Finding a Specific Microsoft Patch on a Host

After the Word (.rtf) 0-day was announced at the end of March, we turned on an alert to let us know when an .rtf file was delivered to the company.  Until the patch was applied, we actually blocked the incoming mail, inspected it, and if it was clean, we allowed it to reach its destination.  After the patch, we just alerted on the incoming mail. 

It's been a couple of months, and we are still getting the alerts.  Before I turned off the alerts, I wanted to ensure that the patch was on my host.  A quick script I ran to look for the specific patch was:

wmic qfe | find "KB2953095"

It seemed to work ok.

If there are better/easier ways to do this, leave a comment.

Somewhat off-topic....I can't believe the number of people that still send documents as .rtf.  Why not just use Word?  Or a text document?  The number of incoming .rtf documents was way higher than I would have guessed.  Most were resumes or travel booking documents.

SANS SIFT 3 and the Desktop Share

I had the new SIFT 3.0 downloaded for a while, but I haven't been using it as much as I would like.  I've been using the older 2.x version. One of the main reasons is that on the 2.x version of SIFT, there was a desktop shortcut that took me directly to a directory of the host OS.  This is missing in the 3.0 version of SIFT.  I fully admit, I don't know linux as well as I know Windows.

Quickly reading up on the issue, and I found that this mount to the guest OS should be found in mount_points/hgfs.  I had that directory, but nothing was populated there.  And, in the Virtual Machine Settings, I had the Shared Folders set to Always Enabled.  Still nothing.

On a reboot, I noticed that there was an update to VMWare Player.  I updated, and checked the mountpoints directory, but still nothing.  One last google suggested running vmware-config-tools.pl.

Sure enough, after answering the questions, that did the trick.  Now, in the mout_points/hgfs folder, I see a subfolder for "C".  Bingo.

Now I have to get used to Unity and finding what I used to be able to find in SANS SIFT 2.x.

If anyone else has tips on making that transition, feel free to leave advice in the comments.

Finding Inactive Accounts

The SANS Top 20 Controls has a control named Account Monitoring and Control.  Within that control is a Quick Win:  Ensure that systems automatically create a report on a daily basis that includes a list of locked-out accounts, disabled accounts, accounts with passwords that exceed the maximum password age, and accounts with passwords that never expire. This list should be sent to the associated system administrator in a secure fashion.

We don't have an automated report of those types of accounts, and quite frankly, we have very poor visibility into account control.  Coming from a DoD environment, I'm not used to having such lax controls.  Slowly, I'm starting to push the company forward, but it is taking time.

My first thought was to look at the inactive accounts.  I figured that these accounts would be low enough of the low-hanging fruit to start with, and here's how I have gone about finding them.

(Note: that I have created a master script that will do more than what this post details...I'm only describing inactive accounts at this time.)

1.  This command is in a batch file:  dsquery user -inactive 4 -limit 3000 > accountout.txt

Call the output file what you like.  The -inactive 4 parameter tells dsquery to look for accounts that have been inactive for at least four weeks.  I picked four to start with, as I realize that we have users that travel extensively.  My hope is that once we manage the output, I'll be able to lower that number.

2.  I took the output of the file, and copied it to Excel.  From there, I went to Data>Text-to-Columns in order to break up the data nicely.

3.  Column 2 seemed to be where I could differentiate between user and non-user accounts.  I filtered on just user accounts and copied that to a new sheet.

My results were staggering.  There are way too many accounts.  My next step is to find or create a process to validate that these accounts are a) legitimate, and b) truly inactive.  Spot checking a bunch of these users revealed users that are contractors.  And, if I have to guess, they are no longer with the company.  Prime targets to attack - which is why they should be disabled or deleted.

Once that's done, I'll need to automate the process and schedule it to run weekly or so.  As for locked-out, disabled, and password length checking...those will be added in time.