full-disclosure - DCOM RPC exploit (dcom.c)

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From: pauls at utdallas.edu (Schmehl, Paul L)
Subject: DCOM RPC exploit  (dcom.c)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ron DuFresne [mailto:dufresne@...ternet.com] 
> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 10:46 AM
> To: Schmehl, Paul L
> Cc: Robert Wesley McGrew; full-disclosure@...ts.netsys.com
> Subject: RE: [Full-Disclosure] DCOM RPC exploit (dcom.c)
> 
> And those sites during slammer that blocked 1434, as was 
> advised when the patch was made available, though it was 
> advised even long before that, were largely unafected.  Sites 
> that are properly blocking 135 and it's protocolcs will most 
> likely be unaffected from any new worm wishing to exploit 
> this repeat problem with DCOM/RPC.
> 
This is simply and plainly false.  I don't know why people can't seem to
grasp this.  I know of several major corporations who not only had
1434/UDP blocked at the firewall but also on a number of internal
routers *and* had aggressive patching programs, and they *still*
suffered from Slammer.   All it takes is *one* infected box *inside* the
network to negate all the hard work you've done trying to keep the worm
out.

When you have 150,000 machines worldwide, having 1% of those unpatched
(which is a 99% *success* rate) means you have 1500! vulnerable
machines.  Most situations that I'm familiar with were in the tens - not
even the hundreds - but it only took 10 or 15 machines to take down the
entire network due to the nature of that worm.  10 or 15 boxes
represents 1/100th of a percent of the total, yet that small number
could completely destablize a network and cause untold hours of work for
the admins and networking staff.

Now anybody who wants to tell me that a 0.01% failure rate in a patching
program proves the admins are incompetent is simply ignorant of the
issues.  I guess it's just impossible for people who don't actually run
a large network to grasp the nature of the issues.

You build your little home network, you put up a FreeBSD box as a
NAT/Router/Firewall, and you think you understand networking in a large
enterprise?  You haven't a clue.

Paul Schmehl (pauls@...allas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu/~pauls/