The researcher disclosed the bug one week before Microsoft is scheduled to patch it. I'm sure MS isn't thrilled, but they did drag their feet:
"I decided to release this bug one week before the patch is released, because it is not the first time Microsoft sits on my bugs. I'm doing free work here with them (I'm not paid in anyways for that) with the goal of helping their users. When they sit on a bug like this one, they're not helping their users but doing marketing damage control, and opportunistic patch release."
The researcher sounds really petty. They're patching it, but not on this person's schedule so he's causing microsoft and USERS problems they didn't have before.
If they weren't patching, I'd understand, but this isn't the right way to get attention in my book.
There are very competent people on this planet who make a very good buck out of zero-days (not to mention remotely control users' machines, and steal data). IMO the researcher didn't want that particular vulnerability to dwell on somebody's todo list for several years.
It definitely puts pressure on MS but I don't think that's bad. Corporations have demonstrated time and again that the only way to get them to move is a PR hype.
If they want researchers to stop doing preliminary public disclosures, they should prioritize security higher than PR damage control.
> IMO the researcher didn't want that particular vulnerability to dwell on somebody's todo list for several years.
Except the researcher themselves knew it was one more week, and not "several years." You cannot claim they were ignorant if their own statements shows that they were not.
Well, if MS claims the patch is coming in one week, one approach might be to wait one week and then release the exploit. Works out regardless of the accuracy of the claim.
Meh. The bug requires you to connect Windows to a malicious SMB server.
Now that everybody knows that, if anybody is really concerned, they can stop SMB connections from LAN to WAN by blocking TCP 139, 445 and UDP 137, 138.
You're absolutely right! The researcher acted in a questionably ethical manner here by waiting to disclose the vulnerability. The only ethical approach is full and immediate public disclosure.
Full and immediate public disclosure seems irresponsible and counterproductive IMO.
The last thing I'd want as a developer or a manager is to wake up in the morning with a PR shit storm and angry users on my hands because some inane script kiddie found it appropriate to disclose a zero day without reaching out to me or my team first. Sure, some other guy might know about or find the vulnerability and exploit it by the time a patch comes out; it's guaranteed that they will if you release a 0day.
We can discuss all we want on what a reasonable delay to release a patch might be, but absolutely not on the notion that immediate public disclosure is the right thing to do. It wastes everyone' time, disrupts workflows, puts fellow developers, their managers, and their users under intense pressure and stress, all so some kid can enjoy an ego trip. To me it just seems gross and childish.
There's no excuse for them to delay patching it without explaining to him in detail why there's a delay, and even if he had been a dick about it, they should've had a very good explanation for the public.
They had neither and that is unacceptable.
Reason being: Even if he doesn't publicize it, someone else might know and be using it without MS knowledge. Anytime you become aware of an exploit one must act as if it already is being abused.
What is the thresshold where you do decide to release the bug description?
Microsoft has sat on bugs for years saying they were working on them. Do you disclose after a week? A Month? a Year?
If it were a company or team with a solid history of patching swiftly I could see trusting them. But this is Microsoft, they have the resources to fix bugs. They chose an OS design that sacrificed security for other things. Worst, they chose to betray trust in the past. Someday Microsoft might earn that trust back, but they are a long way off from earning mine.
If I informed them of the bug and it wasn't fixed in the next patch, then I would need solid evidence they are working on it or I release the exploit. If it were a group I trusted I would follow up several times until I lost faith in them.
I don't know, I guess that really depends on the frequency and context of 'not the first time Microsoft sits on one of my bugs'. I'm not a security researcher but I suppose if I was and Microsoft was sitting on my bugs pretty frequently and they were really serious I might just give them a shot across the bows one fine day.
And when Microsoft do cut QA short people complain that Microsoft doesn't care about quality/is using retail as a beta test. It is really a no-win situation to be honest.
The correct way to do this is immediately release a bulletin to admins to block the affected service, then push a patch to disable it, then push a patch to fix and reenable it when they feel ready.
