Watch out! Shadow Brokers dump includes remote root exploits for Solaris boxes

The security expert Matthew Hickey has discovered two tools dubbed EXTREMEPARR and EBBISLAND which were specifically designed to target Solaris systems.

After the mysterious Shadow Brokers group has leaked the archive containing the stolen NSA hacking tools and exploits, security experts started analyzing the huge trove of data. Experts discovered that NSA operators developed an attack code to compromise Oracle’s Solaris.

The cyber security expert Matthew Hickey, the cofounder of British security shop Hacker House, digging the archive has discovered two tools dubbed EXTREMEPARR and EBBISLAND which were specifically designed to target Solaris systems.

Both tools could be used by a logged-in user to escalate privileges to root, and obtain root access remotely over the network. The tools work on Solaris systems running versions 6 to 10 on x86 and Sparc, and experts believe it could work also on the latest build, version 11.

The EXTREMEPARR tool elevates the logged-in entity (i.g. a user, a script) to root by abusing dtappgather, file permissions, and the setuid binary at.

The EBBISLAND tool could be used to target any open RPC service to spawn a remote root shell on the flawed Solaris box. The EBBISLAND triggers a buffer overflow vulnerability in Solaris’s XDR code.

Summarizing the NSA could open a root shell on any Solaris system, the experts noticed that the use of the exploits doesn’t request specific skills.

“These are prebuilt static binaries and you can run them out of the box with very little technical knowledge,” Hickey told The Register.

Hickey scanned the Internet searching for vulnerable connected devices, he used the popular Shodan.io search engine, and found thousands of vulnerable systems. But the real threat, he said, was that a lot more of these machines are going to be running internally behind firewalls, and the exploit code could be used to root these once an attacker gets a foothold within an organization.

Many of the flawed machines identified by the expert run internally behind firewalls, this means that the above exploit code could be used by attackers to compromise the target network and move laterally.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Shadow Brokers, Solaris)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.