SiliconAngle reports that threat actors could exploit Microsoft's Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol DNS Dynamic Updates functionality to facilitate the spoofing of Active Directory DNS records without additional user authentication.
Akamai researchers discovered that 40% of all its monitored networks, including those in major corporate data centers, leverage Microsoft DHCP services and are vulnerable to attacks, which could be conducted even outside LAN.
"The impact of the attacks that we highlighted can be very significant the ability to overwrite DNS records without any authentication enables attackers to gain a machine-in-the-middle position on hosts in the domain. In most cases, the ability to intercept communication destined for the DHCP server could be abused to intercept credentials and relay them or capture sensitive traffic of other services that might be installed on the server. This could easily expose sensitive information and could allow attackers to breach AD domains and escalate privileges," said Akamai security researcher Ori David.
Included in the exposed dataset labeled "PDL" were individuals' full names, email addresses, phone numbers, location data, professional summaries, and skills, as well as education and employment histories.
Attackers could leverage the issue — which impacts Nexus 3000, 7000, and 9000 series switches with vulnerable NX-OS versions with DHCPv6 activated and are in standalone NX-OS mode — to facilitate continuous crashes of the dhcp_snoop process and a denial-of-service condition.
Higher rewards of up to $250,000 will be given by Google for the discovery of memory corruption flaws in the Chrome browser shown to achieve remote code execution using a non-sandboxed process as part of a more robust vulnerability reward program.