery environment. this has been exploited for some time already, allowing malicious uses of trustedinstaller ACL. ive had to deal with persistent installs using exactly this route, and a really nasty one will brick your machine if you dont knock out its components in proper sequence pwning the trusted installer account, and disabling the viral recovery mechanism.
- jeroenhd 5mo agoThe backdoor could be a bug, but I don't really understand how it happened. The attack works by having an NTFS log get replayed against another partition than the one the log is stored on. Sending the right signals to unlock Bitlocker in TPM-only mode is a necessity for recovery operations. Managing to replace the executable launched post verification is a plausible attack vector. The weird thing is why it's possible to put the corrupting transactions on a different disk than the one being updated. In theory I think it would be possible that it's a combination of "all recovery partitions share the same FS identifier and are verified before transaction playback" (it is a pre-packaged WIM file after all) and "the transaction log stores the FS identifier of the partition the changes are meant for", but in my opinion the latter part is a very weird architecture to choose. If this is a backdoor, I appreciate how clever they were hiding it. If this is a bug, the person who discovered it probably has a whole lot more ready to publish.
- Shank 5mo agoThe thing that made Nightmare think it was a backdoor is that the bug is only present in the recovery version of the DLLs, not the one built into the system, and not prior versions of Windows. It’s also for a file system feature that Microsoft hasn’t “touched” in ages and they consider fairly esoteric.
- mittensc 5mo ago
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 5mo ago> “CVD is a two-way street,” he said. “The vendor has some responsibility as well, so to go out publicly stating this person violated CVD without showing any of the correspondence seems bold.” > “It confusingly claims their program ‘ensures researchers are compensated and publicly acknowledged’ in a statement answering a researcher who says he got neither,” Well said.
- zamalek 5mo agoI would argue that this form of disclosure is ethical in the face of Microsoft misbehaving. It's like mutually assured destruction - and in this case (it sounds like) Microsoft tried to cheat and thought they would get away with it. Feeling consequences are how they are kept in line. Maybe next time they will think twice before (allegedly) treating a person like they did here, as well as the creative reasoning I recall them using in the past to reduce payouts.
- thewebguyd 5mo ago> the creative reasoning I recall them using in the past to reduce payouts. It's a wonder anyone even reports things to Microsoft anymore because of this. They have a long habit of declaring things as intentional, then silently patching it after.
- 12_throw_away 5mo agoTBH, the microsoft statement itself feels like slop. Not necessarily LLM slop (although who are we kidding, it probably was), but definitely like corporate slop, written by some manager with no context for how any of this is supposed to work (they laid off all the people who did), but with a need to make some sort of statement-shaped response
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoRelated: GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315968
- 45ahgd 5mo agoThis is poor damage control by Microslop. Why would the researcher publish valuable exploits without trying to get a bounty? Usually, when an individual is that upset, the group or corporation is wrong and tries to shape public perception by lying. Since when is publishing zero days a crime anyway? Shame on Microslop for these intimidation tactics. The real crime is vibe coding operating systems.
- midtake 5mo agoSorry not sorry
- this_user 5mo agoAt the end of the day, Microsoft won't care how bad any of this will make them look. Their reputation has been abysmal for decades, but none of it actually seems to have any kind of negative effect on their bottom line.
- lukan 5mo agoBecause they mainly care about their reputation in C suites not internet forums.
- rustyhancock 5mo agoI know this is a crazy take. But I go feel so down trodden by many many tech corps these days I find it hard not to have a smidge of satisfaction for this guy pointing out the colossal favour research developers do for them by responsible disclosure. That said, I feel bad for the inevitable victims of exploitation and also I am certain he will end up criminalized or as per usual the law will enforce a large corps will against him. Yes. Definitely a Friday night after a hard week take.
- vorpalhex 5mo agoMicrosoft chose to run a shoddy bounty program. The researcher tried to do the right thing. Microsoft could have prevented this. They were warned. It's their own fault. The exploit exists whether or not the researcher reports it. They didn't make the exploit.
- thewebguyd 5mo ago> They didn't make the exploit This is important to remember, in this situation and all other 0-day disclosures. There's also no guarantee that the uses of said 0 day after disclosure are the only time its been actively exploited. The exploit was already existing, and there are plenty of three letter agencies and Israeli companies that could very well have already been aware of them. The only place blame belongs here is on Microsoft, no where else.
