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Tuesday, December 4

Microsoft reopens WPAD Vulnerability from 1999.

Apparently MSFT hasn't had enough vulns lately.  They decided to reintroduce one (or never fix it in the first place).

From 1999.

Reported last week at a "ethical hacker conference" in New Zealand by Beau Butler, the WPAD vulnerability allows you to perform a man-in-the-middle attack for hostnames that do not have a FQDN.    Essentially, what happened is Microsoft fixed it back in 1999, and it's taken this long to figure out that they only fixed it for ".com".  Other extensions weren't fixed at all ".au", ".nz" for example.

Some blogs have picked this up and said "Zero Day!!!"  But it's not.  It's the same one from 1999.

Here is a link to the Microsoft Security Advisory posted yesterday.

It lists several mitigating factors.
• Customers who do not have a primary DNS suffix configured on their system are not affected by this vulnerability. In most cases, home users that are not members of a domain have no primary DNS suffix configured. Connection-specific DNS suffixes may be provided by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and these configurations are not affected by this vulnerability.
• Customers whose DNS domain name is registered as a second-level domain (SLD) below a top-level domain (TLD) are not affected by this vulnerability. Customers whose DNS suffixes reflect this registration would not be affected by this vulnerability. An example of a customer who is not affected is contoso.com or fabrikam.gov, where “contoso” and “fabrikam” are customer registered SLDs under their respective “.com” and “.gov” TLDs.
• Customers who have specified a proxy server via DHCP server settings or DNS are not affected by this vulnerability.
• Customers who have a trusted WPAD server in their organization are not affected by this vulnerability. (See the Workaround section for specific steps in creating a WPAD.DAT file on a WPAD server.)
• Customers who have manually specified a proxy server in Internet Explorer are not at risk from this vulnerability when using Internet Explorer.
• Customers who have disabled 'Automatically Detect Settings' in Internet Explorer are not at risk from this vulnerability when using Internet Explorer.

In my opinion, this is weak.  That's apparently Secunia's opinion as well.  As they rated it "less critical".

My question is, did MSFT re-introduce this vulnerability?  Or did they just half ass fix it in `99?

The following OS'es are affected:
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Web Edition
Microsoft Windows Vista
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Professional

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