• Kiwi Man-in-the-middle attack?

    Posted on November 24, 2007 at 01:56 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    Patrick Gray, writing in The Age, reports that New Zealander Beau Butler has discovered a big-time security hole in some versions of Windows – but apparently not in the American versions.

    Two days earlier, in a TechToday posting, Gray described Butler’s recent presentation at the Kiwicon conference thusly:

    In the most sensational presentation of the conference, security researcher Beau Butler showed us how Microsoft’s completely half-arsed fix of a known issue – problems with Windows Proxy Autodiscovery – could be used by the more evil among us to seize control of vast numbers of workstations. Due to a bug in Microsoft’s WPAD functionality, proxy auto-configuration requests frequently wind up popping out on to the Internet.

    That means bad, bad people can load up your workstations with false proxy information. That’s right, Butler had figured out a way to run a man-in-the-middle attack on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workstations in his home country. You’ll be hearing more on this, but in the mean time it would make sense to configure a wpad server in your organisation to stop Microsoft’s silly software from seeking proxy configuration files from evil hackers outside your organisation.

    I don’t have any other details, but it sounds as if this might be a significant problem. (In particular, this many be the same WPAD problem that was reported back in March and addressed, if not solved, in KB article 934864) Certainly, Microsoft is now listening. Will keep you posted.

    Thanks to JT for the heads-up.

    Windows Patches/Security
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