Pierluigi Paganini
June 01, 2016
A Windows zero-day flaw was offered for sale at US$90,000 on the Russian crime forum exploit.in. The flaw could be exploited by hackers to gain a full deep access to an already compromised machine.
The discovery was made by the researchers from the Trustwave’s Spiderlabs team, who have found the thread related to the sale of the Windows zero-day.
The zero-day flaw is a local privilege escalation vulnerability that was sold by the Seller BuggiCorp, it works on Windows systems running OS version from Windows 2000 to Windows 10.
The seller also published proof-of-concept videos, he claims the Windows zero-day works in the presence of the Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET).
The experts consider BuggiCorp legitimate, another factor that led into believing that the Windows zero-day exists is the insurance offered by the escrowing system implemented by the platform exploit.in.
“As such, a zero day being offered for sale stood out among the other offerings in an underground market for Russian-speaking cyber criminals.” “However, finding a zero day listed in between these fairly common offerings is definitely an anomaly. It goes to show that zero days are coming out of the shadows and are fast becoming a commodity for the masses, a worrying trend indeed.” states the post published by IBM.
The availability of a similar Windows Zero-day vulnerabilities represents for a criminal organization a significant opportunity to optimize the management of their profitable botnet composed of million compromised machines.
“The zero day in question claims to be a Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) vulnerability in Windows. Below is a screen shot of the original offer, posted on May 11th 2016:”
The experts believe that the seller aims to gain notoriety in the underground ecosystem as exploit seller, in fact, he remarks that that transaction must be completed through the exploit.in platform and its escrow service.
“It seems the seller has put in the effort to present himself/herself as a trustworthy seller with a valid offering,” continues the post.
“One of the main indicators for this is the fact that the seller insists on conducting the deal using the forum’s admin as the escrow.”
“the price here seems on the high end but still within a realistic price range, especially considering the return on investment criminals are likely to make using this exploit in any campaign.”
In the following PoC video it is demonstrated how the zero-day could be exploited in a Windows 10 machine to elevate the cmd.exe process to the system -level privilege account.A recent attack
In a second video, the seller shows how to exploit the Windows zero-day vulnerability to successfully bypass all of EMET protections for Windows 10.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/secbloggerwards2016
Thank you
Pierluigi
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(Security Affairs – zero-day exploit, hacking)
