Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, March 21st, 2017 edition of the Sandcented Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Orich, and I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Cisco released a critical security advisory regarding a vulnerability in its software cluster management

protocol. The vulnerability is capable of

executing code remotely and at the very least can be used for denial of service attack.

Now Cisco became aware of this vulnerability based on the leaked CIA hacking tools, the famous WikiLeaks, Walt 7 release

that we've seen a couple weeks ago. There is currently no patch for this vulnerability. So Cisco

just released this advisory to essentially tell their customers that there is the vulnerability, they're working on a patch.

This particular cluster management protocol writes on top of Telnet.

The exploit actually uses just some invalid Telnet control sequences in order to execute random code.

So to protect yourself, you should just block telnet access to affected devices.

That's probably best practice anyway. If you're exposing your Cisco or whatever gear, not just

Cisco to Telnet, you probably are playing with fire and should block that as close as possible to the device.

A large number of Cisco's catalyst switches are vulnerable.

Please refer to Cisco's advisory for the authoritative list.

And last weekend, another pawn to own competition in Vancouver went underway and probably the most

impressive vulnerability being demonstrated was one that used Microsoft Edge in order to not only get

access to the system Microsoft Edge was running on but then even further in this particular case Microsoft Edge was running on. But then even further, in this particular case, Microsoft Edge

was running inside a virtual machine. They then used a VMware workstation exploit in order

to escape the virtual machine and actually break out into the host. So this would be pretty much what you would consider a secure environment with Microsoft

Edge, the more modern browser, and then of course running on Windows 10 inside a virtual

machine.

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