September 30, 2009, 2:49PM

SMB2 Exploit Fitted into Metasploit; Attacks Likely

Fully functional exploit code for the (still unpatched) Windows SMB v2 vulnerability has been released to the public domain via the freely available Metasploit point-and-click attack tool, raising the likelihood for remote in-the-wild code execution attacks.

The exploit, created and released by Harmony Security's Stephen Fewer, provides a clear roadmap for hackers to plant malware or open backdoors on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and 2 as well as Windows 2008 SP1 server.

The release of the public exploit puts Microsoft under serious pressure to complete its patch-testing process and release a fix to head off in-the-wild attacks.

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According to Microsoft's Johnathan Ness, the company's security response team has already completed more than 10,000 separate test cases in their regression testing and are currently doing "stress testing, 3rd-party application testing, and fuzzing."

Microsoft's next scheduled Patch Day is more than two weeks away -- on October 13, 2009 -- which means the company is now under pressure to issue an emergency, out-of-cycle fix for vulnerable Windows users.

The flaw, which was originally released on September 8 as a simple denial-of-service issue, does not affect the RTM version of Windows 7

On September 17, a team of exploit writers from Immunity created a remote exploit that’s been fitted into Immunity’s Canvas pen-testing platform. The exploit hits all versions of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 SP2.

Until Microsoft issues a patch, vulnerable Windows users should immediately implement the one-click "fix-it" workaround that's available. The fix-it package, which was added to Redmond’s pre-patch advisory, effectively disables SMBv2 and then stops and starts the Server service. It provides temporary mitigation from remote code execution attacks targeting the known — and still unpatched — vulnerability.

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