RDP Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft is now taking steps to prevent Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) brute-force attacks as part of the latest builds for the Windows 11 operating system in an attempt to raise the  security baseline  to meet the evolving threat landscape. To that end, the default policy for Windows 11 builds – particularly, Insider Preview builds 22528.1000 and newer – will automatically lock accounts for 10 minutes after 10 invalid sign-in attempts. "Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute-force password vectors," David Weston, Microsoft's vice president for OS security and enterprise,  said  in a series of tweets last week. "This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks -- this control will make brute forcing much harder which is awesome!" It's worth pointing out that while this  account lockout setting  is already incorporated in Windows 10, it's not enabled by default. The f...

A new research has uncovered multiple critical reverse RDP vulnerabilities in Apache Guacamole , a popular remote desktop application used by system administrators to access and manage Windows and Linux machines remotely. The reported flaws could potentially let bad actors achieve full control over the Guacamole server, intercept, and control all other connected sessions. According to a report published by Check Point Research and shared with The Hacker News, the flaws grant "an attacker, who has already successfully compromised a computer inside the organization, to launch an attack on the Guacamole gateway when an unsuspecting worker tries to connect to an infected machine." After the cybersecurity firm responsibly disclosed its findings to Apache, the maintainers of Guacamole, on March 31, the company released a patched version in June 2020. Apache Guacamole is a popular open-source clientless remote desktop gateways solution. When installed on a company...

As SaaS providers race to integrate AI into their product offerings to stay competitive and relevant, a new challenge has emerged in the world of AI: shadow AI.  Shadow AI refers to the unauthorized use of AI tools and copilots at organizations. For example, a developer using ChatGPT to assist with writing code, a salesperson downloading an AI-powered meeting transcription tool, or a customer support person using Agentic AI to automate tasks – without going through the proper channels. When these tools are used without IT or the Security team's knowledge, they often lack sufficient security controls, putting company data at risk. Shadow AI Detection Challenges Because shadow AI tools often embed themselves in approved business applications via AI assistants, copilots, and agents they are even more tricky to discover than traditional shadow IT. While traditional shadow apps can be identified through network monitoring methodologies that scan for unauthorized connections based on...

Remember the Reverse RDP Attack —wherein a client system vulnerable to a path traversal vulnerability could get compromised when remotely accessing a server over Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol? Though Microsoft had patched the vulnerability (CVE-2019-0887) as part of its July 2019 Patch Tuesday update, it turns out researchers were able to bypass the patch just by replacing the backward slashes in paths with forward slashes. Microsoft acknowledged the improper fix and re-patched the flaw in its February 2020 Patch Tuesday update earlier this year, now tracked as CVE-2020-0655. In the latest report shared with The Hacker News, Check Point researcher disclosed that Microsoft addressed the issue by adding a separate workaround in Windows while leaving the root of the bypass issue, an API function "PathCchCanonicalize," unchanged. Apparently, the workaround works fine for the built-in RDP client in Windows operating systems, but the patch is not fool-proof en...

A new module for TrickBot banking Trojan has recently been discovered in the wild that lets attackers leverage compromised systems to launch brute-force attacks against selected Windows systems running a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection exposed to the Internet. The module, dubbed " rdpScanDll ," was discovered on January 30 and is said to be still in development, said cybersecurity firm Bitdefender in a report shared with The Hacker news. According to the researchers, the rdpScanDll brute-forcing module has so far attempted to target 6,013 RDP servers belonging to enterprises in telecom, education, and financial sectors in the U.S. and Hong Kong. The malware authors behind TrickBot specialize in releasing new modules and versions of the Trojan in an attempt to expand and refine its capabilities. "The flexibility allowed by this modular architecture has turned TrickBot into a very complex and sophisticated malware capable of a wide range of malicious a...

If you are using any supported version of the Windows operating system, stop everything and install the latest security updates from Microsoft immediately. Windows operating system contains four new critical wormable, remote code execution vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Services, similar to the recently patched ' BlueKeep ' RDP vulnerability. Discovered by Microsoft's security team itself, all four vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1181 , CVE-2019-1182 , CVE-2019-1222 , and CVE-2019-1226 , can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers to take control of an affected computer system without requiring any user interaction. Just like BlueKeep RDP flaw , all four newly discovered vulnerabilities are also wormable and could be exploited by potential malware to propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically. "An attacker can get code execution at the system level by sending a specially crafted pre-authentication RDP packet to an affected RD...

Remember the Reverse RDP Attack ? Earlier this year, researchers disclosed clipboard hijacking and path-traversal issues in Microsoft's Windows built-in RDP client that could allow a malicious RDP server to compromise a client computer, reversely. (You can find details and a video demonstration for this security vulnerability, along with dozens of critical flaws in other third-party RDP clients, in a previous article written by Swati Khandelwal for The Hacker News.) At the time when researchers responsibly reported this path-traversal issue to Microsoft, in October 2018, the company acknowledged the issue, also known as " Poisoned RDP vulnerability ," but decided not to address it. Now, it turns out that Microsoft silently patched this vulnerability  (CVE-2019-0887) just last month as part of its July Patch Tuesday updates after Eyal Itkin, security researcher at CheckPoint, found the same issue affecting Microsoft's Hyper-V technology as well. Microsoft...

Nearly 1 million Windows systems are still unpatched and have been found vulnerable to a recently disclosed critical, wormable, remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)—two weeks after Microsoft releases the security patch. If exploited, the vulnerability could allow an attacker to easily cause havoc around the world, potentially much worse than what WannaCry and NotPetya like wormable attacks did in 2017. Dubbed BlueKeep and tracked as CVE-2019-0708, the vulnerability affects Windows 2003, XP, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 editions and could spread automatically on unprotected systems. The vulnerability could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code and take control of a targeted computer just by sending specially crafted requests to the device's Remote Desktop Service (RDS) via the RDP—without requiring any interaction from a user. Describing the BlueKeep vulnerability as being Wormable ...