A series of attacks against Microsoft Active Directory domains could allow miscreants to spoof DNS records, compromise Active Directory and steal all the secrets it stores, according to Akamai security researchers.
We’re told the attacks – which are usable against servers running the default configuration of Microsoft Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers – don’t require any credentials.
Akamai says it reported the issues to Redmond, which isn’t planning to fix the issue. Microsoft did not respond to The Register‘s inquiries.
The good news, according to Akamai, is that it hasn’t yet seen a server under this type of attack. The bad news: the firm’s flaw finders also told us that massive numbers of organizations are likely vulnerable, considering 40 percent of the “thousands” of networks that Akamai monitors are running Microsoft DHCP in the vulnerable configuration.
In addition to detailing the security issue, the cloud services biz also provided a tool that sysadmins can use to detect configurations that are at risk.
While the current report doesn’t provide technical details or proof-of-concept exploits, Akamai has promised, in the near future, to publish code that implements these attacks called DDSpoof – short for DHCP DNS Spoof.
“We will show how unauthenticated attackers can collect necessary data from DHCP servers, identify vulnerable DNS records, overwrite them, and use that ability to compromise AD domains,” Akamai security researcher Ori David said.
The DHCP attack research builds on earlier work by NETSPI’s Kevin Roberton, who detailed ways to exploit flaws in DNS zones.
[…]
In addition to creating non-existent DNS records, unauthenticated attackers can also use the DHCP server to overwrite existing data, including DNS records inside the ADI zone in instances where the DHCP server is installed on a domain controller, which David says is the case in 57 percent of the networks Akamai monitors.
“All these domains are vulnerable by default,” he wrote. “Although this risk was acknowledged by Microsoft in their documentation, we believe that the awareness of this misconfiguration is not in accordance with its potential impact.”
[…]
we’re still waiting to hear from Microsoft about all of these issues and will update this story if and when we do. But in the meantime, we’d suggest following Akamai’s advice and disable DHCP DNS Dynamic Updates if you don’t already and avoid DNSUpdateProxy altogether.
“Use the same DNS credential across all your DHCP servers instead,” is the advice.
Source: Attacks abuse Microsoft DHCP to spoof DNS records and steal secrets • The Register
Robin Edgar
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