IIS FTP 0-day Exploit Released – Updated

Wolfgang Kandek

Last updated on: September 7, 2020

This Monday proof of concept exploit code for a Microsoft IIS FTP vulnerability was posted to the milw0rm site. The code allows the attacker to take control of the machine that runs the vulnerable FTP server and can easily be automated and turned into a mass attack tool by combining it with a scanning tool. In order to be exploitable, the vulnerable FTP server need to allow write access and the creation of directories. Unfortunately, even anonymous write access is good enough to make the server vulnerable, but nevertheless this cuts down on the number of potential targets.

Microsoft acknowledged the vulnerability and published an advisory 975191 this afternoon and list 5.0, 5.1, 6.0 and also 7.0 as affected. The advisory suggests as work-arounds to either disable FTP altogether, limit access to only authorized and named users or use NTFS capabilities to prohibit the creation of directories on the server. The NTFS solution seems to be the way to go for users that cannot make a bigger change to their FTP services and has minimal impact, so it is a good interim solution until a real patch comes out. We don’t expect this problem to be addressed in next week’s Patch Tuesday release as the Development and QA time are too long; it makes sense to prepare for a longer period without a real solution. An alternate way of dealing with the problem is to evaluate whether a robust FTP server with more granular management capabilities can be deployed instead of the one built-in within IIS.

HD Moore ported the exploit code to his Metasploit project yesterday. This makes it even simpler for IT administrators to demonstrate the existence of the exploit and argue for the deployment of an alternative FTP server.

Updated to include IIS 7.0 as Microsoft amended their advisory on 9/3/2009

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