It's only unwinable because Microsoft refuses to take a PR/cash hit of telling people to stop using something while it's broken.
We live in the age of security researcher marketing. No one wants to be the anonymous guy who submitted sometnhing. They want to be the star and have all these articles written about them and all this attention. The easiest, of course unethical, way to get this is to release something before its patched regardless of what the OEM is doing in regards to patch scheduling. To release one week before patch Tuesday is a pretty big middle-finger to a lot of people for no other reason than what looks like personal gain or spite.
I imagine this decision is going to bring him a lot of negative attention. I wouldn't hire someone who 0-day'd a security bug a week before its patch out of spite.
Thankfully, connecting to a random smb is a fairly edge case. I believe most firewalls block smb to/from the internet and most consumer ISPs block the protocol outright. This probably won't have much of a real world impact.
> He told Ars that the software maker initially planned to patch the flaw in December but later decided to delay the release until February so it could be included with other planned SMB fixes.
No, it was only a 0day before he made it public. He is merely providing security-conscious persons information and a way to defend themselves from an exploit which MS has not fixed. He is turning a 0day into a known vuln.
You know who sounds really petty though? The whiners taking Microsoft's side despite them missing the bug in the first place and sleeping on the report, and now attacking the person who reported it.
> They're patching it, but not on this person's schedule so he's causing microsoft and USERS problems they didn't have before.
Not in the slightest. You do not understand how the internet works. The vulnerable systems were vulnerable yesterday, and are vulnerable today because MS didn't think it was worth hurrying to patch them. Users' harm was caused by Microsoft who gave them a broken product, and by any hypothetical hackers, not by a security researcher telling the public what the hackers probably already knew.
Microsoft had a chance to release an emergency bulletin as soon as they were informed of the vuln, with mitigation steps. (ie, block SMB, etc) They didn't, and in fact spent time recommending useless things (Win10, Edge) that only serve to slander competitors by implication, and pimp more of their products.
Microsoft needs the understand that the new timeframe for releasing mitigations, if not patches, is closer to 24h than 24 days. But even if they hit that metric, they don't deserve any fanfare until they do it without lying or misdirecting.
Downvoters: RTFA - The Microsoft reports are intentionally misleading wrt. steps customers need to follow to be safe, and they claim to be better that their competitors (Apple, etc) in this regard despite obvious and consistent proof to the contrary. Microsoft is responding to security concerns with marketing speak, and they're knowingly setting their customers up for catastrophic data loss or hacks by recommending useless fixes.
He asked a PR person, probably one with little security background (how many security people do you know who went into PR?) gave the stock answer which does happen to actually be good security advice: run the latest supported version with patches.
The reporter was just butthurt about not getting a scoop and decided to write an article complaining about PR practices in place of an actual story.
Really like the click bait title though, it's a nice touch. /s
>Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible,
EDIT
and this
>The time has come for Microsoft vulnerability disclosure communications to mute the marketers and let the security engineers do the talking instead.
In this case it seems to have been fully-fledged lying, not just bullshit: Microsoft (told the researcher they) delayed releasing this patch so they could release a number of SMB-related fixes at once.
They might have good reasons for doing that, but it isn't true to say they "proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible".
Microsoft always seems to prefer going on offense rather than playing defense. They are one of the least self-aware companies I can think of. For example, this absolutely insane "funeral march" for iPhone and Blackberry they held in 2010 to celebrate the launch of Windows Phone 7 [1]. What other company would even consider this?
They are one of the least self-aware companies I can think of.
That was Uncle Fester's Microsoft. That behavior was an extension of Ballmer's pugilistic personality.
Today's Microsoft is just as tone-deaf, but in a different respect. For the life of me I can't understand why Nadella thinks that their recent behavior wrt. Win 10 is a good idea. E.g. rebooting user's machines during presentations, having spyware that it's not possible to disable, advertising in the OS, etc.
I am still shocked that Windows was recoverable from the fiasco of XP security problems. They have gotten exponentially better in security over the years.
