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- #Serious sam vulnerability update#
- #Serious sam vulnerability Patch#
- #Serious sam vulnerability windows 10#
So even though SeriousSAM is classified as a “local vulnerability,” when it is abused along with other weak security practices, it can be used to carry out devastating attacks against a network.
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Attacking all compromised systems with ransomware.Potentially compromising the entire Active Directory domain if they are able to dump the Domain Admin’s credentials from the LSASS process as the local administrator.Compromising other machines in the network (lateral movement) either by using Pass-the-Hash or cracking the local administrator’s password (if shared/weak passwords are being used).From there, they can use it to perform further nefarious activities, such as: Therefore, a threat actor with local user access who obtains the SAM file would be able to elevate their privilege to that of a local administrator on the compromised machine. The password hashes in the SAM file include the hash for the local administrator. It is possible to use Pass-the-Hash attacks to gain access to the user with just the hash alone (no password cracking required).They are not salted, meaning that two users who happen to use the same password will also have the same password hash.They are different from UNIX password hashes in two ways: The hashes in the SAM file are Windows NTLM hashes.
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It is similar to /etc/master.passwd on BSD systems or /etc/shadow on Linux – but with one key difference: On UNIX, gaining access to the password hashes in the shadow file does not grant the attacker immediate access to the user accounts that those password hashes belong to. This is bad since only administrators are supposed to be able to access the SAM file.įor those who may not be familiar, the SAM file on a Windows system stores the password hashes of all local users of that system.
#Serious sam vulnerability windows 10#
On July 19, 2021, security researcher Jonas Lyk discovered that recent versions of Windows 10 and 11 allowed regular users to read the Security Accounts Manager (SAM) file. This information should hopefully be useful to both pentesters and defenders.Īs a side note, throughout this blog post I will just refer to the vulnerability “SeriousSAM” for the sake of brevity, even though it is also known as “HiveNightmare” elsewhere. Finally, I will discuss mitigation measures.
#Serious sam vulnerability Patch#
Next, I will demonstrate how Microsoft’s defenses can be bypassed to exploit SeriousSAM even on systems that are fully-patched by Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday update. In this blog post, I will first show how the SeriousSAM vulnerability can be exploited in its original form. Because of this, it is still possible to exploit the SeriousSAM vulnerability on patched systems under certain conditions.
#Serious sam vulnerability update#
It turns out that the update is only a partial fix, as acknowledged by Microsoft’s advisory.
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The Microsoft Patch Tuesday update on Aug“addressed” SeriousSAM a.k.a. Exploiting and Mitigating SeriousSAM / HiveNightmare
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