Exploits for several million Microsoft servers posted

This oughta be a blast....

By Thomas C Greene in Washington DC • Get more from this author

Posted in Software, 4th May 2001 07:01 GMT

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Several exploits have been developed for a buffer overflow vulnerability in servers running IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, which we reported on Tuesday.

The vulnerability exists in the .printer ISAPI (Internet Server Application Programming Interface) filter (C:\WINNT\System32\msw3prt.dll), which enables Web-based control of networked printers, due to an unchecked buffer in msw3prt.dll.

A malicious HTTP .print request containing approximately 420 bytes in the 'Host:' field enables execution of arbitrary code, and if handled right will yield system-level access on the target machine.

Microsoft has posted a patch, which it 'strongly urges' admins to install; but the number of machines running IIS on Win2k is so immense (several million at least) that cracking unpatched victims will be like shooting fish in a barrel.

With that in mind, computer enthusiast dark spyrit has put together jill.c, "an exploit code that will give you a remote command shell, reverse telnet style, on a vulnerable host. This exploit code takes advantage of a vulnerability in IIS that allows remote attacker to overflow one of IIS's internal buffers causing it to execute arbitrary code."

From Wanderley Abreu we have a memory-leak exploit called webexplt.pl; and from Ryan Permeh of eEye Digital Security, which discovered the vulnerability, we have a non-malicious exploit called iishack2000.c, which creates a file in the root of drive C imploring unpatched innocents to fix their systems. ®

Microsoft IIS hole gives System-level access

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