The NT Kernel is a very secure and resilient design, it was just mucked up over the years with Win32 blurring the lines between the kernel and userland. MinWin was an internal project that started in Windows 7 where the tendrils of things like Win32 were extricated from the kernel. In addition to improving security, this also enabled things like multi-platform support and headless servers.
Truth be told, Microsoft has among the worst PR agencies/policies from the tech industry. Very bureaucratic, slow to get something out of them, and you usually end up with just canned answers and most questions dodged. It's hardly even worth the effort to contact Microsoft's PR about something.
Unless you know a higher-up exec, like Mary Jo Foley or Paul Thurrott does, for instance, you're unlikely to get a real answer for a security question. For a journalist, writing what you think happened, and then waiting for Microsoft to react, contact you, and tell you what really happened is likely a much more effective strategy to get something out of Microsoft.
tl;dr: a CVSS 7.8 Windows vulnerability in the SMB service can allow an attacker to DoS any machine with the filesharing service exposed; the possibility of RCE seems to have been discarded; exploits are freely available online. This article complains that Microsoft's communication is lacking details and transparency in times of war
Does anybody know how many days it would take from when a critical security bug is discovered in Windows and assuming that the fix is just a few lines of code and not a component rewrite and marketing is not in the way, I am wondering how many steps are from when a fix is created until is released.(I imagine that there may some QA and some managers that need to approve it but I have no idea)
Disclosure: I work at MS but not on the kernel or anything related to this security bug. Opinions are my own.
I've seen one-line bug fixes introduce many other bugs.
Adding a null check is always suspicious. Is the system in an invalid state? Should it fail fast instead of swallowing the error?
Maybe the code wasn't touched in several years. Maybe the person that wrote it no longer works there. Maybe the code in question doesn't have good test coverage or documentation. There are so many variables to consider when assessing risk of code changes.
It depends. Some bugs can be fixed easily and some might be too complicate to fix even though it looks simple. Usually all critical bugs are attended as soon as they are created (few hours delay). But the actual fix depends on the bug and there is no general formula for that
Even assuming that, there could be a massive testing load to ensure that those few lines of code don't mess up something tangentially related, or cause new security issues of their own.
Assuming you just need to add a check for null pointer and that this bug is very critical like hackers are exploiting it, assume engineers create a fix and are 100% it is safe, hopefully there was no other component that was depending on the broken code , how much it will take to fix it,
maybe there is somewhere a history of critical bugs , with the date of when it was found and when it was fixed then we can find the time interval.
The Windows kernel is one of the most mission critical pieces of software in the world. And is easily the most important piece of IP for MS. I'd argue there's no such thing as a "simple fix". I have no doubt even the most trivial of changes has to be very thoroughly vetted.
They could have a solution out the door in less than 24h but it may be a mitigation (ie, disable the service) rather than a proper fix. But that's pretty easy. In fact, it's usually the first thing an engineer does when verifying a bug report - "Ok I've reproduced it, now let's shut off the service and make sure the problem goes away."
Release a patch that disables the vulnerable service and give people a way to bypass that and turn it back on once they've taken proper internal measures. (Read the CVE, block ports, etc...)
> What is the threshold where you decide to release a bug description?
Absolute minimum: 1 month after patch.
Also: Leave 1 month, as an absolute minimum, to publish a patch.
Why that? Because it takes time to track a bug and fix it and test the fix and ship it to 1 billion consumers in 150 countries and languages.
Welcome to the world of real users where things take time to happen.
Of course, one may think that he's an idealistic enthusiast pressuring the evil big companies when giving them less time. But nope, the only thing one may truly accomplish is being an unrealistic asshole putting millions of computers and people at risk. Think twice before you disclose. There will also be your mom's computer on the other end of that 0-day ;)
"I decided to release this bug one week before the patch is released, because it is not the first time Microsoft sits on my bugs. I'm doing free work here with them (I'm not paid in anyways for that) with the goal of helping their users. When they sit on a bug like this one, they're not helping their users but doing marketing damage control, and opportunistic patch release."