Internet Explorer zero-day lets hackers steal files from Windows PCs

Discussion in 'other security issues & news' started by guest, Apr 12, 2019.

  1. itman

    itman Registered Member

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    Getting back to the 0Patch detailed analysis, this "hidden" Win 10 setting they supposedly discovered in Edge .mht downloads in regards to MOTW is baloney in my opinion.

    Edge internal security settings are in reality just IE11 maximum security settings. Edge will always open in AppContainer and does so by always enforcing EPM internally. As such, any thing Edge downloads will reflect this EPM status via its SID assigned permissions. What happened here was IE11 did recognize the EPM status on the Edge download. However, IE11 itself was not configured to run in EPM, so it just ignored that request and opened the download in non-AppContainer mode. In other words, MOTW setting on the download really had nothing to do with the issue.
     
  2. itman

    itman Registered Member

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    TrendMicro did a detail analysis on this here: https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendla...er-can-let-attackers-steal-files-system-info/. I must say it is the best analysis to date. To begin with, not once is any of this "MOTW" business mentioned. How the hell the security "powers to be" got that screwed up is beyond me.

    Trend also has Microsoft's official response to the issue which is:
    For once I find myself "partially" agreeing w/Microsoft. In typical Microsoft to quote a native American saying "speaking with forked tongue" fashion, they conveniently omitted what Trend notes in the article that the default extension assignment for .mht files is IE11. Just embed a .mht file in a MS Word .docx file and click the file icon in the document. At default MS Word security settings, the .mht file will open IE11 with the mhtml code rendered.

    Which takes us to the best way to handle this. Just permanently assign the .mht extension to notepad.exe or whatever, and be done with the issue.
     
  3. Rasheed187

    Rasheed187 Registered Member

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  4. itman

    itman Registered Member

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    In the POC, he uploaded system.ini from the C:\Windows directory. Do you monitor all read access to C:\Windows directory?
     
  5. Rasheed187

    Rasheed187 Registered Member

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    I care more about my private files being stolen. Who cares about C:\Windows.
     
  6. itman

    itman Registered Member

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    Yikes! The researcher just used that file as an example in his POC.
     
  7. Rasheed187

    Rasheed187 Registered Member

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    Yikes! Is it really this hard to understand what I mean? For example, I have blocked my browser from getting access to my data partition, so this means that these type of exploits will almost certainly fail to steal data. Of course there is a drawback, because sometimes you might need to upload certain files, so then you can either copy those files to unprotected folders, or you can temporarily disable file/folder protection.
     
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