- thot_experiment 5mo agoNaw totally agree, we need way more robust protections for security researchers and way harsher penalties for corpos doing bullshit, it should be a percentage of revenue. We have way too much fuck around these days and not nearly enough find out.
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoNothing crazy about it. Crazy is feeling sorry for the trillion dollar corporation. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The right thing is immediate publication of all exploits, zero liability for the researcher who's just doing a public service and maximum liability for the corporation whose criminal negligence enabled the exploits to begin with.
- throwaway763210 5mo agoResponsible disclosure isn't a law, it's a norm vendors invented and lean on when it suits them. Nothing legally requires you to report to a vendor first. Full disclosure and non disclosure are a valid choice as well. Maybe Microsoft should spend less energy threatening researchers and more on not shipping the slop code in the first place.
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoOr maybe they shouldn't revoke the very accounts researchers are required to use to communicate exploits to MS?
- themafia 5mo ago> “We remain firmly opposed to these actions, and any disclosure outside proper coordination that could harm our customers and the digital ecosystem,” Precisely. /Your/ customers. I have no obligation to them and you profit handsomely from them. I'm not sure you can use "opposition" as a strategy to ameliorate your own negligence followed by inaction.
- chasil 5mo agoThe best interests of the customers of Microsoft is an immediate apology, a payment of at least $100,000, and a signed agreement pledging that no (further) legal action will be taken. The denial of Microsoft is just as harmful as the exploits of these flaws.
- cyanydeez 5mo agoor everyone just dump all their exploits on Saturday morning 2AM, then buy puts.
- TacticalCoder 5mo ago> or everyone just dump all their exploits on Saturday morning 2AM, then buy puts. But nobody can buy PUTs at 2am on a saturday morning? You should buy PUTs on a friday before close then dump the exploits no?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- theogravity 5mo agoShort via Hyperliquid or some other crypto exchange that tokenizes stock? HL does have a trading pair for MSFT and trades 24/7.
- vkou 5mo agoYou don't want to go short on a company when that happens, you want to go long. Amazon stock goes up when AWS bugs take down the entire internet, because everyone realizes that more of the internet depends on Amazon than they thought.
- cryo32 5mo agoI've been working with Microsoft products since about 1989. It has been mostly miserable, like living with a schizophrenic gorilla. You wake up in the morning and don't know how fucked your day is going to be. Dealing with them has been absolutely impossible even when you were one of their "gold" tier partners back in the day. I hope the promise of a July 14th threat goes as planned. They need to hurt. And everyone needs to see the risks they are taking by using their products.
- codedokode 5mo agoI read a little about BitLocker. It seems to store the encryption key in TPM and acquire it automatically after boot. I wonder, can encryption key be extracted by inserting a rogue PCIe card and reading it from memory, or by inserting a rogue DDR memory card with a backdoor to read the key from it, or by sniffing CPU - TPM bus?
- kotaKat 5mo agoSniffing the TPM's been available for quite some time, actually - and quite cheap! https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/articles/TPM-sniffing https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/articles/TPM-sniffing The best way would be to arguably keep the key completely off the TPM and use remote attestation. There's some preboot products out there like WinMagic SecureDoc* that use a little Linux partition, spin up just enough to get a network connection up to a remote server, provide authentication services, and then send the Bitlocker key down, unlock the partition, and chainload onwards to Windows. * I acquired an enterprise device on eBay and was VERY surprised to find this product on it as the preboot protector. Zero way to crack in from my end, so I applaud it. There's even some MFA solutions they offer around this! https://winmagic.com/en/solutions/mfa-windows-login/ https://winmagic.com/en/solutions/mfa-windows-login/
- Retr0id 5mo agoSomething I've never understood about TPM attestation, is what happens if you plug the TPM into a microcontroller and give it all the same measurements that it would normally receive during a normal boot? Would that let you spoof attestations?
- pitched 5mo agoTPM-only saves you against someone pulling your drive. Probably more than enough for a USB drive. Enable startup PIN if you’re worried about someone grabbing the whole laptop.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 5mo agoI wonder: what's the approximate market value on the bugs so far released?
- cdud3 5mo agoDepends on if this are really zero days or only to the public known zero days.
