Displaying items by tag: SMB

Samba has released several updates that patch critical flaws in their popular Sever Message Block (SMB) freeware implementation. SMB is a protocol that allows for simple sharing of network resources and has had its share of critical vulnerabilities in the past. The sharing of network resources is a common target for attackers as it can be a quick an easy way to compromise a system. One of the vulnerabilities includes all versions of Samba before 4.13.17 (CVE-2021-44142).

SaaS is the de facto way of doing business for the SMB (and even for the enterprise). The costs of building your own infrastructure and maintaining it are just too high for most. Instead, it is easier and more cost effective to let someone else handle it. Buying a spot in Amazon Webs Service, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure it not complicated and the tools to help you set up your new business infrastructure are well done (if not always well documented). When you use these services, you do expect them to provide security, but what you may find out is that not all cloud vendors think that should come as part of the package. In fact, many look at them as little more than a way to gain extra revenue and not something that just should be done.

Over the weekend there was a lot of talk about how Windows in particular is vulnerable to a flaw that is linked to SMB. This flaw could allow someone to grab user information by forcing a redirect to a malicious server using the SMB protocol. The way it works is pretty simple; if you give someone a URL that begins with the work “file” then Windows (and some other systems) will think that you want to use SMB to connect to a file share. If the server that the link (URL) points to uses even basic authentication then you can try and tempt a user to put in their own credentials and grab them during the exchange.