As part of the May “Tuesday updates”, Microsoft fixed the critical vulnerability CVE-2019-0708 (also known as BlueKeep) related to the operation of Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and RDP.
Although the technical details of the problem were not disclosed due to its high level of threat, it is known that with the help of this bug attackers can execute arbitrary code without authorization and distribute their malware like a worm, as, for example, it was famous WannaCry and NotPetya malware.The issue is dangerous for Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 2003 and Windows XP, for these versions were released security updates.
Microsoft experts have already warned about this problem twice, and experts from several information security companies (including Zerodium, McAfee, Check Point and Kaspersky Lab) and independent researchers have created proof of exploits’ concept for BlueKeep.
The code for these exploits has not been made publicly available due to a high a risk. In addition, for the vulnerability has already been created module MetaSploit (also not available in the public domain).
Last week, BitSight experts published another depressing statistics: according to their data, about 800,000 devices are still vulnerable to BlueKeep. Apparently, users of these devices should think about installing patches as soon as possible, since yesterday on GitHub was published a presentation detailing the use of the vulnerability and creation of an exploit.
Slides of this presentation almost entirely written in Chinese. On them mentioned 2019 Security Development Conference and name of the famous Chinese company Tencent KeenLab. The two slides also contain the word “demo”.
ArsTechnica journalists asked information security specialists about the presentation, interviewing independent expert Marcus Hutchins and Rendition Infosec co-founder and former developer of exploits for the NSA, Jake Williams.
“One of the only things standing in the way of real-world attacks is the expertise required to write exploits that remotely execute code without crashing the computer first”, — said Marcus Hutchins.
In general, both specialists agree that the situation is very serious, since publishing a detailed presentation significantly lowers chances for creating RCE exploits for BlueKeep. The fact is that the slides show in detail how to implement heap spraying, that is, according to the presentation, is one of the most difficult tasks during creation of an exploit.
“It’s the most detailed publicly available technical documentation we’ve seen so far”, — explained Jake Williams.
He also suggested that Tencent KeenLab experts obviously created and demonstrated at the conference an RCE-exploit for BlueKeep, although the PoC itself was not published.
Previously, security experts believed that BlueKeep’s exploits would be widely available around mid-August, after the end of Black Hat and Defcon conferences in Las Vegas. However, now they are inclined to assume that this will happen earlier.