- zingababba 5mo agoWatching Microsoft squirm is always peak
- Hikikomori 5mo agoHey MSRC. Maybe don't ban security researchers and then complain about vulnerabilities not being disclosed to you? Have you tried not fucking yoursef?
- gslepak 5mo agoIt's poor form to publish exploits like this but Microsoft not paying their bounty is also poor form, and so is attempting to exploit the legal system to defend Microsoft's "right" to write buggy code.
- rileymat2 5mo agoIt is not all about money, but microsoft had a net income of 101 billion last year, and a 36% profit margin. I am not saying humans or AI can create "perfect" software, but NASA has shown there is a HUGE gap between what can be achieved and what commercial software has generally done. We have given software a pass on the liability for the damage it can caused when it is defective for too long, that's the only way to change this, it must hit the bottom line.
- skinfaxi 5mo agoIs NASA software accessible over the public internet?
- rileymat2 5mo agoNot all, but wouldn't that make a case for more rigorous standards? Economically things must be prioritized, but there is a very big gap between NASA standards and typical commercial software.
- _trampeltier 5mo agoAll the things up there can be contacted with radio. Some downstream data is easly readable. Sending is another thing, but satelites are in public communication space.
- fsckboy 5mo agothis is from 2010 but says that microsoft was not going to pay bug bounties https://www.computerworld.com/article/1510124/microsoft-no-money-for-bugs-2.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1510124/microsoft-no-m... did they start to do that at some point, or is this a pressure (blackmail?) campaign to get the to do that? I have no love for, but rather hate for, Microsoft, so I'm not suggesting blackmail in the sense of defending them, but it's something they could claim. this is on Microsoft's website, they don't promise much for CVD https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/cvd https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/cvd
- transcriptase 5mo agoThey’re supposed to. Instead they have a reputation for telling researchers that their disclosure isn’t actually a vulnerability and doesn’t qualify for a bounty or recognition, then quietly patching said non-vulnerability with a suspicious degree of urgency.
- jiggawatts 5mo agoHappened to me when I reported that I could get Azure to issue me a certificate for a domain I don’t own. Rejected, then quietly fixed a couple of months later.
- UltraSane 5mo agoThey should really hire him.
- bink 5mo agoResponding to bug bounty reports is a thankless job. Especially these days it's a flood of AI spam, language barriers, "pay me first", incomplete reports, huge egos, and people who think every find should be treated as a critical vulnerability. The people who handle these reports often do so after-hours or on holidays. In smaller companies they're also often the ones who manage the triage, patching, testing, and security release process. In larger companies they have to find owners for every line of code and convince those code owners of the severity (often knowing that neither or them will be rewarded for doing the work). All it takes is one wrong person to be assigned as a report comes in, a person who doesn't understand the real value of a bounty program, or one person having a bad day to completely ruin a company's reputation. It seems like that might have happened here (of course MS has done this before so who knows if it'll matter in the end). Microsoft needs to be completely transparent and to do so immediately. They should, with the reporters permission, release all communications. They can exclude technical details if patches aren't available yet. Doing anything less is going to prevent a lot of people from using their bounty program in the future and we'll all be worse off for it. They almost certainly made a mistake and they need to own up to it.
- myself248 5mo ago> The people who handle these reports often do so after-hours or on holidays. If that's the case at Microsoft, something is absurdly wrong.
- legohead 5mo agoI guess I'll play devil's advocate here, don't shoot me. Over the course of my career I've had to deal with multiple hacks, DDOSes, and even situations working with the FBI. It's a mess, and extremely frustrating and unfair to those of us who are just trying to do a good job and make a living. Those of you who are throwing stones at Microsoft's coding, how confident are you that your code is safe from this new AI age? Obviously MS handled this poorly, even after reading this article it's not clear how MS handles bug bounties. But that doesn’t mean this “researcher” deserves a pass. Releasing 0-days, especially working exploit code for unpatched vulnerabilities, is extremely unethical. It has real potential to cause a lot of harm to regular engineers, and users who had nothing to do with the dispute.
- nemomarx 5mo agoI don't think it's their fault for not making code without exploits. I do think they should try and close them in a timely fashion when the exploit is pointed out though - the longer they wait the more chance bad actors find it in addition to the security researchers. Ultimately they need to cooperate here for users to be safe.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoThey should also be fully transparent and not silently patch, and only issue a CVE weeks later after being called out like they did with RedSun, from this same researcher. That Microsoft releases vulnerable software isn't the issue (that's a known quality at this point), it's their lack of transparency and refusal to hold themselves accountable.
