Microsoft published information on a critical remote code execution vulnerability dubbed the Bluekeep RDP vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708) in May 2019. Windows 8 and newer systems have a default RDP setting requiring Network Level Authentication that mitigates the risk of this vulnerability while systems running Windows 7 and Server 2k8 or 2k8 R2 can be patched. LARG*net immediately scanned all member networks to determine if whether anyone was externally vulnerable and thankfully no one was.

Recently a number of articles were published alerting VLC users about a new zero day. The remote code execution this zero day takes advantage of does sound rather scary and users should definitely be made aware of the issue. Yet there’s a difference between sensible and sensational reporting.

10x engineers is a Silicon Valley term used to describe engineers that are ten times more productive than average. They can be from any of the usual IT categories; programmers, network engineers, sysadmins, etc.

A zero day vulnerability is a software bug that has been fixed/patched for 0 days. A zero day exploit is the code attackers use to take advantage of a zero day vulnerability.

In the last blog I attempted to hack a server (with permission, naturally) and discovered it had a debugger running that gave me a foothold. However I couldn’t get full control of the system without a skill upgrade in the realm of return-oriented programming (ROP) chaining.