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Comment by mrinfinitiesx | Hacker News Reader

This should be interesting to watch unfold.

The CVE has been discovered by a security researcher/firm, rather than being found in the wild. Without technical details or a PoC being publiclya available, I doubt this will amount to more than just another starting point for someone to developer a new exploit. In a year or so it might show up in your Metasploit bundle.

Its a odd to take any assertion that "it wasn't seen in the wild" as if in the opposing frame(s) it wasn't "our best technique for over a decade".

Like any valuable secret, the incentives are in the other direction on both sides.

I don't think that is a realistic conclusion. If one group found it, we can assume that there exists at least one other group that is capable of finding. It therefore is not unrealistic to believe this has seen limited exploitation by sufficiently motivated actors.

> The CVE has been discovered by a security researcher/firm, rather than being found in the wild.

The researcher/firm was the one that disclosed it, but I don't feel like you could conclusively say that the exploit isn't in the wild.

Yes, it's sometimes hard to keep in mind that vulnerabilities don't just materialze into existence when they're first publicized. It's a differnt picture, everyone is vulnerable all the time.

Every Windows-based business LAN or industrial machine I know still has IPv6 disabled. Most other targets are too low value for people to bother.

IPv6 actually disabled or meerly inactive because there's no router advertisements on the LAN?

I suspect more of the second than the first. If it's just inactive, a compromised host can often broadcast a router advertisement or perhaps use local net addresses to compromise other hosts. A well prepared network would block ipv6 traffic on their switches, it they don't want it, but that's a big investment in capable switches.

It's a registry setting. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

Which says:

> You cannot completely disable IPv6 as IPv6 is used internally on the system for many TCPIP tasks. For example, you will still be able to run ping ::1 after configuring this setting.

I'd be concerned their workaround is just limiting it into a local vulnerability that spyware, etc will abuse on all the systems that end up not patched because they used the workaround..

When spyware holds your ass, it already has everything on you and doesn't need any vulnerability.

> When spyware holds your ass, it already has everything on you and doesn't need any vulnerability.

..because it uses one of the available local escalation tricks, where sending RA to ::1 could be one of those if that is a thing.

I mean 'disabled in network adapter connection properties'. If you're already using IPv4 there's no reason for the extra complications of leaving IPv6 enabled.

> If you're already using IPv4 there's no reason for the extra complications of leaving IPv6 enabled.

That’s just flat out wrong. No pure IPv6 deployments exist on endpoints in practice. Only in internal networks. You either run pure v4, or dual stacked v4+v6.

IPv6 is gaining some pretty solid adoption these days, but it’s not there yet. Disabling it is holding back the deployment of it, and is a problem by itself.

The context ('business LAN or industrial machine') referred to internal networks. What happened there doesn't really effect IPv6 adoption.

That’s definitely not the norm. IPv6 is enabled by default and it’s not recommended to disable it. Only really locked down places that are ignoring recommendations would have it disabled.

Whether it’s exposed to the Internet is another question, but pretty much everyone has a firewall to at least stop passive scans.

We do it in our 10k+ environment.

It seems that this can be triggered before the packet reaches the firewall.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/zero-click-w...

I meant a network level firewall at the perimeter, but this is good information to know you can’t rely on the Windows firewall.

> Every Windows-based business LAN or industrial machine I know still has IPv6 disabled.

Which is against Microsoft's recommendations:

> Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a mandatory part of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 and newer versions. We do not recommend that you disable IPv6 or its components. If you do, some Windows components may not function.

* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

Microsoft doesn't even listen to their own recommendations. Why would anybody else?

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