- rileymat2 5mo ago> I do think they should try and close them in a timely fashion when the exploit is pointed out though - the longer they wait the more chance bad actors find it in addition to the security researchers. You are assuming it is not already being actively exploited and there will be a timely response to fix it, which is why we have these ticking clocks.
- cdud3 5mo ago
- anonymousiam 5mo agoAttacking the messenger is an age-old trend in the bug reporting arena. Microsoft has the backing of many governments, and has access to the best legal teams possible, leaving this guy in a world of hurt. Microsoft seems to have brought this on themselves by creating a complex and user-hostile bug reporting system. It seems to me that they could have offered this person a job or a contract, because Eclipse has been amazingly effective at uncovering high-severity exploits. Also, Eclipse could have approached various governments offering the exploits for sale, because a lucrative market exists for such things, assuming they aren't already in the NSA portfolio. Lots of above-board companies do the same thing. Quotes in this article blame Eclipse for the damage, but the blame should really rest with Microsoft. Eclipse is apparently just one person using an AI framework. Microsoft has vastly more resources to discover and fix problems with their products, but they never seem to do it themselves.
- CTDOCodebases 5mo agoDid Microsoft ever explain why Bitlocker could be deliberately circumvented? Part of me thinks they are welcoming this drama because if the other 0-days are genuine bugs then it muddies the water and shifts the focus away from a the fact that they shipped an intentionally backdoored security product.
- SXX 5mo agoWhat is Microslop management and PR department doing? How come this can go for a week? They spent billions trying to build this open source and developer friendly image to just burn it all over $200,000 of unpaid security bounties. Microsoft is a dumpster fire.
- iJohnDoe 5mo agoI know this is a cynical approach, but I imagine most security flaws in Microsoft products are somewhat intentional. Either by purposefully putting them there or by willingly ignoring them. It’s widely known how much Microsoft cooperates with three letter agencies. I think they are in a bind on how to act in these situations. They don’t want to acknowledge or fix the 0-day vulnerabilities because they don’t know if those are in use via state sponsored operations. Either they deal with customer fallout or they deal with the grief from their agency liaisons that they interrupted a multi-year operation by fixing the 0-day. Vulnerability researchers really should avoid reporting to Microsoft and just sell them instead.
- bilekas 5mo agoI was reding about this yesterday and my tinfoil hat started to rustle in the drawer. It sounded like it really could have been a backdoor, that was complicated enough to not be an easy replacement to roll out without being detected, so Microslop tried to shut down the discovery as soon as possible, annoyed the wrong researcher and now they're at risk of really having to remove their back door to an administration that is not exactly understanding.
- nicman23 5mo agobold move in the age of llm 0 days. this will be worse than geohot and sony
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago"Ultimately, “the bugs are Microsoft's,” Moussouris said." Not much has changed at Microsoft Still trying to blame others for its own incompetence
- mentalgear 5mo agoReeks of a Management trying not to assign CVE labels to obvious vulnerabilities, so that in the public Windows doesn't come across as the security swiss chess nightmare that it is.
- mrandish 5mo agoIt's kind of fascinating how large corporations can end up acting like petulant children against their own interests and stated goals. We don't know who said or did what in this situation, but as TFA says, even if the researcher was a maximally bad actor, MSFT's public response hurts their interests. Sometimes individuals behave like petulant children but for a well-run corporation it's a failure mode. In my experience, corps sometimes behave this way not because it's the 'corporate intent' but simply due to internal politics and ass-covering by individual middle managers. MSFT's response is puzzling because it doesn't clear up anything nor does it try to de-escalate. It's also not the sort of completely neutral statement made when you need to respond but have nothing to say yet. This statement implies the researcher is a bad actor while also being vaguely threatening. I can't imagine any way this benefits MSFT. It appears more like a junior exec trying to manage the optics so it looks like their department isn't in the wrong. This ass-covering accomplishes nothing for MSFT. Even if the researcher was demanding payment for a vuln and wasn't producing sufficient justification for their demand or wasn't following the process, this isn't a productive response. It sounds more like a manager is worried what their boss thinks. The manager acting this way is bad but the root cause is often the manager's upline creating a context where managers feel they need to ass-cover and stage manage optics.